Dark Arts 101: Be rigorous, on average

I was just thinking of this before I read this and I thought of a twist to put on LW that might make it easier for me not to get sucked into groupthink: "LessWrong is not my community; LessWrong is a location." Instead of LW being equivalent to the sum of my 'colleagues,' it's more like LW is the Roman Forum.

It isn't about how not to say stupid things about undecidability, though, nor about the specific flawed reasoning. It's about how he hid the flawed reasoning in a forest of excellent tangential reasoning. Well, it was supposed to be. I'd better turn down the insulting tone to avoid focusing on his errors.

Phil makes three claims: (1) what the argument is; (2) that Steiner fails to bridge the steps in that argument because it goes outside his expertise; and (3) that most of the book is good argument irrelevant to the main thread. Point (2) requires him to be correct about point (1). But point (3), which is the point in Phil's title, does not much depend on correctly identifying the argument, or even the argument existing.

It is generally more convincing to claim to have identified a buried argument and rejected it than to claim that no argument exists. But I think it is convincing for bad reasons. That the argument Phil extracted matched his interests and expertise is suggestive that his process of extracting it was biased.

Yes, if Phil is to criticize a book for fooling readers, it is important that he look at the readers and determine what they actually took away. But your suggestion that they took an argument away from a book is absurd. How often do people do that? Indeed, looking at the Amazon reviews, it looks to me that they did not.

Added: I think point 3 is the interesting point, and Phil clearly does, too, not just because he put it in the title, but also because he said so in response to a bunch of comments complaining about 2. Which makes this post an example of its own topic of a sideline distracting from the main argument.

That's a good skepticism to have. I've wondered myself how he will summarize it; the last chapter doesn't have any obvious recap. I have probably miscontrued at least part of his argument, since I've read only half the book. It would be more fair to have waited until I finish the book, but I don't think I'm going to finish the book.

"Important to the argument" is not a binary predicate. I picked what seemed to me the most-important parts, the pieces he could not do without. But most things are related at least indirectly. For instance, there's a section in-between the 2nd and 3rd points I picked where he dismisses the counter-theory that the choice of the literature canon is the result of a convergence, over centuries, by humanity on right judgement of works of literature (p. 67-69). This is well-reasoned and important in its own right, and it supports his catastrophic argument (everything changed because of modernism) by undercutting an opposing gradualist argument (and also bolsters his running theme of "most people are stupid", which is necessary to defend from Aumann agreement). But it isn't part of the "proof" of his thesis. On p. 87-95, he describes modernism, which is a concept used at the core of his argument, but describing it is also not part of his proof. (Curiously, he never uses the word "modernism", and seems to think his discovery of this historical transition is entirely novel.)

There are parts I didn't count as critical that seemed to be very important to him, such as his definition of art as "the maximalization [sic] of semantic incommensurability". Perhaps he works these in later. I also didn't count times when he repeats or rephrases an assertion made earlier, not to support it, but to use it as a now-proven fact to prove other things.

My interpretation is that the core argument is talked about often throughout the book, but the premises and intuitions supporting it are only mentioned occasionally. So, the audience will be aware of Steiner's claims after having read the book, and they'll walk away from the book with the feeling of having been impressed by his skill, even though they won't actually be able to recite his argument. They do get the rough gist of his argument, Phil's point is that there's almost nothing more than gist to his argument.

Additionally, Phil may have summarized. Presumably there is some redundancy within the hundreds of pages.

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My interpretation of his review is that the core argument is talked about often throughout the book, but the premises and intuitions supporting it are only mentioned occasionally. So, the audience will be aware of Steiner's claims after having read the book, and they'll walk away from the book with the feeling of having been impressed by his skill, even though they won't actually be able to recite his argument. They do get the rough gist of his argument, Phil's point is that there's nothing more than gist to his argument.

Hm. He does also add

[2] This pattern breaks down around page 90, where Steiner begins a long spiral into his central thesis.

So while the OP says that his explaination is what you objected to, what he actually seems to describe is that part of the book is about the core argument, other parts are, well, not really about the core argument.

I began it because I bought it as a present for someone who had it on her Amazon wish list, but it didn't arrive until after Christmas. I kept reading it because he is one of the few articulate prominent literary theorists. He draws interesting parallels and contrasts between music and literature, the antagonism between democracy and the literary canon, and other ideas. His argument that the best literary criticism is other literature is interesting, and sympathetic to my own belief that one earns the right to speak on literary theory only by writing literature. I don't agree with the book's thesis, at all, but the big spaces between the points of his argument are good. Just not at carrying the thesis of the book.

The interestingness drops around page 90, though. I can still tell what he means to say, but I keep stopping, scratching my head, and saying, "Did he really mean to say that? Is this a first draft?"

Steiner convinces people of his false argument (Dark Arts) by being rigorous, on average. 99% of his statements are based on his expertise, but that does not mean his argument is 99% based on his expertise.

It is not here because the book is important; it's here because it describes an example of a deceptive persuasive technique.

7 only explicitly refers to 3, but it also requires 6 and 5 in order to actually refer to Zombie World. 1 and 2 are setting up definitions for 3. If you roll that in as understood already, then the short version is fine because the entire argument against Zombies really boils down to one point: the causal structure of P-braaains requires them to include consciousness.

That doesn't mean that lines 1, 2, and 4-6 are pointless. It also doesn't match what Phil is saying unless line 3 is both reaching outside of the realm of expertise and not emphasized. Line 3 is definitely not reaching outside the realm of expertise, and is emphasized.

If you want to raise a problem, it would be that line 4 is carrying all the weight, not 3 - except, he goes on to further talk about it for multiple paragraphs immediately afterwards.