Philosophical Landmines (2013)
lesswrong.com
lesswrong.com
I've long understood that if you want to get a point across, you need to express it as clearly as possible, and avoid flamebait or words that you fully expect someone will take issue with. But, as the article highlights, there are words and phrases that can be mundane, inoffensive, and a perfect match for what you want to say, and yet saying them will predictably derail the conversation into rehashing tired tangents, so you need to talk around such word to have a productive conversation (and, conversely, avoid fixating on them).
Hindsight is 20/20, so now that I have a clearer understanding of this dynamic, I can immediately think of several such conceptual landmines regularly stepped on by HNers (myself included) :). I'll do my best to avoid them in the future.
1) Synthesising other's words into a personal perspective is a slow process that takes days to a week. Part of the thought-process-shuts-down aspect of difficult conversations is new ideas hitting at a pace too fast to be absorbed at the time of the conversation.
The rational strategy for a person who finds themselves in such a situation is the just throw out all their talking points to see what happens - even if it doesn't quite make sense - then go away and mull on what the responses were. It is productive even if the conversation often looks stupid in hindsight.
2) The functioning of large groups is such that most people don't participate in the conversation. The large quiet majority doesn't have a mechanism to coordinate their opinion apart from instinct, so they will use arguments modelled in robust political debates by the vocal minorities because that is really all the majority has to work with. It is thus important for a rational actor, in normal political discussions, to make sure their arguments are represented for the lurkers to to digest even if in theory everyone in talking already knows them.
In practice, that looks like literally the same chain of comments playing out again and again. That is pretty much useless for the debaters themselves - but it is probably a very useful instinct to help the people not talking to work out what they believe.
When two vocal people both incorrectly believe incoherent (and usually bad) ideas are the correct model arguments then situation gets useless and unhelpful very quickly, and there is no way the situation will quiet down without intervention. But rehashing the same situation again and again is purposeful.
I think this is the primary reason for the "anti truth" movement today.
That was my reaction too. It happens across the political spectrum, and avoidance of p-landmines only encourages their further use.
One should pick when and where to make a stand, and seek conciliation, but if you are always avoiding other people's outrage, you will end up where those others want you to be.
From the article: "Anyone who hangs out on 4chan can confirm that this is the approximate shape of most thread derailments." Well, that might well be one of the arenas where you don't need to make a stand.
You can find an English translation here: http://coolhaus.de/art-of-controversy/
I later discovered the compilation was in demand to help users accurately select their cliche of choice—exactly the opposite of my intent.
Decades later I am content that these widely used catchphrases are not damaging our language since they have a broader semiotic purpose of, for example, to show tribal affiliation, e.g., “diamond hands,” and not merely a basket of denotative glyphs.
But that is not to say that a writer is not enriching the language by using a fresh metaphor that adds another sharp facet or just the right amount of bokeh ambiguity to the discussion.
And like "truth", you have "justice" and "freedom".
For example, you can have a judge and a defendant both talking about justice with two radically different mental maps in their heads. And a year down the road you talk to the defendant and he might have updated his mental map and ask for clarification.
The one that annoys me is "advertising" which people view as benign pictures showing up on their browser, but might really be extremely invasive surveillance and profiling of everyone.
Except this doesn't follow from consequentialism, although it's not uncommon for someone to assume it does. No-one would want to live in a world where that was the norm, and it could not be kept secret, so even the most full-bore consequentialist should oppose it. A consequentialist might hold that human rights are a good idea as a means, even if they aren't sold on the idea that they should be an end in themselves.
> no one is literally "chanting slogans". There may even be some original phrasings involved. But the conversation has been derailed.
This seems like a rather shallow take on what it means to be creative and original. Reciting a famous philosophical quote, say, doesn't mean you aren't thinking. There's little point rephrasing it if it's well known and succinct. The originality is in how you apply it, not in expressing it in your own words, which is really just not-invented-here in action.
Those are just nitpicks though. As to the core idea, it's not terribly clear to me what philosophical landmine means. I think it's meant to mean an ambiguous word or phrase that people are likely to feel strongly about, in a way that is likely to derail a conversation.
> Avoiding landmines is your job. If it is a predictable consequence that something you could say will put people in mindless slogan-playback-mode, don't say it.
Isn't this just a way of saying you should write clearly?
I'm reminded of an online conversation where someone said something like:
> Humans are different from machines in that they have free will.
Quite the philosophical rabbit-hole, but it turned out they meant
> Humans are different from machines in that they are able to set their own goals.
which is much more clear and precise. I suppose free will is the landmine there, as it's unclear what it really means, and just about everyone has a strong opinion about it, even people who have never read any philosophy and know nothing about the subject.
That doesn't really matter to the argument. In context, that was an example of someone getting caught on a philosophical landmine. Anyone who's argued consequentialism before has heard that response, as it sounds like you have.
Actually, you also arguably got caught in a philosophical landmine there.
This seems like a rather shallow take on what it means to be creative and original.
"Cached thought" is a term of art on Lesswrong. See the link above the article text. The author isn't talking about quoting dead people, they're talking about trotting out thoughts which have been marked in your brains thought-store as high-quality, but may have not been reevaluated for years, and certainly haven't been re-evaluated for this particular conversation.
So what is a philosophical landmine? It's some conversational trigger which distracts an interlocutor by reminding them of their hobby-horse philosophical issue and causes them to start rehearsing the five standard arguments for their position on that issue instead of saying anything relevant to the conversation at hand. If that sounds like an awfully specific sort of scenario, then you haven't talked to many philosophy undergrads.
Take for example postmodernism, under which there can be no legitimate communication between people, and all arguments are power plays between the speakers. In such conditions it's very easy to foment cynicism and conflict, since without the ability to communicate you will not be able to solve conflicts or grievances.
> The freedom of one ends where the freedom of the other begins
It doesn't matter whether you're advocating for hardcore communism, for minimal state, absolute anarchy or anything in between those -- someone is going to bring this crap up and use it as a counterpoint. Usually it doesn't make sense and doesn't convey any concrete meaning, but it's what people heard other people say and it sounds smart and morally superior so people try to use it anywhere they can.
Then I'd circle around to the original subject under discussion, and argue that the boundary that they drew may not be extreme enough in light of some of the things we had just discussed, and ask how they justify drawing the boundary in that particular place.
Now we're having the conversation that I wanted to have in the first place, and I've positioned myself to argue from a perspective farther from the position that I actually hold than the person that I'm arguing with is. Their disagreement with the arguments that I am now making will generally push them closer to my actual position, and their agreement with the arguments that I'm making will push them into defending an obviously extreme, outlying position (which is what I chose it to be.) Both create cognitive dissonance that can be resolved by accepting my actual position.
edit: There are infinitely many other angles, too. I like talking about desert, as in "the property of deserving", because it's not something most people have thought about as such, and it can be spoken about in pretty ordinary language. Then you're talking about positive liberty rather than the negative liberty of "freedom from restraint." To continue to use the cliché in those terms involves having to change signs (-/+), which is difficult and requires thought (if you never learned DeMorgan's rule or practiced explaining it in plain English.) Now you're having a real conversation.
tl;dr: If you can force people to reword their clichés, you can have a real conversation. The best way to do this is to attack them from strange angles.
> Usually it doesn't make sense and doesn't convey any concrete meaning
This is the first time I have heard this quote, but it makes sense to me. Why do you suggest it doesn't make sense?
You're one of today's lucky 10 000 then[0]! It's a common quote, a standard and vague answer for the question of limits to individual freedoms.
I'm not GP, but I agree that it often doesn't make sense - because it doesn't convey any concrete meaning. It requires your conversation partners to infer what exactly you meant by this, and it invites debating the abstract point under unrelated examples (particularly edge cases), or what is or isn't a freedom.
In a context of a particular conversation - say, short-time rentals - you could say it to argue that just because one can run a short-term rental in residential area, doesn't mean they should. But saying "my freedom ends when your begins" doesn't communicate much. You could, instead, say that "your freedom to make money off random strangers ends where my freedom to have a good night's sleep begins". Or, better yet, you could simply say something like "my problem is that, in practice, such rentals tend to be a source of constant loud noise and other bad behavior - which goes against mine and other permanent residents' desire to live in a safe neighborhood and be able to sleep well at night".
(And speaking of landmines, don't ever mention "zoning" in such conversations.)
--
[0] - https://xkcd.com/1053/
Maybe this is how it felt in the early 70's when the nation was coming out of assassinations/Vietnam/Watergate, or how it felt in Ireland after the Troubles, India after the Emergency, Chile ever since the Pinochet coup, and so on, "one damn thing after another".
I grew up in the 70's, what we're witnessing today is different. Cable news media has almost destroyed the news of current events. By some cable news networks labeling everything they're against "fake", some have lost sight of what's true by reason of logic. Telling blatant lies as news is very different then what I grew up with.
Quantum mechanics usually is brought up as a source of randomness or irreducible complexity that may debunk determinism, which therefore may or may not imply "free will."
1. a source of serious debates about what it "really" means for us, with the Schroedinger's cat being the most famous argument (it was appeal to intuition used against the Copenhagen interpretation).
2. Abused as a pseudoargument by proponents of claims like "you can heal other people with the power of your mind". As in: "how can you tell it's impossible? What about quantum mechanics?".
Wonderful typo with "landmind" by the way. It's perfect!
During the Trump presidency it felt like the population of the US was split in two different realities, and that the worldview of someone from the other side was completely alien. It works similarly in smaller scales as well, with things such as conspiracy theories.
I have to save that kid that fall into the well.
Let your mind free and ...
I posted it because I think this happens very frequently on HN - long and unproductive backs-and-forths that only exist because someone used a "landmine" word, and someone else stepped on it.
And by the way, if you are going to post things and then downvote legitimate responses—then perhaps you need to rethink things a bit?
TeMPOraL didn't downvote you. He couldn't. No one can downvote replies to their own posts (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969116 was probably downvoted because it broke these guidelines:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
My take on this is that it isn’t an issue of whether you can discuss truth or not, but rather if it’s philosophically relevant to the conversation. What I mean by that, and what I think the article means, is that the person isn’t questioning the meaning of truth really but instead avoiding the discussion going really any further by throwing out a catch phrase which is pertinent in a very distant and vague sense, but the person has no real intent to go into it.
It’s sort of seems like a form of “whataboutism” where somebody counters a point by going “Yeah but what about truth?!” It effectively ends the conversation because it’s not a matter of agreeing on the meaning of truth in the context of the discussion, but more of a distraction which can never be fully answered which stalls the original discussion.
Maybe in context those specific definitions do matter and should be stated assumptions, but often I don’t think they are. In addition, it truth or morals can’t be pinned down in centuries of effort, how could they be in these kinds of conversations? I don’t believe they could.