PSA:
I just realized that /u/Elo’s posts haven’t been showing up in /r/Discussion because of all the downvoting from Eugene_Nier’s sockpuppet accounts. So, I’ve gone back to read through the sequence of posts they’re in the middle of. You may wish to do the same.
Meta:
I was going to leave this as a comment on Filter on the way in, Filter on the way out..., but I figured it’s different enough to stand on it’s own. It’s also mostly a corollary though, and just links Elo’s post to existing ideas without saying much new, and so probably isn’t worth it’s own top-level post. This isn’t likely to be actionable either, since I basically come to the conclusion that it’s ok to take down the Chesterton Fence that LW has already long ago taken down.
This might be a good comment to skim rather than read, since the examples are mostly to completely define precisely what I’m getting at, and you’re likely already familiar with them. I’ve divided this into sections for easy skimming. I’m posting only because I thought the connections were small but interesting insights.
Also meta: this took about 2.5 hrs to write and edit.
TL;DR of Elo’s “Filter on the way in, Filter on the way out...” post:
Elo proposes that nerd culture encourages people to apply tact to anything they hear, and so it becomes less necessary to be tiptoe around sensitive issues for fear of being misunderstood. Nerds have a tact filter between their ears and brain, to soften incoming ideas.
“Normal” culture, on the other hand, encourages people to apply tact to anything they say, and so it becomes less necessary to constantly look for charitable interpretations, for fear of a misunderstanding. Non-nerds have a tact filter between their brain and mouth, to soften outgoing ideas.
They made several pretty diagrams, but they all look something like this:
speaker’s brain → [filter] → speaker’s mouth → listener’s ears → [filter] → listener’s brain
The thing I want to expand Elo’s idea to cover:
What’s going on in someone’s head when they encounter something like the trolley problem, and say “you can’t just place a value on a human life”? EA’s sometimes get backlash for even weighing the alternatives. Why would anyone refuse to even engage with the problem, and merely empathize with the victims? After all, the analytic half of our brains, not the emotional parts, are what solves such problems.
I propose that this can be thought of as a tact filter for one’s own thoughts. If that’s not clear, let me give a couple rationalist examples of the sort of thing I think is going on in people’s heads, to help triangulate meaning:
HPMOR touches on this a couple times with McGonagall. She avoids even thinking of disturbing topics.
Some curiosity stoppers/semantic stopsigns are due to avoiding asking one’s self unpleasant questions.
The idea of separate magisteria comes from an aversion to thinking critically about religion.
Several biases and fallacies. The just world fallacy is result of an aversion to more accurate mental models.
Politics is the mindkiller, so I’ll leave you to come up with your own examples from that domain. Identity politics is especially ripe with examples.
Filter on the way in, Filter on the way out, Filter while in, Filter while out:
So, I propose that Elo’s model can be expanded by adding this:
Some subcultures encourage people to apply tact to anything they think, and so it becomes less necessary to constantly filter what we say, for fear of a misunderstanding. Such people have a tact filter between different parts of their brain, to filter the internal monologue.
That corollary doesn’t add much that hasn’t already been discussed to death on LW. However, we can phrase things in such a way as to put people at ease, and encourage them to relax their internal and/or outgoing filters, while maintaining their ingoing filter. Adapting Elo’s model to capture this, we get this:
future speaker’s thought → [filter] → speaker’s cashed thoughts → [filter] → speaker’s mouth → listener’s ears → [filter] → listener’s thoughts → [filter] → past listener’s cashed thoughts
Note that both the speaker and the listener have internal filters. We can think or hear something, and then immediately reject it for being horrible, even if it’s true.
Ideally, everyone would avoid filtering their own ideas internally, but apply tact when speaking and listening, and then strip any filters from memes they encounter while unpacking them. Without this model, perhaps us endorsing removing the 2 internal filters was a bit of a Chesterton Fence.
However, with the other 2 filters firmly in place, we should be able to safely remove the internal filters in both the thoughts of the speaker and listener. If the listener believes the filter between the speaker and their mouth is clouding information transfer, they might even ask for Crocker’s rules. This is dangerous though, since removing redundant backup leaves only their own ear->brain filter as a single point of failure.
Practical applications:
To encourage unconstrained thinking in others, perhaps we can vocally strip memes passed to us of obfuscating tact if there is a backup filter in place and if we’ve already shown that we agree with the ideas. (If we don’t agree, obviously this would look like an attack on their argument, and would backfire.)
That sounds like something out of the boring advice repository, but providing social proof is probably much more powerful than merely telling people that they shouldn’t filter their internal monologue. It probably doesn’t feel like censorship from the inside. If we want to raise the sanity waterline, we’ll have to foster cultures where we all provide positive reinforcement for each other’s good epistemic hygiene.
Maybe we could start tagging such stuff with epistemic status: exploratory or epistemic status: exploring hypotheses or something similar? Sort of the opposite of Crocker’s rules, in effect. Do you guys think this is a community norm worth adding?
We have a couple concepts around here that could also help if they turned into community norms on these sorts of posts. For example:
triangulating meaning: If we didn’t have a word for “bird”, I might provide a penguin, a ostrich, and an eagle as the most extreme examples which only share their “birdness” in common. If you give 3+ examples of the sort of thing you’re talking about, generally people will be able to figure out what the 3 things have in common, and can narrow things down to more or less the same concept you are trying to convey to them.
Principle of Charity: I think we pretty much have this one covered. We do have a bad nitpicking habit, though, which means...
Steel manning: If I’m trying to build up an idea, but it’s only in the formative stages, it’s going to have a lot of holes, most of which will be fairly obvious. This means making a lot of sweeping generalizations while explaining.
These are literally just the first couple things that popped into my head, so feel free to suggest others or criticize my thoughts.
In general, it seems like such discussions should be places to share related anecdotes, half-baked thoughts on the matter, and questions. Criticism might be rephrased as questions about whether the criticism applies in this instance. Those who don’t “get” what is being gestured at might be encouraged to offer only questions.
I remember some study about innovation, which found that a disproportionate amount happened around the water cooler. Apparently GPS was invented by a bunch of people messing around and trying to figure out if they could triangulate Sputnik’s position, and someone else wondering whether they could do the reverse and triangulate their own position from satellites with known orbits. We need places for that sort of aimless musing if we want to solve candle problems.
More broadly, we could start applying some of these norms to Discussion. After all, it’s supposed to be for, you know, discussion. :p I think it’s long overdue.