Arguments are good for helping people reason about things

The word "argument" has (at least) two kinds of uses:

1. "Here's some reasoning showing why X might be true."
2. Social pressure. (e.g. "No, you should donate to XYZ and not ABC because blah blah blah.")

I hear you saying that the first is good. I agree. Even when people have all the pieces. Not logically omniscient as you say.

The second is dumb. Healthy rational discourse norms would banish it.

I'm a bit of a dick on this point. When I see it, I exaggerate it and call it out. It irritates me. I wasn't being totally fair to D0TheMath. I think they were trying to be polite and follow standard LW norms and engage in good faith. But I still think my sight was basically right.

I read their comment as saying something like:

Given my epistemic state, I find myself disagreeing with you. I don't find it worthwhile to investigate whether you're right, so here's what you would need to do to persuade me.

This is normal in LW culture, and I think it's nuts.

It's part of the same bonkers thread that has people policing their epistemic impacts on each other and calling this handwringing "good collective epistemic hygiene". It's codependence. Plain and simple.

(What to do instead? How about just actually intend good epistemics for yourself, aim to be clear and transparent [LW · GW], and let others take care of their epistemic states (or completely fuck themselves up). That produces vastly more epistemically robust networks with vastly less overhead.)

A network that values persuading each other is crazy. Awful incentives. It feeds ego structures ("rewards with status" if you like) when arguments are persuasive. It starves geeks and feeds sociopaths.

If you disagree with someone and aren't curious, that's fine. Just admit that to yourself (and maybe tell them).

If you are curious, just ask. ("If you feel like looking into simulacra levels theory, maybe give me an example of XYZ if you can?")

But for the love of sanity, don't feed the sociopaths.

An extra nuance which isn't totally relevant to my main hot take of "arguments are often not useless": I agree with the idea that framing an argument in your head as an attempt to convince someone of something isn't necessarily the best way to think about it. It's very easy for arguments to start to feel adversarial, which they ideally shouldn't be.

This post was requested by Eneasz Brodski on the Bayesian Conspiracy discord.

The summary of Valentine's comment here is extremely inaccurate seeing as in the same comment thread he made an argument, it calls for making the minimum amount of arguments and says nothing about arguments not being useful. The comment seems to be more about how communities about optimizing for being good at something shouldn't spend resources on catering to people who are bad at that thing

Outlining heuristics is helpful for every lurker who happens not to have encountered that heuristic before. This is often more useful to me than the object level arguments.

Indeed: he wasn't literally talking about ideal reasoners, only "smarter" ones. You aren't an ideal reasoner, because ideal reasoners have to be infinite in their faculties.