Arguing Without Warning

105 点作者 Gadiguibou大约 3 年前

17 条评论

ineptech大约 3 年前

There's more than one kind of argument and the author's elision of that makes this kind of muddled:* "You vs Me" vs "Us vs the problem". In the latter, there's an objective Correct answer and each party would prefer to find it than to "win" the debate; in the former, the parties would rather "win" than discover new information that would change their mind. The article assumes that internet debates are of the latter variety, while in my experience they are 99% the former.* With/without audience. Without an audience, you are trying to convince the person you're arguing with, which forces you to address their strongest points; with an audience, you (usually) have no real hope of budging the person you're talking to, and are only interested in persuading some hypothetical listener, so you are incentivized to ignore their strongest points and pounce on the weakest ones. Again, the essay is written as if internet debaters are speaking to each other, when in reality they are overwhelmingly talking past each other and hoping to persuade the audience.Overall this reads like someone pontificating on whether it is politer in a bar fight to sucker-punch with the right or left hand. Perhaps of interest but not likely to affect any actual bar fights.

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kqr大约 3 年前

Counter-argument, written without informing the author: the risk of arguing without talking to the thesisholder is that you don't work with the iron man version of the thesis.And straw man debate is a type of intellectual bullshit we have too much of already.(So why am I engaging in this type of intellectual bullshit by writing this comment? Sometimes when I'm very tired and don't have energy to do more useful things like read a book I get a little kick out of trying to state arguments concisely and get little tokens of appreciation in the form of upvotes from fellow hackers.These tokens are less likely in a drawn-out argument, even if it becomes intellectually more honest. So... I blame the system!)

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stickfigure大约 3 年前

The rationalist community[1] has a pattern for this. Make a public post with the title Contra <PersonX> on <Subject PersonX Has Written About>. Write out your debate arguments in public, but be generous around the uncertain boundaries of the argument. Invite the original author (or others) to steelman the position: "X is arguing for Y, but that seems to contradict Z. If I've misunderstood, please correct me." Always link to good rebuttals from your original post.From good-natured participants, the dueling blog posts format can be delightful to read.[1] - I first noticed it in Scott Alexander's Slate Star Codex, but I've seen many others use this pattern since.

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nonrandomstring大约 3 年前

I generally favour the Rogerian approach of always looking for the most generous interpretation of common goals and values that night be separated by language, assumptions or unfortunate experiences that have become crystalised into generalised anecdotes. Other thinkers who've suggested similar manners to Rogers are Jurgen Habermas and Paulo Freire. These boil down to:- Be truthful- Use pragmatic epistemology, don't over-intellectualise- Expect and offer sincerity- Aim for universalisation/inclusive and non-self-contradiction- Always assume good faith- Use concrete rather than abstract statements- Good, careful humour, but don't soften hard truths- Make contributions relevant and timely- Beware self-deception and rationalisation- Use the minimum facts necessary to make any pointI think if one keeps these in mind, it's always okay to offer arguments without warning, seeking permission, treading on eggshells or feeling the need to credentialise or excessively qualify a response.

paulpauper大约 3 年前

Why? Caplan suggests it’s because no one believes quantitative social science is meaningful. Maybe, but I suspect the explanation is simpler: There’s not much glory in checking someone else’s work.This is probably wrong. There is tons of glory in checking someone's work and finding a mistake. Look at all the controversy and major media coverage over the the Reinhart and Rogoff paper, which was undermined by some majors data collection errors that were later pointed out. This was a major deal at the time.Most people probably already expected Caplan's thesis to be true or took it for granted as true, so there was no compelling need to check. People will only check if the the conclusion goes against their assumptions or something commonly accepted to be true. So a paper which claims to refute the premise of Keynesianism is something that economists are probably going to be be more inclined to check than a conclusion that affirms the orthodoxy.

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teekert大约 3 年前

“Say that for most articles you read, you go through this process:* You read it.* You’re convinced that it’s true.* You search for criticisms.* They are devastating, so you no longer think the article is true.”9/10 times on HN and I love you all for it. (Well maybe a bit less but I certainly have shared articles and read the HN comments afterwards and come to regret sharing)

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ashildr大约 3 年前

1) have a look at the beautiful dicussion on the “Mold effect”. Here’s a pointer to begin: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx2LEqTQT4E" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx2LEqTQT4E</a>2) altruism exists3) if you briefly try to talk to the author you _may_ avoid misunderstanding their idea and thus less time is wasted.3) being proven wrong is great. Being right is boring.

khafra大约 3 年前

The trouble is that disagreeing with someone always has at least two effects: Changing viewers' confidence in the original claims, and taking some of the status of the original claimant as a person who makes correct claims.It would be nice if human communication had some sort of predicate whereby you could remove the second effect from your argument. But AFAIK it depends almost entirely on trusting the audience to decouple the argument from the arguer, which only a very few audiences can be trusted to do.

titzer大约 3 年前

I feel like this entire article was written without the ability to conceive of another way of thinking or that there are other people who think differently than you. They are entirely optimizing for their own ability to mouth off an opinion without doing any hard work. For the author, maybe it's great if people go off with half-cocked, poorly-researched, and fundamentally misguided criticisms that stem from complete misunderstandings. But for me, it annoys me when people write long missives about some stuff they barely understand but feel good to them. They usually aren't trying to understand, they aren't trying to help other people understand, and certainly aren't helping out the authors whom they are criticizing.Instead, people who do this are just shoveling more confusion, reinforcing tribal lines in some cases, and frankly, muddying the waters.I'll give an example. Relativity. There is absolutely no doubt in the physics community that Relativity is a.) a thing b.) well-understood mathematically c.) explains physical reality remarkably well, being supported by vast amounts of evidence. And yet general relativity is not yet unified with quantum theory.Do we need more cranks who a.) do not understand the underlying mathematics and b.) do not understand what the fundamental shortcoming is, in detail, firing off articles "criticizing" it? Hells no. These types of things should be debated by physicists and mathematicians who do actually thoroughly understand these things. Physics journals won't suffer amateur hour, and they shouldn't. Physics journals, and all scientific publishing venues, subject articles to review that try to elevate the level of discourse by checking and re-checking claims.But the internet is not journals, sure. It's a free-for-all. It has elevated so many random voices to a level of authority that it is not possible to weed through claims at speed; cranks make themselves look like experts. An experts understate their own confidence. The internet is a massive Dunning-Krueger melting pot.I will absolutely push back on the idea that the problem we have right now is that the expectations are too high. You mean you have to understand what a person is saying, maybe even talking to the person first, before you launch a volley of utter nonsense at them? The humanity.

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JadeNB大约 3 年前

> Go find any popular article that makes factual claims. Then, read comments about it on some high-quality forum. Almost always, you will see comments that are deeply problematic for the original thesis.> How much should these comments decrease your confidence in the original article? I claim: Not much, at least on average.> First, if everything you read has devastating criticisms, you should expect them to exist.Without explicitly commenting on the world in which we live, it seems to me that all the hypotheses are consistent with a world of low-quality discourse, in which many of the factual claims we encounter in popular articles are wrong (in possibly minor, but possibly major, ways). You should always evaluate your sources, to be sure—and the value of an anonymous comment on even a high-quality forum is fairly low—but a factual refutation of a factual claim should, I think, be given very high weight, even if most such claims have such refutations.(The author seems further on to be pointing out perhaps the futility of refuting a 'headline point' when the headline will be fleshed out in the body. With that I can more easily agree. Of course, as is the way of such things, I was more eager to make my slightly contrary point than to finish reading the essay.)

avivo大约 3 年前

A few issues with this:> The mistake here is seeing a counter-argument as being against a person, rather than as against a particular artifact. What matters is what’s out there.This is not how it works in most of real life. There are political impacts within a community or organization depending on how an argument goes down. Potentially permanent schisms.> So, if the critiques of an article find only “moderately bad flaws”, that often increases my trust because my prior was that the flaws would be even worse. If the claim that some types of watermelon taste bad to certain people at some times of the year survives the skeptics, then that might be an above-average outcome.This is empirically not how most people operate.> We need to design our norms around the unfortunate reality that most people are not helpful when criticized.No, design norms around getting the best possible world. That unfortunate reality is only one of many factors to take into account.---I'll hold judgement on the conclusion overall; I think it may make sense for arguments when nothing political is on the line and everyone is a psuedorationlist. Beyond that...unsure.

serverlessmom大约 3 年前

One of the biggest issues with trying to explain a point via the internet is that the more time you spend expanding on your ideas in order to make your point, the less likely it is that someone who disagrees with your initial message will even finish reading your well thought out argument.

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nathell大约 3 年前

> Here’s one such case: Say someone wrote something. You think they’re wrong, so you write a manifesto arguing that they’re wrong.Whoa, whoa, hold your horses. Pause right there.How does that "so" conjunction work? Given that you think they're wrong, why would you want to write a manifesto arguing that they're wrong? What's your motivation behind it?There can be a plethora of possible motivations, all of them valid. Just to name a few:- The original statement is in direct conflict with your world view. Because it's being read and shared, you want to write a counterpiece because you, too, wish to be heard.- You believe that the original statement represents a belief that's factually incorrect, so you want to write a corrigendum because you believe that policies based on false premises are bound to lead astray.- The original statement is written in a way that touches you emotionally. Perhaps it disparages a part of the world that's important to you. You want to respond in defense of that part.- You don't find the matter particularly important, but you see an omission in the original statement's reasoning that you think you can amend. You write a supplementary response to improve your (and hopefully others') understanding of the problem at hand.- You just have that irresistible urge originating $GOD knows where, that you have no better name for than "xkcd #386".Depending on the circumstances, you may or may not want to follow the various norms that Dynomight mentions in their article. But I think it's of paramount importance to be self-aware of our own motivations. It also helps to be explicit about them.

paulpauper大约 3 年前

>Second, the critiques themselves often have serious flaws, and then those have serious flaws, and it sort of goes on forever. I find this aspect of reality very frustrating, but most discussions seem to be an infinite regress carried on until someone gets exhausted and leaves.There are two types of criticisms: criticism out of disagreement with the thesis, or a criticism that undermines the reasoning or conclusion of the thesis itself. The latter is much worse. Good journalists and writers try to keep the second to a minimum as it can come at a major cost to credibility.

aufhebung大约 3 年前

It seems interesting that the norms argued for here are contrary to the norms in a field like journalism, where journalists have an obligation to ask relevant people for comment. I'm not arguing for one approach over the other, but it would be interesting to look at the development of journalistic norms for counterarguments.

a_shovel大约 3 年前

> We tend to criticize things that we think are almost right, so close to right that we’re worried other people will accept them.> This is a compliment. If someone criticizes something you wrote, you should feel gratified that you were “right enough” to be worth arguing with.This is the logic of internet trolls. I'm right, and if you disagree, that proves I'm right, and if you fully debunk my argument, that means you're desperate to keep people from believing me, which, again, proves I'm right.I don't know if you've heard, but people will accept a lot of arguments that aren't anywhere near to right, because it appeals to their preconceptions, or it would be convenient to their goals if it were right, or their friend said it was good, or a million other reasons.

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incomingpain大约 3 年前

>There’s just isn’t enough checking and counter-arguing, full stop.Sure but why? Lets focus on politics as it's at the centre of all this.The usual or normal stake in society is virtually no discussion about politics. Once every few years you pick a representative and then you can ignore politics because you can't change anything. You ought to be talking about that local sports team or that new tv show. This changed in recent years, I'm not really familiar with this ever happening before. Politics is beyond represented in common discussion today but you CANNOT argue. Dont dare take a side or else you get labelled an *ist.You will also notice that all thought commanders in the field of politics are either comedians or lawyers; while the actual politicians tend to be lawyers or celebrities. None of those 3 groups are allowed to speak their mind or argue.The battlefield of thought is where this isn't true. You can find this battleground where the comedians and lawyers interview.The prevailing theory also has the blame on the "STEM" movement in that highly qualified people left social sciences toward STEM leaving a huge talent gap in the social sciences. In addition to the reality of social media utterly destroying mainstream media. Just look at the fall of CNN to political activists.What does matter is that we have a new hyper awareness of politics. The left wing right wing false dichotomy has collapsed. Why is it the universities used to be for free speech and are now certainly not?It's also super important to notice how unsuccessful major protests have been. BLM, who literally represent something clearly broken, very clearly the USA should fix their objective racist and brutal police force. The USA absolutely needs to fix the multitude of problems along these lines. However they have received absolutely no fix. They have had major protests and riots all over and nobody at all in government is willing to fix it. You're not allowed to argue or even discuss this.However, if you try to argue or point any of this out. You become a nazi or racist or whatever ist they decide upon.Hopefully you can see why arguing has become impossible. It's not just politics, but politics is the center. Race, Gender, Drugs, environmentalism, guns, etc. Tons of things you are simply not allowed to argue about.OP knows this as well which is why he discusses Watermelons. He actively goes out of his way to discuss something that nobody discusses because it's the only way to avoid hitting a subject you're not allowed to discuss. He could have discussed how everyone in Toronto lives in an igloo.Why is this happening? One side of politics has decided that society is on the brink of collapse if not extinction. This is a matter of life or death.Unfortunately, I made a huge mistake in this post. I argued.