8 ms·

Decoupling as a moral decision

31 points by hn-0001 5y ago

joshink1 5y ago
Abstracting is often more effective than de-coupling for these kinds of discussions. The act of changing concrete variables about a "case" requires that one keeps everything else (and their value-laden implications) the same. It is also much easier to mentally manipulate symbols when they are free of moral/emotional weight. In the example given in the article, the question of IQ heritability can be "safely" abstracted into a population study question without referencing specific groups or populations. Of course, a serious biologist would use higher-resolution concepts like "breeding population" with defensible boundaries. It seems disingenuous (or maybe naive?)to expect discussions about American racial groupings to remain neutral and freely "de-couplable". It's like honestly expecting people to adhere to "is !== ought". There is a political implication to any conclusions derived about race, as it is mostly a sociological concept. Discussing it is especially difficult because the people who discuss racial differences (as opposed to other groupings like: family, class, height, religion, etc...) generally employ it in a political context (eugenics, affirmative action, etc...)
- yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
  > as it is mostly a sociological concept If one were to challenge this statement, it would be a good example of the challenges involved in choosing when to discourse-decouple.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  Gentle reminder: heritability isnt what "most people think it is". It's just covarience with genes -- this might seem like it means "X is genetic" -- but it *doesnt*. Consider accents (eg., the scottish accent) this is highly heritable: typically only people with the genetic profiles of those localised to scotland have it. Consider using heritability to determine genetic vs. envrionmental causation (largely: you just cant use it to do this). Eg., even in the case of height: it would seem that the genes of people in poor-nutrition countries were the cause of their low height. The movement from "heritability" to "genetic causation" *asssumes* (and always, by assertion *assume*) that the trait studied is already genetically caused. IF we know this, THEN hertiability is a somewhat reliable measure of "to what degree". But in almost all cases we have no grounds whatsoever to independently assume this. Rending most heritability studies basically useless.
  - joshink1 5y ago
    Thanks for that info. A quick aside: I'm curious why it's gene vs environment (either/or), and not gene + environment (emergent)? If the latter, then I'd think heritability would necessarily factor both genes and environment -- as genes don't express in a vacuum. For example, the heritability of "general skin cancer risk" is both genetic (melanin) and environmental (latitude, sun irradiance...). Due to differences in UV exposure, the genetic influence is probably greater at lower latitudes than higher.
PostThisTooFast 5y ago
kybernetikos 5y ago
The fact that we know some people don't naturally A-decouple is exactly why in public, political debates we have to be careful about D-decoupling or allowing others to do it without challenging them. There are an infinity of things we could assume for the sake of argument and the act of choosing and assuming a particular one of those options is often not a purely academic one, especially when done in public.
- philwelch 5y ago
  “Don’t make sophisticated arguments in public because they might confuse stupid people” is reasonable, but you need to work out the implications. Do non-stupid people have some alternative forum to have sophisticated discussions with each other? If so, you’ve replaced an open society of free expression with a society with a gatekeeping intellectual elite that does everything behind closed doors. And if not, you’ve literally imposed an artificial cognitive handicap on your whole society.
  - kybernetikos 5y ago
    This is a great point and definitely something to think about, but I don't think it really captures quite what I intended to say. It's more like "don't let people get away with appeals to emotion and other fallacies, just because they disguise them as sophisticated arguments - call them out". This is true in all kinds of debates, but it's particularly important in broad political debates. The appropriate level of charity to give the person you're debating with depends on the context and just how much good faith it's reasonable to assume. As to 'alterative fora', I don't think that's quite as bad as your comment seems to suggest. An academic paper is an 'alternative forum' to a time-constrained panel discussion on a TV show, but acknowledging that the kinds of arguments that are appropriate in one might not be appropriate in the other, is not "replacing an open society of free expression with a society with a gatekeeping intellectual elite that does everything behind closed doors".
    - dpark 5y ago
      > "don't let people get away with appeals to emotion and other fallacies, just because they disguise them as sophisticated arguments - call them out" That’s much better stated than my response. Don’t let them abuse the platform they’re being granted.
4cao 5y ago
> Jack is looking at Anne, and Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, and George is unmarried. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? (Yes/No/Indeterminate) The answer to this is not so obvious to me. What if Anne is divorced or or widowed? Unmarried can mean "not married," but it also could mean "never married," as in the following example: > Crude incidence rates of stroke (per 1000 per year) among the four marital status categories were as follows: 1.96 (married), 1.52 (unmarried), 2.36 (divorced), and 5.43 (widowed). Compared to married persons, adjusted risk of stroke was significantly increased for divorced (RR 1.23; CI 1.19-1.27) and unmarried men (RR 1.07; CI 1.03-1.11) but not for widowed men (RR 1.02; CI 0.98-1.06); risk was slightly increased for divorced women (RR 1.10; CI 1.06-1.15) while not for widowed (RR 1.0; CI 0.97-1.03) and unmarried women (RR 0.97; CI 0.97-1.03). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29492956/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29492956/
- mjburgess 5y ago
  It's also just "not a question", but really a puzzle. And I think that's what's happening in "discourse-decoupling" also. I do think they might well just be the same. Ie., in ordinary conversation when one says, roughly, "heres some information, what do you think?" one doesnt expect the question itself to be a puzzle -- ie., that the answer is in some formal sense about the information as information. I think likewise, in ordinary conversation, "shall we just kill all the ants?" means kill all the ants. It is a very unusual (academic) conversation in which the question is read as a sort of "ethical puzzle". If you just told people in both cases, "this question is a puzzle" -- then I imagine it would trigger the decoupling mechanism more reliably.
- delusional 5y ago
  Ok? I feel like it's relatively clear from the question that in this hypothetical world there are only 2 states, married or unmarried. Logically the question can be cut down to: Given an alphabet {A, B} is there an symbol x such that for the string "AxB" an A is not followed by a B.
- ud_0 5y ago
  I admit I failed that question, and I understand the impulse to then challenge the way the question was constructed. In school, it's something I did regularly, partly because some of the questions were indeed weakly constructed, but also partly because I was reluctant to admit I actually misunderstood. In this case, it's not a trick question per se, but it certainly does something to trick the mind into not enumerating the possibilities. It would be interesting to see how the majority of programmers respond to it, as compared to say the majority of mathematicians. I suspect the question tricks people into abstracting too early: 'one variable in this system is undefined, hence I can't say!'
zkirill 5y ago
I got the Levesque question wrong. :(
jlawson 5y ago
As formulated, the resistance to D-decoupling is simply a refusal to discuss issues, or a blocking technique to prevent certain things from being understood. It's in the same bag of tricks as screaming to stop someone from being heard, sticking your fingers in your ears, bluntly changing the subject over and over, Gish galloping, or disconnecting someone's microphone. Obviously a choice to do any of these things is a moral decision. It is a moral decision to try to prevent discourse from happening; prevent people from thinking things through because you think they might end up at a conclusion you dislike. Often it's a way to prevent yourself from thinking things through. Generally I think that if you're choosing to block the discussion in order to win it, you're no longer participating in good faith and should be censured and then ignored because of it. We have a moral imperative to discuss ideas in good faith, not play thought-blocking power tactics.
- dpark 5y ago
  If refusal to “discourse decouple” is a refusal to discuss then attempts to “discourse decouple” must equivalently be a refusal to accept objections to the premise. It’s not a given that the opponent attempting to use decoupling is operating in good faith.
- elcamino44 5y ago
  I don’t think that quite captures everything, though. Because in the same way that attempting to block decoupling is a rhetorical device, decoupling itself (at least in a public debate) is also a rhetorical device. The decoupler says “put aside your objections to my proposal for a moment so that you can better understand it; then later you can reflect on these objections with a fuller understanding.” And the person blocking the decoupling says “no, the objections are valid and therefore should be kept firmly in mind whenever you are considering anything to do with the proposal.” Both approaches are trying to achieve something in terms of discourse. I don’t believe it’s possible to say that one approach is more fair or valid or better in all circumstances.
  - jlawson 5y ago
    I don't think attempting to block decoupling is a "rhetorical device". "Rhetor" means teacher. A rhetorical device is a way to explain, communicate, teach. Blocking this was is an attempt to prevent explanation, communication, and learning. That isn't a rhetorical device - it's an anti-rhetorical device. Perhaps better called an argumentative tactic. A good discussion is one where ideas are most fully-examined, questioned, and understood from the maximum number of angles. If the goal is to have a good discussion, you must encourage and support devices that increase understanding. If the goal is simply to win for a specific agenda, you don't care about having a good discussion, and you should use whatever argumentative/blocking/interruption tactics you can. Ultimately it's a question of whether you value finding truth and mutual understanding, or the dominance of your pre-existing beliefs.
weregiraffe 5y ago
ud_0 5y ago
Say you're getting mugged and the mugger opens with "If we accept that you don't have any right to your possessions, don't you agree that I'm justified in taking all your stuff?" It is not an intellectual or rhetorical shortcoming to then answer with "No, I agree neither with your premise nor with your conclusion." On the other hand, if you do D-Decouple and agree, then the mugger will either proceed to rob you immediately, or if an audience is present, they will first read aloud a well-prepared statement that 'proves' how you indeed don't have any right to your possessions - before inevitably proceeding to rob you. Not robbing you was never in the cards, they just made it seem that way by phrasing the question to provide an illusion of openness to discussion. People who accept D-Decoupling during a debate get steamrolled by bad-faith counterparts, and the audience on average will never remember that there was an "if" hypothetical in front of the question to begin with. In practice, the "If we accept X, then we must do Y" maneuver is seldom performed in good faith. It's merely a vehicle to move on to the Y part without concerning yourself with X, and it's mostly performed for the benefit of an audience who will only remember the Y part, or those who already agree with X. A side effect is also the gradual normalization of X through repetition. People who already agree with the premise will see nothing wrong with this, and that's not necessarily unethical. It only becomes unethical if the proposition has negative consequences and the "hypothetical" becomes a deniable position that allows the speaker to retreat behind if challenged. In other words, I do think the implications of the hypothetical part matter. Not all "If we accept X, then Y" have X's or Y's worthy of consideration. I would also argue that it's probably valid to look at the Y part in isolation. If Y is unethical or nonsensical, I believe there is no intellectual duty to consider any part of the argument.
bradgranath 5y ago
Just because I'm capable of dialectical thinking doesn't automatically make it a worthwhile endeavor to listen to someone drone on (AGAIN) about the heritablity of IQ (why is this the ONLY example of 'free'thought these 'free' thinkers are ever thinking of?) to his heart's content.

31 points by hn-0001 5y ago

Abstracting is often more effective than de-coupling for these kinds of discussions. The act of changing concrete variables about a "case" requires that one keeps everything else (and their value-laden implications) the same. It is also much easier to mentally manipulate symbols when they are free of moral/emotional weight. In the example given in the article, the question of IQ heritability can be "safely" abstracted into a population study question without referencing specific groups or populations. Of course, a serious biologist would use higher-resolution concepts like "breeding population" with defensible boundaries. It seems disingenuous (or maybe naive?)to expect discussions about American racial groupings to remain neutral and freely "de-couplable". It's like honestly expecting people to adhere to "is !== ought". There is a political implication to any conclusions derived about race, as it is mostly a sociological concept. Discussing it is especially difficult because the people who discuss racial differences (as opposed to other groupings like: family, class, height, religion, etc...) generally employ it in a political context (eugenics, affirmative action, etc...)

yakshaving_jgt 5y ago
> as it is mostly a sociological concept If one were to challenge this statement, it would be a good example of the challenges involved in choosing when to discourse-decouple.
mjburgess 5y ago
Gentle reminder: heritability isnt what "most people think it is". It's just covarience with genes -- this might seem like it means "X is genetic" -- but it *doesnt*. Consider accents (eg., the scottish accent) this is highly heritable: typically only people with the genetic profiles of those localised to scotland have it. Consider using heritability to determine genetic vs. envrionmental causation (largely: you just cant use it to do this). Eg., even in the case of height: it would seem that the genes of people in poor-nutrition countries were the cause of their low height. The movement from "heritability" to "genetic causation" *asssumes* (and always, by assertion *assume*) that the trait studied is already genetically caused. IF we know this, THEN hertiability is a somewhat reliable measure of "to what degree". But in almost all cases we have no grounds whatsoever to independently assume this. Rending most heritability studies basically useless.
- joshink1 5y ago
  Thanks for that info. A quick aside: I'm curious why it's gene vs environment (either/or), and not gene + environment (emergent)? If the latter, then I'd think heritability would necessarily factor both genes and environment -- as genes don't express in a vacuum. For example, the heritability of "general skin cancer risk" is both genetic (melanin) and environmental (latitude, sun irradiance...). Due to differences in UV exposure, the genetic influence is probably greater at lower latitudes than higher.

PostThisTooFast 5y ago

kybernetikos 5y ago

The fact that we know some people don't naturally A-decouple is exactly why in public, political debates we have to be careful about D-decoupling or allowing others to do it without challenging them. There are an infinity of things we could assume for the sake of argument and the act of choosing and assuming a particular one of those options is often not a purely academic one, especially when done in public.

philwelch 5y ago
“Don’t make sophisticated arguments in public because they might confuse stupid people” is reasonable, but you need to work out the implications. Do non-stupid people have some alternative forum to have sophisticated discussions with each other? If so, you’ve replaced an open society of free expression with a society with a gatekeeping intellectual elite that does everything behind closed doors. And if not, you’ve literally imposed an artificial cognitive handicap on your whole society.
- kybernetikos 5y ago
  This is a great point and definitely something to think about, but I don't think it really captures quite what I intended to say. It's more like "don't let people get away with appeals to emotion and other fallacies, just because they disguise them as sophisticated arguments - call them out". This is true in all kinds of debates, but it's particularly important in broad political debates. The appropriate level of charity to give the person you're debating with depends on the context and just how much good faith it's reasonable to assume. As to 'alterative fora', I don't think that's quite as bad as your comment seems to suggest. An academic paper is an 'alternative forum' to a time-constrained panel discussion on a TV show, but acknowledging that the kinds of arguments that are appropriate in one might not be appropriate in the other, is not "replacing an open society of free expression with a society with a gatekeeping intellectual elite that does everything behind closed doors".
  - dpark 5y ago
    > "don't let people get away with appeals to emotion and other fallacies, just because they disguise them as sophisticated arguments - call them out" That’s much better stated than my response. Don’t let them abuse the platform they’re being granted.

4cao 5y ago

> Jack is looking at Anne, and Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, and George is unmarried. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? (Yes/No/Indeterminate) The answer to this is not so obvious to me. What if Anne is divorced or or widowed? Unmarried can mean "not married," but it also could mean "never married," as in the following example: > Crude incidence rates of stroke (per 1000 per year) among the four marital status categories were as follows: 1.96 (married), 1.52 (unmarried), 2.36 (divorced), and 5.43 (widowed). Compared to married persons, adjusted risk of stroke was significantly increased for divorced (RR 1.23; CI 1.19-1.27) and unmarried men (RR 1.07; CI 1.03-1.11) but not for widowed men (RR 1.02; CI 0.98-1.06); risk was slightly increased for divorced women (RR 1.10; CI 1.06-1.15) while not for widowed (RR 1.0; CI 0.97-1.03) and unmarried women (RR 0.97; CI 0.97-1.03). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29492956/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29492956/

mjburgess 5y ago
It's also just "not a question", but really a puzzle. And I think that's what's happening in "discourse-decoupling" also. I do think they might well just be the same. Ie., in ordinary conversation when one says, roughly, "heres some information, what do you think?" one doesnt expect the question itself to be a puzzle -- ie., that the answer is in some formal sense about the information as information. I think likewise, in ordinary conversation, "shall we just kill all the ants?" means kill all the ants. It is a very unusual (academic) conversation in which the question is read as a sort of "ethical puzzle". If you just told people in both cases, "this question is a puzzle" -- then I imagine it would trigger the decoupling mechanism more reliably.
delusional 5y ago
Ok? I feel like it's relatively clear from the question that in this hypothetical world there are only 2 states, married or unmarried. Logically the question can be cut down to: Given an alphabet {A, B} is there an symbol x such that for the string "AxB" an A is not followed by a B.
ud_0 5y ago
I admit I failed that question, and I understand the impulse to then challenge the way the question was constructed. In school, it's something I did regularly, partly because some of the questions were indeed weakly constructed, but also partly because I was reluctant to admit I actually misunderstood. In this case, it's not a trick question per se, but it certainly does something to trick the mind into not enumerating the possibilities. It would be interesting to see how the majority of programmers respond to it, as compared to say the majority of mathematicians. I suspect the question tricks people into abstracting too early: 'one variable in this system is undefined, hence I can't say!'

zkirill 5y ago

I got the Levesque question wrong. :(

jlawson 5y ago

As formulated, the resistance to D-decoupling is simply a refusal to discuss issues, or a blocking technique to prevent certain things from being understood. It's in the same bag of tricks as screaming to stop someone from being heard, sticking your fingers in your ears, bluntly changing the subject over and over, Gish galloping, or disconnecting someone's microphone. Obviously a choice to do any of these things is a moral decision. It is a moral decision to try to prevent discourse from happening; prevent people from thinking things through because you think they might end up at a conclusion you dislike. Often it's a way to prevent yourself from thinking things through. Generally I think that if you're choosing to block the discussion in order to win it, you're no longer participating in good faith and should be censured and then ignored because of it. We have a moral imperative to discuss ideas in good faith, not play thought-blocking power tactics.

dpark 5y ago
If refusal to “discourse decouple” is a refusal to discuss then attempts to “discourse decouple” must equivalently be a refusal to accept objections to the premise. It’s not a given that the opponent attempting to use decoupling is operating in good faith.
elcamino44 5y ago
I don’t think that quite captures everything, though. Because in the same way that attempting to block decoupling is a rhetorical device, decoupling itself (at least in a public debate) is also a rhetorical device. The decoupler says “put aside your objections to my proposal for a moment so that you can better understand it; then later you can reflect on these objections with a fuller understanding.” And the person blocking the decoupling says “no, the objections are valid and therefore should be kept firmly in mind whenever you are considering anything to do with the proposal.” Both approaches are trying to achieve something in terms of discourse. I don’t believe it’s possible to say that one approach is more fair or valid or better in all circumstances.
- jlawson 5y ago
  I don't think attempting to block decoupling is a "rhetorical device". "Rhetor" means teacher. A rhetorical device is a way to explain, communicate, teach. Blocking this was is an attempt to prevent explanation, communication, and learning. That isn't a rhetorical device - it's an anti-rhetorical device. Perhaps better called an argumentative tactic. A good discussion is one where ideas are most fully-examined, questioned, and understood from the maximum number of angles. If the goal is to have a good discussion, you must encourage and support devices that increase understanding. If the goal is simply to win for a specific agenda, you don't care about having a good discussion, and you should use whatever argumentative/blocking/interruption tactics you can. Ultimately it's a question of whether you value finding truth and mutual understanding, or the dominance of your pre-existing beliefs.

weregiraffe 5y ago

ud_0 5y ago

Say you're getting mugged and the mugger opens with "If we accept that you don't have any right to your possessions, don't you agree that I'm justified in taking all your stuff?" It is not an intellectual or rhetorical shortcoming to then answer with "No, I agree neither with your premise nor with your conclusion." On the other hand, if you do D-Decouple and agree, then the mugger will either proceed to rob you immediately, or if an audience is present, they will first read aloud a well-prepared statement that 'proves' how you indeed don't have any right to your possessions - before inevitably proceeding to rob you. Not robbing you was never in the cards, they just made it seem that way by phrasing the question to provide an illusion of openness to discussion. People who accept D-Decoupling during a debate get steamrolled by bad-faith counterparts, and the audience on average will never remember that there was an "if" hypothetical in front of the question to begin with. In practice, the "If we accept X, then we must do Y" maneuver is seldom performed in good faith. It's merely a vehicle to move on to the Y part without concerning yourself with X, and it's mostly performed for the benefit of an audience who will only remember the Y part, or those who already agree with X. A side effect is also the gradual normalization of X through repetition. People who already agree with the premise will see nothing wrong with this, and that's not necessarily unethical. It only becomes unethical if the proposition has negative consequences and the "hypothetical" becomes a deniable position that allows the speaker to retreat behind if challenged. In other words, I do think the implications of the hypothetical part matter. Not all "If we accept X, then Y" have X's or Y's worthy of consideration. I would also argue that it's probably valid to look at the Y part in isolation. If Y is unethical or nonsensical, I believe there is no intellectual duty to consider any part of the argument.

bradgranath 5y ago

Just because I'm capable of dialectical thinking doesn't automatically make it a worthwhile endeavor to listen to someone drone on (AGAIN) about the heritablity of IQ (why is this the ONLY example of 'free'thought these 'free' thinkers are ever thinking of?) to his heart's content.