site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4001 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 23, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

There are some users whose comments asschap me a whole lot. But I can't live with acting on it and blocking them. Not there yet in terms of achieving true nirvanna where I don't get asschapped in the first place, maybe one day.

FWIW, it's not exactly their opinions, as someone mentioned downstream, some posters just have really annoying writing styles. I recall reading a post where some guy almost literally hedged every single statement he made. Motherfucker, just commit to it! Its's not like we can't fill in the "it seems like"'s or "I think"'s using our imagination.

I've also been blocked by 4 different users, 3 of them, never even responded to. I'm quite the asschapper myself (mostly unintentionally?).

I blame my hedging on having read Pact/Pale and getting into the habit of not speaking direct lies or opening myself up to be called on a mistake.

Like urquan and some others here, I also tend to hedge my comments most of the time. In my case, it’s something I started to do in middle school, following the advice of Benjamin Franklin:

While I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English grammar . . ., at the end of which there were two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procur’d Xenophon’s Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charm’d with it, adopted it, dropt my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer and doubter. . . . I continu’d this method some few years, but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced any thing that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken. This habit, I believe, has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinions, and persuade men into measures that I have been from time to time engag’d in promoting; and, as the chief ends of conversation are to inform or to be informed, to please or to persuade, I wish well-meaning, sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive, assuming manner, that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition, and to defeat every one of those purposes for which speech was given to us, to wit, giving or receiving information or pleasure. For, if you would inform, a positive and dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention. If you wish information and improvement from the knowledge of others, and yet at the same time express yourself as firmly fix’d in your present opinions, modest, sensible men, who do not love disputation, will probably leave you undisturbed in the possession of your error. And by such a manner, you can seldom hope to recommend yourself in pleasing your hearers, or to persuade those whose concurrence you desire.

This method also saves embarrassment, as I think Franklin pointed out elsewhere in his autobiography, on those occasions when what you thought to be so, isn’t.

In this place, people tend to speak more dogmatically and forthrightly, but at least for me, having gotten so used to hedging my words in such a way, it would take a conscience effort for me not to.

This was probably me.

I see my use of the motte less as an attempt to argue and more as an attempt to find common ground with other posters.

I hate argument -- always have -- but love discussion. The difference between those is that the first requires a sort of overconfidence and seeks to win, while the second requires humility and seeks to understand. My goal on the motte is to state my personal experience and views and to find common ground with other people, not to assert that my perspective is universal or try to win an argument. I find arguments infuriating and soul-destroying, not energizing or engaging.

By using phrases like "I think" or "it seems to me" or "my feeling is" or "in my experience", my goal is to demonstrate that what I'm saying isn't something I believe is universal or without exception, but something that is directionally true, an opener for discussion rather than a closed epistemic case.

But I also know, just philosophically, I have a high bar for confidence in claims. The sort of evidence that would convice someone else to make a strong claim often only convinces me to make a weak one. This isn't due to a lack of intellectual confidence -- people who know me IRL would agree to that -- but due to my high degree of skepticism of grand claims. When someone makes a claim with a great deal of rhetorical confidence, the first thing that comes to mind isn't how insightful I think the claim is, but all of the myriad possible exceptions to the claim.

I myself find more argumentative or assertive conversation styles to be grating -- it sometimes demonstrates a brash overconfidence out of bounds of what the speaker actually has reason to believe. My impression of such styles is that they alienate rather than invite exceptions and alternative perspectives; they shut down friendly discussion and perpetuate unfriendly debate.

You notice I wrote "sometimes" there; I had a draft where I simply stated "it demonstrates a brash overconfidence..." and I found that to be itself overconfident. This is precisely because there are some times where such rhetorical strength in what one says is warranted; the "sometimes" doesn't hedge the claim (reflecting a lack of confidence in the claim) so much as demonstrate my belief that this is not a universal truth but one that is true only in a subset of situations.

When I wrote essays in college there would be a section of argument but then a much longer section where I walked through all the objections and exceptions. This got me a lot of points for being thorough. Obviously I put more rhetorical emphasis, as my claims were based on evidence or deductive argument. But it also reflected my view that the world is incredibly complex, and when we make claims about social processes or the human experience or the state of other people's minds, we're almost certainly mostly wrong, even if our point lands for a subset of experiences.

It's not that I'm not commited to what I'm saying, it's that I believe the claim is true insofar as my personal experience reveals, and even then for only a subset of things. I tend to use these phrases where I'm making claims about other people's mental states, the situations in far-off places, and broad social trends: precisely the areas where the evidence-to-supposition ratio leans the most towards supposition and speculation. And since I don't have omnipotence, I express a limited or perspectival claim because that's all I'm actually able to speak to.

The point is to express epistemic uncertainty and openness to alternative perspectives.

But I understand it can be grating as a writing style if it's done too often, so I'll work on moderating that.

I think I do the same, not infrequently—I don't want to give the impression that I'm more confident than I am when I'm not entirely sure, so I'll try to qualify things to convey the right level of confidence.

I like both discussions and arguments, if they're productive.

It wasn't you. I don't exactly recall finding your posts grating to read. They are often long and could use some getting to the point, but are smooth to read. The grating ones have a sprinkling of off statements or stylisms that are plain jarring.

On the flip side. I'm a big believe in brevity. Which often reads as overconfidence and argumentative. But I truly do believe that just like code that is too long has a smell, so does text. Preciseness and efficiency with resources is a skill (if not virtue).

I auto append hedging qualifiers to any non factual statement anyways. The sky is blue, but is the state of modern political discourse grim? Of course not, I have already prepended nothing to the first statement and "I think that" to the second statement. No one ever could make an absolute assertion about the state of modern political discourse, by DEFAULT it's a "i think" statement. If you feel the need to spell that out, I think you ought to trust the reader (and yourself) more.

I wonder if this is a product of the type of writing you've trained yourself to do. Coding trains you to be clean and efficient, jettisoning words and phrases that are insufficiently information-dense. I imagine journalists who had the fortune of coming up back when newspapers still had editors have been similarly trained to cut out the fat in service of the almighty column-inch. As a lawyer, it was beaten into me by harsh editors that those kinds of qualifiers are "weasel words" undermining my credibility to the court, so I tend to assume any grammatically qualified statement to be a bad-faith attempt to imply something they don't have the facts to back up if called out on (if you had the goods, you wouldn't bother qualifying the statement and would have simply stated it as unalloyed fact). It's often hard for me to turn this instinct off and remember that most people do not have formal training in argumentative writing.

But for someone with more of a creative writing background, who is trying to write neither efficiently nor persuasively, the connotative difference between a "thought," a "feeling," and a "fact" may often be really important. While a scientist writing for academic journals needs to be careful not to overstate their conclusions, and so will see qualifiers like "I think" as nothing less than honesty and good form.

EDIT: re-reading this comment, I may have disproved my own theory. Unnecessary qualifiers were clearly not beaten out of me: I literally started this comment with a qualified "I wonder if" in order to insulate myself from pushback stemming from the fact I hadn't put all that much thought into the idea...

While a scientist writing for academic journals needs to be careful not to overstate their conclusions, and so will see qualifiers like "I think" as nothing less than honesty and good form.

You would think, but you’d be wrong. Scientific writing has an immensely irritating (to me) convention of pretending that the writer doesn’t exist as a human being.

You can see lots of ‘it may be observed that’ and ‘it is apparent that’ and sometimes a ‘we conclude’ but never ever ‘I think’ or ‘I can’t be sure but’. It’s a combination of lingering Enlightenmeny pretensions of objectivity plus a desire to deflect professional criticism.

I hated writing like that, it felt deceptive and weaselly.

That's fair. I appreciate the advice. I struggle terribly with limiting my length, which has a lot to do with the thing about pointing out exceptions that I noted above. I also think almost exclusively in text so when I express a view it's usually the culmination of a lot of actual words floating around in my head. When I write a short text it feels... unfinished, like I've left something important out. But, with effort, I'm able to do it, so informal activity like the motte gets the long bois and actual essays or professional writing gets edited-down stuff.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats