A social norm against unjustified opinions?

IAWYC, modulo the use of "should": at least with connotations assumed on Less Wrong, it isn't associated with compulsion or emotional load, it merely denotes preference. "Ought" would be closer.

It's true that in technical contexts "should" has less emotional connotation; however even in say, standards documents, one capitalizes SHOULD and MUST to highlight the technical, rather than colloquial sense of these words. Banishing them from one's personal vocabulary greatly reduces suffering, and is the central theme of "The Work" of Byron Katie (who teaches a simple 4-question model for turning "shoulds" into facts and felt-preferences).

Among a community of rationalists striving for better communication, it would be helpful to either taboo the words or create alternatives. As it is, a lot of "shoulds" get thrown around here without reference to what goal or preference the shoulds are supposed to serve.

"One should X" conveys no information about what positive or negative consequences are being asserted to stem from doing or not-doing X -- and that's precisely the sort of information that we would like to have if we are to understand each other.

I seriously doubt we're capable of not associating it with those things, though.

I think of "should" and "ought" as exactly synonymous, btw.

Look, this whole thread started because of Annoyance's judgment of people who have higher priorities than rationality, right? Did you have a problem with that?

All I'm saying is that this community in general gives way too short shrift to the utility of social cohesion. Sorry if that bothers you.

It's demonstrated by the fact that you can up/down vote and report anyone's posts, and that you need a certain number of upvotes to write articles. This is a method of policing the discourse on the site so that social cohesion doesn't break down to an extent which impairs our discussion. These mechanisms "reinforce correctness," in your terms. So I'll ask again, can we do away with them?

I don't think humanity follows obviously from rationality, which is what I meant about rationality being a means rather than an end.

There are rules the community follows to maintain a certain level of social cohesion, which in turn aides us in the pursuit of rationality.

How is that demonstrated?

Those rules are rarely discussed outright, at least not comprehensively.

I'm pretty sure if I started posting half of my comments in pig-Latin or French or something, for no apparent reason, and refused to explain or stop, I'd be asked to leave fairly quickly, though. That all communication will be in plain English unless there's a reason for it not to be is one example. I'm sure there are others.

I thought we'd already defined "practicing rationality" as "intentionally trying to make rational decisions and intentionally trying to become more rational". Whether we had or not, that was what I meant by the term.

Someone can be being somewhat rational without 'practicing' rationality, and to the degree that they can accurately predict what effects follow what causes, or accomplish other tasks that depend on rationality, every person I know is at least somewhat rational. Even animals can be slightly rational - cats for example are well known for learning that the sound of a can opener is an accurate sign that they may be fed in the near future, even if they aren't rational enough to make stronger predictions about which instances of that sound signal mealtime.

While social signaling can be used on its own to cause someone to switch their allegiances to concepts that they don't value especially highly, that's not the only possible use of it, and it's not a use I consider acceptable. The use of social-signaling that I recommend is intended to keep a person from becoming defensive while 'rationality-level appropriate' rational arguments are used to actually encourage them to change their mind.

You should expand this into a top-level post. Communication is difficult and I think most people could use advice about it. As it stands, it sounds like broad strokes which are obviously good ideas, but probably hard to implement without more details.

How did Annoyance fall off the path, and can I avoid doing the same if I proceed?

While I find conversations with Annoyance rather void, I would encourage you to not try and lift (him ?) up as an example of falling off the path or entering failure modes. If you care about the question I would make a post using generic examples. This does a few things:

• Gets you away from any emotional responses to Annoyance (both in yourself and anyone else).
• Provides a clear-cut example that can be picked apart without making this entire thread required reading. It also cleans up many straw men and red herrings before they happen, since the specifics in the thread are mostly unneeded with relation to the question you have just asked.
• Brings attention to the core problem that needs to be addressed and avoids any specific diagnoses of Annoyance (for better or worse)

If your actions accomplish your goals, fine. However, it's safe to say most of the people here don't want to be Annoyances, and it's important to point out that your behavior does not reflect a requirement or implication of rationality.

If you disagree, I hope you will explicitly list the assumptions leading to your belief that it's a good idea to treat people with condescension.

The rational thing to do when confronted with a position you don't understand is ask yourself "Why did that person adopt that position?"

This is of low value, if the answer doesn't come easily.

Why would I want to do that, given my current utility function?

What's the function you use to evaluate your utility function?

Persuasiveness: You fail at it.

Persuasiveness: what I was not aiming for.

It's from the Tao Te Ching:

"Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs; the sage is ruthless, and treats the people as straw dogs."

One might accuse this of falling afoul of the appeal to nature, but that would assume a fact not in evidence, to wit, that Annoyance's motivations resemble that of a typical LW poster (to the extent that such a beast exists).

Voted down because your realization is flawed. Achieving anything does not require you to be rational, as evidenced by this post.

Wanting to accomplish thing X, and being able to expect it to occur as a result of actions I take, requires rationality.

Your objection is incorrect.

Your strategy of dealing with people is also flawed:

Your understanding of my strategy is incorrect, as evidenced by your question.

I'm not sure what you're referring to with decoys and shields, which I'll just leave at that.

My hypothesis is that reasoning as we know it evolved as a mechanism to both persuade others, and to defend against being persuaded by others.

Consider priming, which works as long as you're not aware of it and therefore defending against it. But it makes no sense to evolve a mechanism to avoid being primed, unless the priming mechanism were being exploited by our tribe-mates. (After all, they're the only ones besides us with the language skill to trigger it.)

In other words, once we evolved language, we became more gullible, because we were now verbally suggestible. This would then have resulted in an arms race of intelligence to both persuade, and defend against persuasion, with tribal status and resources as the prize.

And once we evolved to the point of being able to defend ourselves against any belief-change we're determined to avoid, the prize would've become being able to convince neutral bystanders who didn't already have something at stake.

The system 1/2 distinctions cataloged by Stanovich & West don't quite match my own observation, in that I consider any abstract processing to be system 2, whether it's good reasoning or fallacious, and whether it's cached or a work-in-progress. (Cached S2 reasoning isn't demanding of brainpower, and in fact can be easily parroted back in many forms once an appropriate argument has been heard, without the user ever needing to figure it out for themselves.)

In my view, the primary functional purpose of human of reasoning is to persuade or prevent persuasion, with other uses being an extra bonus. So in this view, using system 2 for truly rational thought is actually an abuse of the system... which would explain why it's so demanding of cognitive capacity, compared to using it as a generator of confabulation and rhetoric. And it also explains why it requires so much learning to use properly: it's not what the hardware was put there for.

The S&W model is IMO a bit biased by the desire to find "normative" reasoning (i.e., correct reasoning) in the brain, even though there's really no evolutionary reason for us to have truly rational thought or to be particularly open-minded. In fact, there's every evolutionary reason for us to not be persuadable whenever we have something at stake, and to not reason things out in a truly fair or logical manner.

Hence, some of the attributes they give system 2 are (in my view) attributes of learned reasoning running on top of system 2 in real time, rather than native attributes of system 2 itself, or reflective of cached system 2 thinking.

Anyway, IAWYC re: the rest, I just wanted to clarify this particular bit.

I feel I should jump in here, as you appear to be talking past each other. There is no confusion in the system 1/system 2 distinction; you're both using the same definition, but the bit about decoys and shields was actually the core of PJ's post, and of the difference between your positions. PJ holds that to change someone's mind you must focus on their S1 response, because if they engage S2, it will just rationalize and confabulate to defend whatever position their S1 holds. Now, I have no idea how one would go about altering the S1 response of someone who didn't want their response altered, but I do know that many people respond very badly to rational arguments that go against their intuition, increasing their own irrationality as much as necessary to avoid admitting their mistake.