We could divide unbounded criticism into two main types:
- Interdisciplinary criticism. Criticism that deals with other fields or with underlying premises (e.g. bringing up chemistry or epistemology in a medicine debate).
- Personal criticism that deals with people’s psychology.
I want (1) to be allowed in general. I think it’s important to debates.
I think (2) is important sometimes but risky. It often works best in long, close friendships (when the friend judges it will go well) or with people who want it enough to pay for it.
It’s hard to just allow (1) but not (2) by default in a forum category (with 2 being available just by consent) for a few reasons. There are some issues that blur lines. The underlying issue is basically topic changes/additions, and what ideas are part of what topic is a human construct, not something inherent in the ideas. People can and do disagree about what is on- or off-topic.
One sort of topic change that doesn’t fit cleanly into (1) or (2) is bias. If someone is being biased, that can be a fairly relevant, objective part of the discussion, but also be taken as personal. Like if someone says “I hate asian people”, and you start arguing with racism, is that a personal attack which is hard for them to take, or is it just objectively analyzing what they said? What if they say something more subtle? Does it depend how much you focus on analyzing their words instead of guessing their personality? Their words and personality are related.
I want to be able to point out potential bias. I think that’s important. I wouldn’t want to exclude that for being too personal/psychological. I think that e.g. scientists need to be able to talk about bias and receive criticism about it.
Another topic change that doesn’t fit cleanly into (1) or (2) is reading comprehension errors (or arithmetic errors, logic errors, other “basic” errors). People can get really personally offended by the idea that they’re incompetent or bad at things that are taught in elementary school. In some sense, I think it’s just a topic change to an objective, impersonal field. But I do understand people taking it personally. But I think it’s hard to avoid talking about it if it comes up repeatedly. Sometimes people don’t mind if you point out a reading error or two with no further commentary, but if you point out too many or point out the pattern itself then they get offended, but if it’s a pattern and you don’t talk about the pattern then the errors may ruin the discussion (and if you do talk about them, irrational responses may ruin the discussion, but at least you’re trying to solve the problem).
Anyway, you might want to put some thought into what types of criticism or topic changes you find scary or not scary and why.
I think I’ve made progress since writing this. By using a debate policy, it’s much easier for me to just go silent without explanation, and if someone actually wants to continue they can invoke my debate policy (or ask why I stopped, though they shouldn’t ask me that if they don’t want to hear an honest answer). I also tend to use milder and more polite language now. I think Deutsch was a bad influence in terms of making grand or extreme claims (Rand too) and I’m trying to think and speak more modestly more like Popper or Socrates.
Also, I used to think it was important to treat people as rational until proven irrational (like innocent until proven guilty). Basically, be charitable and give them a chance until they do something wrong. Now, I think it’s better to wait for people to earn rational criticism, do good work and show they want it and may be able to handle it well.
I think one of the things going on was I was trying to treat people as I wanted to be treated, and how Deutsch said rationality works and all rational people, including himself, would want to be treated. It has been confusing to me that many people don’t like things they say they want, including Deutsch but also many others. I wasn’t trying to be mean to people but it sometimes came off that way, partly because I followed Deutsch’s lead (I didn’t understand it at the time, but he actually is a mean person and a social climber).
Also, people may put themselves forward as public figures or authors – if you write a philosophy book or article, I can critique it on my blog, whether you like it or not, but with no expectation that you read my critique, it’s different than direct interaction. That’s different than conversing with people on forums or social media.
I think that urgency was a mistake. I prefer a softer approach. People can go do whatever with their lives. I don’t care. They don’t have to be rational intellectual debaters. I was trying to help people who wanted help but some people felt pressured. I have issues with a lot of stuff I wrote in that article. I think it’s important to focus on people who come to me/philosophy on their own initiative, with their own positive motivations (or if they choose to go be public figures then wanting to debate them is fine). I think a lot of what Deutsch said about irrationality, and how he and Fitz-Claridge tried to recruit for TCS, ARR and CR, was toxic. I’m trying to stay away from that stuff now. It’s interesting to me that you like it enough to highlight it. I worry it may feel motivational and pump you up in a way that won’t last (but that’s just a general concern; it’s not based on personal knowledge about you).
Also in general I think I underestimated the complexity of the world, of people, of social problems. I was really impressed by Deutsch and his grand ideas and I thought I knew a lot. And it was a lot and I know more now than before, but I now see myself as knowing less relative to the amount of knowledge needed to change the world or be really effective. I understand more about the difficulties and how much more there is that I don’t know. I’m less impressed with stuff like TCS – even if i hadn’t come up with some criticisms of TCS, I’d still just generally be more doubtful about how complete and useful it is, and be much more content for people who want to to take some inspiration from it, and not so interested in anyone doing it in a complete or consistent way. I also e.g. think that politics is harder than Deutsch thinks it is, and I’ve lowered my opinion of how well I can evaluate candidates or know what will or should happen. I don’t think other people are good at it either but I don’t care much. My goal isn’t to save the world or individuals. I don’t expect people to radically change from irrational to rational. If people would just ask intellectuals they follow to create debate policies, that’d be pretty good, and they would be contributing usefully to human progress without having to change their lives.
See also Curiosity – Toxic Attitudes about Greatness
I think maybe you like this because you see it as high stakes, important, urgent, a big deal, similar to some stuff above.
It is that in some sense. But my intention with it was partly the opposite: I wanted people to be more humble modest, curious, and less confident, arrogant, dismissive. Maybe there’s a better way I could approach this. One potential change would be discussing it more explicitly in terms of systemic issues and societal results rather than individuals.
I think a lot of people get kinda stuck and don’t know how to master the basics enough. I’m not sure what to do about it but I haven’t been bringing this up a lot because I’m not sure what would be really helpful for people. And it’s something people can feel bad about, so if you don’t have an effective solution to pair with it that can be bad. I do think there are valid abstract issues to be discussed and there are widespread problems where people struggle with all sorts of things due to having issues with other knowledge it builds on (e.g. when people struggle high school math or algebra, they often didn’t learn fractions well enough and revisiting some previous math can help).
People ought to work on small chunks and master stuff on a frequent basis, and I think that should be possible in theory, and I think I’m intuitively good at doing it, but I think a lot of people struggle to break it down and organize it correctly and get that to work, partly because it’s too complex to do just with spreadsheets or checklists, and a lot of intuition and wisdom is needed too.