Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

One of the common methods people use to attack posts with ideas they don't agree with is to take the prose literally. This is much like the "work to rule" form of protest that unions use, and the "letter of the law" rather than the spirit of it, and of course all those "zero tolerance" policies.

View on HN

For which the Principle Of Charity was created: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

It would be brave person indeed who put their faith in this on the public internet.

Bravery is overrated. You learn to pick your battles and your opponents - you either talk just to charitable people, or under the protection of the Mighty Banhammer wielded by a charitable mod.

Who's the mod on Twitter say? You will encounter people on there who actively choose to follow the opposite of that principle. That's what I mean by public.

Oh, I what you mean now. I too am afraid of the public Internet, and sincerely hope to never have to deal with it.

For most of the time, even on Twitter the social network / filter bubble works, if you're not a celebrity. But I am afraid of saying anything non-PC there.

fantastic... "...avoid attributing irrationality, logical fallacies or falsehoods to the others' statements, when a coherent, rational interpretation of the statements is available.", I like that essentially "snapping" our interpretations to their best fit interpolations within some rational space of ideas.

One approach to resolving this would be to not make statements that are literally not true and to correct statements that are literally not true to not be literally not true.

That creates bland writing and the process of correcting every little deviation is so pedantic that it provides a strong incentive to stop writing. Both of these problems result in a world where we learn less, grow less, and take fewer risks with our writing.

What is wrong with truly being charitable, assuming the absolute best intentions and giving writers the license to deviate a little to let them make a point?

Nothing is wrong with being charitable. Some statements are just wrong, or there is no assumption of best intentions that can satisfy the claims being made.

What is wrong with not writing blatantly false statements or calling out wrong statements for being wrong (or, asking for a correction)?

There is a reason compilers cannot take arbitrary text and produce the program you are 'actually' thinking of.

"Perfect is the enemy of good", perfection isn't always necessary for effective communication, and the perceived intent of the writer usually matters more. If you think the writer is trying to mislead someone, or they said something that you think will lead to misunderstandings of something important, then call them out or ask for a correction. I took the post as being more about "the writer didn't cover all the edge cases" than about "the writer wrote something intentionally false/wrong/misleading".

Very nicely written!! :)

To be clear, I have not read the original post; I was only responding to WalterBright's post.

We do get to skip over words and make up our own meanings of them, anyway. :)

Consider the statement "People are smarter than dogs." This is not literally true, but is true in a very useful sense. Our language need not look like legal contracts, which are written to be literally true, and yet still they have ambiguity problems.

Walter maybe I am missing something here, but in what sense is the statement "people are smarter than dogs" not literally true?

Babies are not smarter than dogs, but they are certainly people. There are also people in vegetative states.

Walter you used a capital P. This means the group, not individual people. "People" the group are smarter than any "dog".

"Babies" the group are smarter than any dog too :)

You two just demonstrate my point.

I know - hence why I am having some fun with you :)

A proper application of the Principle of Charity would lead you to assign more probability to the theory that WalterBright put a fully-formatted sentence inside quotation marks, with a dot at the end and... a capital letter at the beginning. Therefore, his "People" are just "people", and the capital P only marks the start of the sentence.

;).

In what way are dogs smarter than (or equivalent to) babies?

What value is there in such a statement: This dog is at least as smart as this baby?

What does smart even mean?

Well I mean okay it's not rocket science or anything but my schnauzer is a certified cosmetologist. What's your baby got?

> What does smart even mean?

Precisely. That's why it's better to stick with the principle of charity :).

Some dogs can be trained to herd sheep in a remarkably precise way, with just hand gestures and whistles to control them. There are plenty of people on this planet, born with mental defects, that would be incapable of learning to do this. Nevertheless, "People are smarter than dogs" is a usefully true statement, even whilst not being 100% correct. It certainly communicates the idea better than: "People, after having attained a certain level of mental development after birth, and not counting those born with mental defects or receiving cerebral injuries after birth, are smarter than most dogs, putting aside for the moment the possibility of a dog being born with a mutation allowing it to reason at a much higher level than is usually seen in the dog population".

One version of that sentence concisely articulates the core idea. The other, whilst more correct, hides the core idea under a large number of sub-clauses trying to deal with unusual corner cases.

To bring this back to the technical world, this debate is very similar to the way that programming language designers go to great lengths to try and help programmers right error handling code that doesn't get in the way of understanding the nominal case - it turns out that this is an exceptionally hard problem to solve though when dealing with computers because they are so precise. Thankfully human brains can be a lot more forgiving if we so desire (see the Principal of Charity mentioned previously in this thread).

It seems like "smartness" is being defined as, "capable of being controlled by me, or someone like me"?

It just seems a bit selfish to me.

Sure. Come up with a bulletproof definition of truth and falsity in language and we'll get right on that.

It's ok. We'll wait.

A response like this is exactly what the article is about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com