“Everything that matters can be reduced to objective truths.”
My first thought: well, that seems reasonable. My first feeling: well, that’s stupid.
I had asked for a controversial opinion or claim, and that’s the response I got. And I immediately felt a little cheated. It wasn’t exactly controversial in the sense that, it was already fully thought out. (Another example: Hitler was not evil. Obviously, if you have a self-consistent theory with definitions for evil given ahead of time, this will work out to be true.) There was little to say against the statement – in some ways, I agreed. Yet, I felt something about it was still very wrong. All I could do was offer the obvious bit about whether or not some things would get lost in translation, which wasn’t specific enough to get to the heart of the matter. Those things, he claimed, would either be definable with some care, or just “not matter”.
I found that weeks later, I was still bothered by the conversation. What was wrong with it exactly? Why couldn’t I pin it down? Why did my system 2 kind of, sort of, but not really agree? I mean, perhaps it was a little silly to take up so much space in the back of my mind, but it was less about the subject matter and more that I couldn’t seem to put together a coherent argument refuting it.
When I stumbled across a description of double crux* a few weeks later still, I was surprised that I was reminded of this topic once again. On some level of my understanding, it’s about finding the more concrete things to resolve disagreements to better seek truth. And again, this is a principle I agree with. (I am hesitant to comment on double crux. Though there exist unofficial canons of applied rationality, I found a strong enough argument against looking at it [see first comment on above linked post] – at least until I’ve gone to that CFAR workshop [which isn’t that far away!]. So I’ll end this paragraph now.)
Well, that’s true of arguments, to some degree, then…maybe reduction to these truths is not inherently wrong. But what about the rest? Daily conversation? Opinions? Does the majority of the rest fall into ‘reducible’ or ‘irrelevant’? That still felt entirely wrong.
Poking through the lesswrong canon instead, I ended up finding some key words for phrasing my thoughts. I suppose one point I had entirely neglected was the difference between defensibility and the right way to actually think about it. Arguments can be self-consistent and thus fully defensible, but that doesn’t mean they’re the right approach. Various things fall into this category, I think – e.g. something too vague and ambiguous to be properly attacked, something As a close analogy, a strict rule with black and white is easy to enforce, but isn’t necessarily going to be the best way to go about things (fine, depending on your definition of ‘best’). And despite this paragraph coming at a point that isn’t intuitively the Main Point of the post, or anything important at all, I think it’s the biggest takeaway on a personal level.
And then there’s that whole thing about denotation (dictionary definition) vs. connotation. A quote from a lesswrong example shows the point nicely enough:
I have perseverance. You are stubborn. He is pig-headed. I am patriotic. You’re a nationalist. He is jingoistic. I’ll slash red tape. You’ll decrease bureaucracy. He’ll destroy safeguards.
Yes, it’s possible to unpack each of those terms, to fully explain that you mean that “X cares about the country” is the definition for the second line, and all those things become equivalent. If you’re having an argument to get down to the truth of the matter, perhaps that’s the way to go about it. Find an objective definition to start at, and explain why you think that that definition is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But then, when you get down to it, you’ll have to define good and bad, which is always a bit of a sticky subject. Not to mention, I don’t think you can throw the majority of the dictionary away just because there are connotations, calling that ‘useless’. I think it’s useful, to convey opinion, express feelings with various . And there’s that bit where maybe a good definition won’t exist. Or maybe unpacking certain connotations can continue ad infinitum, or lead to tautology, or some other trivial and unsatisfying conclusion…
I suppose the above arguments (save defensibility != best approach) are still a little fuzzy, more hypotheses than well-defended arguments. But the lack of a defense doesn’t mean they’re wrong. I’ve also mostly focused on the fact that the rest isn’t useless, as opposed to whether reduction to objectivity is always the best for arguments. I don’t very much like absolutes, so I would tend to mull over this a bit more. But some part of me does think it’s possibly true. I guess a similar, if not equivalent, question is whether truth-seeking is the ultimate goal in argument/discussion. I don’t think – and this conclusion surprises me – that it’s the goal of every conversation – or maybe even discussion/argument. It seems that in phrasing it all this way, I’ve somehow convinced myself to see the other side?…the side where my sister argues just for the sake of getting her point across, the side where I don’t understand others’ stubbornness. The matter warrants more thinking, but I’m glad to have set down some of my problems with the original statement.
I guess I’ll end with this (supposed[?]) quote from Feynman, which I haven’t fully considered yet: “You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts. It is better to keep the focus on the facts of the matter and try to understand what your interlocutor is trying to communicate, then to get lost in a pointless discussion of definitions, bearing nothing.”