Relevance Norms; Or, Gricean Implicature Queers the Decoupling/Contextualizing Binary

Many people have tried to draw such lines: literal vs contextual, mistake vs conflict theory, science vs religion. My line is mostly about reactions to disagreement. An engineer will say ok, I'll be in my garage working on my flying car. A politician will say ok, let's find points of contact. But a fanatic will call their friends and paint a target on me for disagreeing. I wouldn't do that to anyone for disagreeing with me, so it seems like a pretty sharp line.

I chose this particular post to review because I think it does a great job of highlighting soe of the biases and implicit assumptions that Zack makes throughout the rest of the sequence. Therefore this review should be considered not just a review of this post, but also all subsequent posts in Zack's sequence.

Firstly, I think the argument Zack is making here is reasonable. He's saying that if a fact is relevant to an argument it should be welcome, and if it's not relevant to an argument it should not be.

Throughout the rest of the sequence, he continues to justify this basic position with underlying epistemology and math.   He makes that case that language is there to help you make predictions, shows how hard it is to predict people's views when there are things they aren't allowed to talk about.  He makes the case that drawing boundaries on natural categories is important to make language useful.

However, I believe that throughout the sequence, the position he's implicitly arguing against is the way he defines contextualizing in a reply to me here:

Contextualizers" think that the statement "Green-eyed people commit twice as many murders" creates an implicature that "... therefore green-eyed people should be stereotyped as criminals" that needs to be explicitly canceled with a disclaimer, which is an instance of the more general cognitive process by which most people think that "The washing machine is by the stairs" creates an implicature of "... and the machine works" that, if it's not true, needs to be explicitly canceled with a disclaimer ("... but it's broken"). "Decouplers" don't think the statement about murder rates creates an implicature about stereotyping.

And, I believe this is a straw man.   In particular, I believe Zack is being quite idealistic, building up a model of how language should be used, while ignoring the many ways language is actually used in practice.

If indeed, language were only used for clearing up confusions, I think the argument would be quite one sided, and language should in fact only be used in the way's Zack suggests. However, here's a list of ways that language  is used that don't fit cleanly into that category:

1. Convincing and motivating people to take action
2. Creating positive or negative affect towards a particular idea or group.
3. Quoting someone out of context to portray their positions a certain way.
4. Describing a felt sense, or evoking it in someone else.

In general, the language I use isn't just changing the predictions that people make, it's affecting their emotions, it can be quoted or used to paint others in a certain light, it's being crosschecked with other similar language and affecting people's emotional affect.

And the rest of the sequence largely ignores this. It paints the argument between a robust case that using language correctly helps you make more effective predictions, vs the choice to not hurt others feelings. 

But the truth is, there's a whole set of powerful consequentialist arguments about why you might want to consider the context of things like how it will effect the other persons affect towards what you're talking about, how it will be quoted, how it could be used to paint you or the groups your affiliated with in a certain light, etc.

I don't believe a sequence that has such an implicit straw man should be included in the common knowledge of lesswrong, and I believe this largely for many of the broader contextualizing arguments around the effect that this implicit straw man could have on the broader culture of LW.

I'd suggest that it should be understood as a spectrum rather than a dichotomy. Dichotomies are just easier to explain.

Or suppose you're a guest at my house, and you ask where the washing machine is, and I say it's by the stairs. If the machine then turns out to be broken, and you ask, "Hey, did you know your washing machine is broken?" and I say, "Yes", you're probably going to be pretty baffled why I didn't say "It's by the stairs, but you can't use it because it's broken" earlier (even though the decontextualized answer "It's by the stairs" was, in fact, true).

It doesn't seem like this is what either Chris Leong's post or John Nerst's post was about.

At first when I read this, I strongly agreed with Zack's self-review that this doesn't make sense to include in context, but on reflection and upon re-reading the nominations, I think he's wrong and it would add a lot of value per page to do so, and it should probably be included. 

The false dichotomy this dissolves, where either you have to own all implications, so it's bad to say true things that imply things that are true but focus upon would have unpleasant consequences, or it has to be fine to ignore all the extra communication that's involved in what you chose to say in the place and way that you said it - it's not something created by Chris Leong or John Nerst, it's something common, and worth dissolving. 

And this does that quite efficiently, while suggesting a very good common sense solution that, while not fully specified or complete because that's not really possible here, seems clearly the right approach.

This post seemed helpful for advancing my overall understanding of the "discourse norms landscape." I agree that "what counts as contextually relevant" is often one of the more important questions to be asking. In general, I think it's hard to judge an ontological/category-suggesting post, and I think this class of essay is roughly the right way to engage with it from a critical perspective.

I do feel sort of confused about the framing of this post as a rebuttal to "Decoupling vs Contextualization" though  – in particular I'm a bit surprised about the combination of opinions you're expressing here, and elsewhere. 

It seems like the main substance you're responding to is "Decoupling/Contextualization promotes to attention that Contextualization might be a preferred norm-set, and that opens the door to all kinds of political shenanigans." And I think that's true – but... it's not really what I thought of as the point Decoupling/Contextualization was making. 

The question I interpreted D/C to be addressing was not "what sort of norms are good?" but "what sort of norm conflicts might you run into in the wild, that will make discourse more confusing and difficult?". And when evaluating that post, the key question I'd be asking is not "is one of these norm-sets dangerous to encourage?" but "is this actually a meaningful way to carve reality?" 

If Decoupled/Contextualized is an common way that different people approach discussions, that's really important to be able to talk about! Especially if one of those ways is epistemically dangerous! 

If it's not an important difference that's causing discourse to be confusing/difficult, then it makes sense not to incorporate it into our longterm jargon. 

I'm not quite sure your intended reading here, but... it feels like you're saying "this categorization is promoting to attention a concept that's harmful to our discourse... therefore we shouldn't have this categorization", which... seems very different from what you've historically argued for.

What surprises me is the combination of your concern for this here, but your praise of Local Validity as a Key to Sanity and Civilization – I think Local Validity was an important concept, and I saw the Decoupled/Contextual norms post as an important complement to it. 

(Switching to focus on my own opinions rather than my confusions about yours). 

Decoupling seemed to be a key cultural component that enables Local Validity checking. (It's not identical to local validity, but seems related). And decoupling is hard, or at least not something most people do by default. Language is often muddled together with politics, and it takes a special culture to enable them to be separated. 

(When I first read your post, here, I thought "oh, yeah maybe D/C isn't a useful joint to carve here", but it was re-reading Local Validity that shifted me back towards "hmm, if D/C isn't a useful joint to carve, that sort of implies that Local Validity isn't as important a concept. I'm in fact fairly certain Local Validity is important, and upon reflection there are definitely people who don't have that concept. And while the Local Validity is essay is good, I think the D/C post is much shorter, while also addressing a different slicing of the problem that is sometimes more relevant)

So my current epistemic state, taking this post and those others all together, is take the arguments in this post as more of a "Yes, and" rather than a "No, but" to the D/C post.

THANK YOU for talking about behaviors and expectations for communications, and recognizing that these are tactics for communication and/or persuasion (and/or signaling), not attributes of a given speaker.

One of my main objections to the previous discussion was that they were saying "contextualizer" as a description of a person's style, rather than "(over-)contextualized interpretation" as a description of a given communication's intent or interpretation.

I use both contextual and decoupled aspects, depending on my audience and intent. Communication style is an an active choice.

(Self-review.) I oppose including this post in a Best-of-2019 collection. I stand by what I wrote, but it's not potential "canon" material, because this was a "defensive" post for the 2018 Review [LW(p) · GW(p)]: if the "contextualizing vs. decoupling" idea hadn't been as popular and well-received as it was, there would be no reason for this post to exist.

A standalone Less Wrong "house brand" explanation of Gricean implicature (in terms of Bayesian signaling games [LW · GW], probably?) could be a useful reference post, but that's not what this is.

There's a set of posts by Zack_M_Davis in a similar vein that came out in 2019; some examples are Maybe Lying Doesn't Exist [LW · GW], Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Think [LW · GW], Free Speech and Triskaidekaphobic Calculators: A Reply to Hubinger on the Relevance of Public Online Discussion to Existential Risk [LW · GW], and this one. Overall, this was the one I liked the most at the time (as evidenced by strong-upvoting it, and only weak or not upvoting the others). It points clearly at a confusion underlying a common dichotomy, in a way that I think probably changed the discourse afterwards for the better.

This post gave specific words to a problem I've run into many times, and am just pretty glad to have words for. It also became relevant in a bunch of contexts I was in.