8 ms·

A great quote from the article: "The defensive writing style also encourages another sort of ugliness, which is that “avoiding saying something wrong” becomes

by kornish 11y ago

A great quote from the article: "The defensive writing style also encourages another sort of ugliness, which is that “avoiding saying something wrong” becomes a primary focus of the writing, rather than communicating or exploring ideas which the author might himself be unsure of." One thing that's great about Gwern Branwen's writing is that Gwern's essays are accompanied by a "belief tag". That tag gives the ability to say "This essay is exploratory; I don't have a high degree of confidence that it's canonically true." Details here: http://www.gwern.net/About#belief-tags http://www.gwern.net/About#belief-tags Having the option to dissociate ideas from one's person can give a lot of freedom to put contrarian ideas out there and spark debate in search of the Truth without fearing personal attack. Indeed, one of the things that I consider to make a healthy company culture is that ideas can be criticized without the people behind the ideas feeling criticized themselves.

Florin_Andrei 11y ago
It's one of the surprising side-effects of the Internet that anything whatsoever you might say in a public forum can potentially offend someone, somewhere, somehow.
- madaxe_again 11y ago
  Look, I'm not being racist, but I am mortally offended. You know what you said. Edit: in case you missed it, this was sarcastic.
  - foxhill 11y ago
    you're being down voted because your response does not contribute to the discussion; we all get it, people can feel offended from almost any statement - that is the point of this article.
- tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
  and can follow you for the rest of your life
- proksoup 11y ago
  I recently watched Slavoj Zizek speak about how political correctness is a more complete totalitarianism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tndXr-oQxxA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tndXr-oQxxA I am optimistic the video has some relevance to this discussion.
  - m52go 11y ago
    Mises recently published an excellent article on this topic, titled "PC is About Control, Not Etiquette" https://mises.org/library/pc-about-control-not-etiquette-0 https://mises.org/library/pc-about-control-not-etiquette-0
    - jxramos 11y ago
      "PC is best understood as propaganda" what a bold statement! I like this critical exploration of the whole concept of PC, pretty fascinating.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  You can look at this positively and that if someone gets offended then at least people are reading your work. It is very disheartening when you take the time to write something thoughtful and you get no response at all.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    This has been turned into art by professional media outlets. That's the whole point of almost every single article they publish - the more people they can outrage or offend, the more people read and thus the more ad money flows in. > It is very disheartening when you take the time to write something thoughtful and you get no response at all. Scott Alexander explored this topic in [0]. He also laments the fact that the posts he considers most valuable are read the least, while his most controversial ones are also the most popular. He even has a nice graph of it[1]. [0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ [1] - http://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/sschits.png http://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/sschits.png
    - Mickchicken2 11y ago
      Thank you for sharing this. Fascinating read. Do you have any similar material?
- jandrese 11y ago
  I've been banned from a few forums for not toeing the line on the moderator's personal agenda. It comes with the territory of discovering as you get older that other people are sometimes just crazy and you shouldn't feed the crazy. I mean that literally. These people have mental health issues and they want you to bend over backwards to accommodate them out of a sense of guilt or something. You shouldn't do it. You're just enabling the sickness. It's like those guys who keep running out for more Twinkies even after their partner has grown so large that they can't fit through the door of the bedroom and are trapped. If someone is claiming that your use of regular English adverbs is triggering their PTSD then they are the ones with the problem, not you.
  - kazinator 11y ago
    > people are sometimes just crazy and you shouldn't feed the crazy Those that ban people out of forums believe they are following same principle.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
sawwit 11y ago
How about introducing a simple convention for indicating your degree of belief in similar manner to the sarcasm indicator /s: One could write for example /p1 .. /p9 to refer to the probabilities 0.01% .. 99.9%. That could resolve a lot of issues that occur in text communication. /p7
- ghaff 11y ago
  Funnily enough, that was an oft-ridiculed approach taken by IT industry analysts Gartner for many years. $NEWTECH will achieve > 50% penetration within 5 years. p = .65
TeMPOraL 11y ago
I absolutely love the "belief tags" / "epistemic status" annotations. Gwern stole his "belief tags" from[0] (I link it because there's a cool article there worth checking out), and Scott Alexander has also adopted them. This sort of matches the way I personally thing about information and my own opinions. Back in my head I always have this feeling of "degree of confidence", of how sure I am about what I'm saying, and it's often hard to express it in the speech itself. It fits perfectly as meta-data / qualification. Saying once, "this is a thought I'm playing with, I'm not sure either way" beats having to qualify every sentence with "maybe". Also, I have most fun reading arguments that sound totally convincing to me but are tagged by author as something he doesn't have high confidence in. I end up having to figure out how this smart guy just convinced me of something he himself isn't sure about. [0] - http://webcitation.org/6DuYcqyQ3 http://webcitation.org/6DuYcqyQ3
- kornish 11y ago
  Thanks for the link, that's fascinating read! It seems that many people who I would call "intellectually honest" end up developing speech patterns to avoid (1) speaking in absolutes; and (2) making statements of opinion articulated as statements of fact. An example of (1) is to use the words "many" or "most" instead of "all". An example of (2) is to start opinions with "I think". Those speech patterns, though, can lead to writing which is bland and less than forceful, full of justifications with no interesting assertions to be found. One huge plus of this belief metadata, as you note, is that it frees the author to make bold and daring statements (and hopefully back them up) without committing to the truth of those statements. I think it can make for great writing – the style of strong and passionate assertion mixed with (via the disclaimer) the sensibilities of a reasoned opinion.
  - jandrese 11y ago
    I'm having trouble justifying the tradeoff between: "That's well reasoned but far too wishy washy" and "So forceful! So eloquent! Factually wrong but the way you said it completely sold it to me! Amazing!" It's Obama vs. Trump.
    - 11y ago
dclowd9901 11y ago
So timely. In another HN thread, I simply raised a point that drunk driving wasn't the largest threat to road safety based on statistics, and was labeled an apologist drunk driver. The real problem is that if you put your ideas out there, and someone says something like that, and you don't respond, they've gotten the last word, and your silence is a patent acceptance of their point (as it would be in a face-to-face debate). So we try to guard our opinions with "This is just my opinion" (duh, whose else opinion would it be?), or try to beat others to the counterpoints, and when you are constantly setting up defenses to your ideas, your idea loses a lot of potency and clarity.

by kornish 11y ago

Florin_Andrei 11y ago

It's one of the surprising side-effects of the Internet that anything whatsoever you might say in a public forum can potentially offend someone, somewhere, somehow.

madaxe_again 11y ago
Look, I'm not being racist, but I am mortally offended. You know what you said. Edit: in case you missed it, this was sarcastic.
- foxhill 11y ago
  you're being down voted because your response does not contribute to the discussion; we all get it, people can feel offended from almost any statement - that is the point of this article.
tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
and can follow you for the rest of your life
proksoup 11y ago
I recently watched Slavoj Zizek speak about how political correctness is a more complete totalitarianism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tndXr-oQxxA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tndXr-oQxxA I am optimistic the video has some relevance to this discussion.
- m52go 11y ago
  Mises recently published an excellent article on this topic, titled "PC is About Control, Not Etiquette" https://mises.org/library/pc-about-control-not-etiquette-0 https://mises.org/library/pc-about-control-not-etiquette-0
  - jxramos 11y ago
    "PC is best understood as propaganda" what a bold statement! I like this critical exploration of the whole concept of PC, pretty fascinating.
danieltillett 11y ago
You can look at this positively and that if someone gets offended then at least people are reading your work. It is very disheartening when you take the time to write something thoughtful and you get no response at all.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  This has been turned into art by professional media outlets. That's the whole point of almost every single article they publish - the more people they can outrage or offend, the more people read and thus the more ad money flows in. > It is very disheartening when you take the time to write something thoughtful and you get no response at all. Scott Alexander explored this topic in [0]. He also laments the fact that the posts he considers most valuable are read the least, while his most controversial ones are also the most popular. He even has a nice graph of it[1]. [0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ [1] - http://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/sschits.png http://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/sschits.png
  - Mickchicken2 11y ago
    Thank you for sharing this. Fascinating read. Do you have any similar material?
jandrese 11y ago
I've been banned from a few forums for not toeing the line on the moderator's personal agenda. It comes with the territory of discovering as you get older that other people are sometimes just crazy and you shouldn't feed the crazy. I mean that literally. These people have mental health issues and they want you to bend over backwards to accommodate them out of a sense of guilt or something. You shouldn't do it. You're just enabling the sickness. It's like those guys who keep running out for more Twinkies even after their partner has grown so large that they can't fit through the door of the bedroom and are trapped. If someone is claiming that your use of regular English adverbs is triggering their PTSD then they are the ones with the problem, not you.
- kazinator 11y ago
  > people are sometimes just crazy and you shouldn't feed the crazy Those that ban people out of forums believe they are following same principle.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

sawwit 11y ago

How about introducing a simple convention for indicating your degree of belief in similar manner to the sarcasm indicator /s: One could write for example /p1 .. /p9 to refer to the probabilities 0.01% .. 99.9%. That could resolve a lot of issues that occur in text communication. /p7

ghaff 11y ago
Funnily enough, that was an oft-ridiculed approach taken by IT industry analysts Gartner for many years. $NEWTECH will achieve > 50% penetration within 5 years. p = .65

TeMPOraL 11y ago

I absolutely love the "belief tags" / "epistemic status" annotations. Gwern stole his "belief tags" from[0] (I link it because there's a cool article there worth checking out), and Scott Alexander has also adopted them. This sort of matches the way I personally thing about information and my own opinions. Back in my head I always have this feeling of "degree of confidence", of how sure I am about what I'm saying, and it's often hard to express it in the speech itself. It fits perfectly as meta-data / qualification. Saying once, "this is a thought I'm playing with, I'm not sure either way" beats having to qualify every sentence with "maybe". Also, I have most fun reading arguments that sound totally convincing to me but are tagged by author as something he doesn't have high confidence in. I end up having to figure out how this smart guy just convinced me of something he himself isn't sure about. [0] - http://webcitation.org/6DuYcqyQ3 http://webcitation.org/6DuYcqyQ3

kornish 11y ago
Thanks for the link, that's fascinating read! It seems that many people who I would call "intellectually honest" end up developing speech patterns to avoid (1) speaking in absolutes; and (2) making statements of opinion articulated as statements of fact. An example of (1) is to use the words "many" or "most" instead of "all". An example of (2) is to start opinions with "I think". Those speech patterns, though, can lead to writing which is bland and less than forceful, full of justifications with no interesting assertions to be found. One huge plus of this belief metadata, as you note, is that it frees the author to make bold and daring statements (and hopefully back them up) without committing to the truth of those statements. I think it can make for great writing – the style of strong and passionate assertion mixed with (via the disclaimer) the sensibilities of a reasoned opinion.
- jandrese 11y ago
  I'm having trouble justifying the tradeoff between: "That's well reasoned but far too wishy washy" and "So forceful! So eloquent! Factually wrong but the way you said it completely sold it to me! Amazing!" It's Obama vs. Trump.
  - 11y ago

dclowd9901 11y ago

So timely. In another HN thread, I simply raised a point that drunk driving wasn't the largest threat to road safety based on statistics, and was labeled an apologist drunk driver. The real problem is that if you put your ideas out there, and someone says something like that, and you don't respond, they've gotten the last word, and your silence is a patent acceptance of their point (as it would be in a face-to-face debate). So we try to guard our opinions with "This is just my opinion" (duh, whose else opinion would it be?), or try to beat others to the counterpoints, and when you are constantly setting up defenses to your ideas, your idea loses a lot of potency and clarity.