i really dont like the criterion of embarrassment. i mean i understand why you WANT the criterion of embarrassment, you have this source you want to use, because nothing better tells you about the period in question, but you know the source is full of lies, so you say "well, we can tell the truth from the lies by identifying the less flattering aspects, which one would be unlikely to lie about". sure, very intuitive. but i dont think theres good reason we should expect it to work! people tell "embarrassing" lies all the time!

like okay, for example, greek myths are full of embarrassing descriptions of the greek gods, various things they did that they shouldnt have, mistakes and failures, wrongdoings, etc. and the greek gods are venerated, honored, why would you make up these embarrassing stories about them? should we expect, then, that these parts of the myths are "truer" than the other parts? no, obviously not! people tell embarrassing stories because stories about people who always act rightly and nobly are boring! stories need drama, and things that surprise you, and flaws and growth and etc etc.

like, i guess theres a weak form, where we say the embarrassing stuff is comparatively MORE LIKELY to be true. but "more likely" is relative to a low bar

this post was actually inspired not by biblical exegesis but by someone claiming that we can know with a good amount of certainty that the guy who founded the iroquois confederacy was in fact founded by a huron with a speech impediment, because thats what the oral histories, say, and why would you lie about that (its embarrassing to be huron, an enemy group, and embarrassing to have a stutter). but like. do YOU know the tropes of iroquois storytelling circa 1000 AD? no you do not! you are guessing on what they would find embarrassing! maybe they had a wise foreigner trope! maybe they had a different conception of the significance of stutters (cf moses' speech impediment). maybe they thought stutters indicated a thoughtful, scholarly character! you are guessing!

Or perhaps they thought that those things were embarrassing, but that this contrast served to emphasize his valorous qualities even more through the contrast.

Lots of possibilities.

I'm pretty sure that what's presented as the weak form here is just the normal form? It'd be silly to hold the criterion of embarrassment as proof in anything but rhe most exceptional cases, but it's generally relevant as circumstantial evidence. (In some cases it may be evidence against the authenticity of a source, though, like if a king harshly enforced positivity during his lifetime but was widely slandered centuries later.)

Ideally you want to be -- I'm sorry! -- Bayesian about it, like you weigh your a priori assessment of different possible worlds (like "the early Iroquois thought foreigners with speech impediments were lame" vs. "actually they thought they were cool", or "these details were factual" vs. "these details were political propaganda"), and then you assess how those probabilities shift after accounting for the cringe compilation. It isn't enough just to float other hypotheses, it matters how comparatively likely they are given the details!

It's true of course that "this account is embarrassing" isn't very decisive by itself, but the criterion of embarrassment mostly seems to come up when weighing elements of sources whose credibility we've already judged -- I presume the oral history example is intended less as "we think this oral history is true because of how embarrassing this detail is" and more like "we're pretty confident in the broad strokes of this oral history, so we're also pretty confident in this specific detail, due to the criterion of embarrassment."

there are questions it is a lot more important to get right than 'are ghosts real', of course. like 'should I vaccinate my children' or 'is this person calling me actually an employee at my bank'. but it's a little concerning when people can't get the ghosts one right, because it's a really fucking easy one. what if there's a more important question they are also getting wrong for the same reason?

people are talking about the burden of proof and proving a negative and so on in the notes so i wanna make clear that i'm making a stronger claim than 'there is no evidence for the existence of ghosts, so the default assumption is they don't exist'

i am saying 'we have very good reasons to think ghosts don't exist, and even if you think you found evidence of ghosts you should strongly expect to learn it wasn't ghosts after all'

that's what makes the question easy, after all. ghosts are not, like, an undiscovered species of frog in the amazon. they are a thing incompatible with our understanding of reality.

I think often there's an unexamined assumption that it's always better to be right than wrong, and to get at the root of common irrationalisms you need to pick at that a bit. Being right is useful, but there are many other uses a belief can serve, and there are many, many beliefs for which the benefits of being right are too small to really matter.

The extreme cases are beliefs about metaphysical things that don't really intersect with actual life -- whether there's an afterlife, or whether God is real, or whatever. One can torture out some conjectural negative consequences, but they require layering a lot of specifics on top of the basic idea -- folk-religion tends to just ignore the parts of doctrine it finds unpleasant -- and they require ignoring how these beliefs adapt to fit the needs of society. In practice, replacing them with better-grounded non-supernaturalist beliefs doesn't actually change much. Being right about these things is simply not useful in itself; it's a kind of byproduct of reasoning, and the ideal is to be able to cordon off the parts of your metaphysics that make you feel good from the reasoning part of your brain.

People do this with ghosts, as well. Huge fractions of the population report a belief in ghosts, but you can't help but notice that almost no one really behaves as if they lived in a world where ghosts were real, right? If someone did prove scientifically that ghosts existed, imagine how that would change society, and then observe that the believers are not making much effort to push toward that; even societies with well-established ancestor-worship traditions don't look as they would if ghosts were real.

What we must conclude is that people believe in ghosts the way they believe in divine favour, with a kind of unconsidered and reflexive hypocrisy. Almost everyone acts as if the belief were false, and yet receives most of the psychological benefits of it being true, which stands them in better stead than someone obliged to be rationally consistent. (The fact that belief in ghosts enables a cottage industry of con artists doesn't strike me as a key distinction, since the same is true for every psychological outlet for grief and anxiety about mortality, from funeral services to cryonics. More correct beliefs may actually be worse here, since they provide less intrinsic satisfaction!)

I have to say, I feel like a lot of the people doing this stuff are just better at believing in things than I am; they are not haunted by any hobgoblin of consistency. They have a powerful and effective instinct -- imperfect, but what isn't? -- for the places where being right will or won't strongly improve their own life, all without ever thinking of it in those terms, without ever conceptualizing this as a distinction between knowing and feeling!

I'm being a bit cheeky here, and reasonable people may disagree about all this -- how terrible it can be to be a reasonable person! -- but it's important at least to understand that this is the game, and these are the stakes. Being right was never the goal; the goal is utility, of which that is only one dimension, and the degree to which those dimensions matter varies both between people, and between beliefs.

aight so as An Trans i can tell you that belief in cherry-picked parts of millennia-old superstitions by the supermajority of humanity does very much affect my life in immediate ways and all of them for the worse.

actually the entirety of the marginal differences that belief in superstitions make in the world is a bottomless pit of suffering. (inb4 religious charities: not convinced they're net good.) there need not be a magic parental figure in the invisible world to justify alleviating suffering, altruism is a powerful instinct.

I'm sorry, but this is the thing that's not true!

I don't think it's true that religion has no causal effect on conservative social views, which you imply without stating. If you haven't formed any opinion on trans people, but you go each week to listen to an hour of a man you respect and trust is telling you the word of god tell you that they're delusional sinners, that's going to affect your opinion. Obviously most Christians don't go to church each week, and most adult Christians will select to some extent for a church more closely aligned with their political beliefs, but the average church remains more conservative than its congregants, so it acts as a conservative political force.

Moreover, while the Bible is often read selectively, and treated as an anything-justifier, that doesn't change the fact that the Bible does actually say things! And, being made 2000 years ago, those things skew conservative. For more devout Christians who lean progressive, this can often be a strong source of internal conflict, and pull them towards conservative ideas, even if those ideas aren't appealing to them on a base level. And that means any Christian is at risk of moving towards bigotry if something in their life leads them to suddenly get more devout.

This doesn't necessarily feed into actions as much, as the devout Christian who is bigoted because they can't see a way around it within scripture, rather than because they want to hate [group] will be earnest about 'hating the sin, not the sinner', and polite, friendly, etc. I was loosely friends with a girl in sixth form who was a devout Christian, politically progressive, and was even close friends with the only out gay boy in our year. She was lovely to everyone, on all accounts. I only found out years later that she believed homosexual sex is sin, and that her friend was going to hell. She was still politically progressive, and didn't like talking about this belief, but believed this was the only honest interpretation of the Bible. And if someone believes that, that leaves the door open for a whole host of bigotries, which other people would be closed off to. Which doesn't mean someone will fall into that, but over the course of a lifetime greatly increases the likelihood of it. It's not possible to earnestly believe that and have it not affect the way you see gay people at all.

No, that's not what I mean to imply. There's no question that in real-life cases, affiliation with mainline organized religion does tend to draw people toward social conservativism. My point is that this is mostly a byproduct of the role that traditional organized religion fills in society. If you expel supernaturalist ideologies from that role, other forms of ideology will take it up, and as they settle in, they will converge on most of the same patterns, because religion as such is not meaningfully distinct in this regard.

there are questions it is a lot more important to get right than 'are ghosts real', of course. like 'should I vaccinate my children' or 'is this person calling me actually an employee at my bank'. but it's a little concerning when people can't get the ghosts one right, because it's a really fucking easy one. what if there's a more important question they are also getting wrong for the same reason?

people are talking about the burden of proof and proving a negative and so on in the notes so i wanna make clear that i'm making a stronger claim than 'there is no evidence for the existence of ghosts, so the default assumption is they don't exist'

i am saying 'we have very good reasons to think ghosts don't exist, and even if you think you found evidence of ghosts you should strongly expect to learn it wasn't ghosts after all'

that's what makes the question easy, after all. ghosts are not, like, an undiscovered species of frog in the amazon. they are a thing incompatible with our understanding of reality.

I think often there's an unexamined assumption that it's always better to be right than wrong, and to get at the root of common irrationalisms you need to pick at that a bit. Being right is useful, but there are many other uses a belief can serve, and there are many, many beliefs for which the benefits of being right are too small to really matter.

The extreme cases are beliefs about metaphysical things that don't really intersect with actual life -- whether there's an afterlife, or whether God is real, or whatever. One can torture out some conjectural negative consequences, but they require layering a lot of specifics on top of the basic idea -- folk-religion tends to just ignore the parts of doctrine it finds unpleasant -- and they require ignoring how these beliefs adapt to fit the needs of society. In practice, replacing them with better-grounded non-supernaturalist beliefs doesn't actually change much. Being right about these things is simply not useful in itself; it's a kind of byproduct of reasoning, and the ideal is to be able to cordon off the parts of your metaphysics that make you feel good from the reasoning part of your brain.

People do this with ghosts, as well. Huge fractions of the population report a belief in ghosts, but you can't help but notice that almost no one really behaves as if they lived in a world where ghosts were real, right? If someone did prove scientifically that ghosts existed, imagine how that would change society, and then observe that the believers are not making much effort to push toward that; even societies with well-established ancestor-worship traditions don't look as they would if ghosts were real.

What we must conclude is that people believe in ghosts the way they believe in divine favour, with a kind of unconsidered and reflexive hypocrisy. Almost everyone acts as if the belief were false, and yet receives most of the psychological benefits of it being true, which stands them in better stead than someone obliged to be rationally consistent. (The fact that belief in ghosts enables a cottage industry of con artists doesn't strike me as a key distinction, since the same is true for every psychological outlet for grief and anxiety about mortality, from funeral services to cryonics. More correct beliefs may actually be worse here, since they provide less intrinsic satisfaction!)

I have to say, I feel like a lot of the people doing this stuff are just better at believing in things than I am; they are not haunted by any hobgoblin of consistency. They have a powerful and effective instinct -- imperfect, but what isn't? -- for the places where being right will or won't strongly improve their own life, all without ever thinking of it in those terms, without ever conceptualizing this as a distinction between knowing and feeling!

I'm being a bit cheeky here, and reasonable people may disagree about all this -- how terrible it can be to be a reasonable person! -- but it's important at least to understand that this is the game, and these are the stakes. Being right was never the goal; the goal is utility, of which that is only one dimension, and the degree to which those dimensions matter varies both between people, and between beliefs.

aight so as An Trans i can tell you that belief in cherry-picked parts of millennia-old superstitions by the supermajority of humanity does very much affect my life in immediate ways and all of them for the worse.

actually the entirety of the marginal differences that belief in superstitions make in the world is a bottomless pit of suffering. (inb4 religious charities: not convinced they're net good.) there need not be a magic parental figure in the invisible world to justify alleviating suffering, altruism is a powerful instinct.

I'm sorry, but this is the thing that's not true!

there are questions it is a lot more important to get right than 'are ghosts real', of course. like 'should I vaccinate my children' or 'is this person calling me actually an employee at my bank'. but it's a little concerning when people can't get the ghosts one right, because it's a really fucking easy one. what if there's a more important question they are also getting wrong for the same reason?

people are talking about the burden of proof and proving a negative and so on in the notes so i wanna make clear that i'm making a stronger claim than 'there is no evidence for the existence of ghosts, so the default assumption is they don't exist'

i am saying 'we have very good reasons to think ghosts don't exist, and even if you think you found evidence of ghosts you should strongly expect to learn it wasn't ghosts after all'

that's what makes the question easy, after all. ghosts are not, like, an undiscovered species of frog in the amazon. they are a thing incompatible with our understanding of reality.

I think often there's an unexamined assumption that it's always better to be right than wrong, and to get at the root of common irrationalisms you need to pick at that a bit. Being right is useful, but there are many other uses a belief can serve, and there are many, many beliefs for which the benefits of being right are too small to really matter.

The extreme cases are beliefs about metaphysical things that don't really intersect with actual life -- whether there's an afterlife, or whether God is real, or whatever. One can torture out some conjectural negative consequences, but they require layering a lot of specifics on top of the basic idea -- folk-religion tends to just ignore the parts of doctrine it finds unpleasant -- and they require ignoring how these beliefs adapt to fit the needs of society. In practice, replacing them with better-grounded non-supernaturalist beliefs doesn't actually change much. Being right about these things is simply not useful in itself; it's a kind of byproduct of reasoning, and the ideal is to be able to cordon off the parts of your metaphysics that make you feel good from the reasoning part of your brain.

People do this with ghosts, as well. Huge fractions of the population report a belief in ghosts, but you can't help but notice that almost no one really behaves as if they lived in a world where ghosts were real, right? If someone did prove scientifically that ghosts existed, imagine how that would change society, and then observe that the believers are not making much effort to push toward that; even societies with well-established ancestor-worship traditions don't look as they would if ghosts were real.

What we must conclude is that people believe in ghosts the way they believe in divine favour, with a kind of unconsidered and reflexive hypocrisy. Almost everyone acts as if the belief were false, and yet receives most of the psychological benefits of it being true, which stands them in better stead than someone obliged to be rationally consistent. (The fact that belief in ghosts enables a cottage industry of con artists doesn't strike me as a key distinction, since the same is true for every psychological outlet for grief and anxiety about mortality, from funeral services to cryonics. More correct beliefs may actually be worse here, since they provide less intrinsic satisfaction!)

I have to say, I feel like a lot of the people doing this stuff are just better at believing in things than I am; they are not haunted by any hobgoblin of consistency. They have a powerful and effective instinct -- imperfect, but what isn't? -- for the places where being right will or won't strongly improve their own life, all without ever thinking of it in those terms, without ever conceptualizing this as a distinction between knowing and feeling!

I'm being a bit cheeky here, and reasonable people may disagree about all this -- how terrible it can be to be a reasonable person! -- but it's important at least to understand that this is the game, and these are the stakes. Being right was never the goal; the goal is utility, of which that is only one dimension, and the degree to which those dimensions matter varies both between people, and between beliefs.

I'm increasingly pessimistic about the prospect of getting away from this, just because I'm increasingly aware that basically everyone is prone to it -- the science-and-logic people are mostly just doing the same thing, centered on a different vibe. People tend to rely on a pile of aesthetic signifiers and cultural thought-leaders to decide if something is true or false, because it's hard to do better -- most of this stuff happens in domains where you can't check empirically by yourself, and where papers with no obvious methodological problems are still more likely to be wrong than right.

I don't want to draw an exact equivalence here, there is a real distinction between doing clinical trials and not, there are levels of plausibility in different etiologies, and old, stable results are worth more than recent ones. But there's a kind of hierarchy of "science" that goes like physics, chemistry, biology, health, nutrition, and the ability to make high-quality testable predictions degrades really rapidly as you go down that scale, while the money spent on disseminating bogus information goes up. Obviously this is far more of an issue with the lay public than the people actually producing the research, but even in research there are conflict-of-interest and wishful-thinking issues.

Like let's be real about this, the difference between a modal vaccine supporter and a modal pseudoscientific vitalist who wants you to eat turmeric instead is not that the former is more scientific; they have more faith in conventional wisdom and conventional authority, and that works out well on the balance because there are a lot more bad ways to be unconventional than good ones. But neither group has a great answer to what to do when the conventional wisdom is wrong, which becomes an issue when scientific questions are politicized. In a sense we're lucky that so much of the recent scientific polarization is about dumb RFK shit, because often the politicization has focused on much harder questions like "what poisons you, and how much" or "is this thing ecologically sustainable", where corporate money can more easily sway scientific consensus.

I enjoy reading nietzsche but I'm not sure he's making an honest pursuit of truth. He *enjoys* coming to conclusions, you can feel it, he likes having these glimmers of insight, pulling them together into big ricket theories. He just doesn't seem to care about whether the things he's saying are, yknow, justified in any sort of strong sense. It's about feelings, hunches, leaps, *vibes* if you want to be harsh. And I think he expresses truths! But they're vibey truths, they're too mushy to build with. It's more literature than philosophy. But what do you expect from a guy who hates Socrates!

Well yeah, this is kind of explicitly part of his deal I think

Well kind of. I mean he definitely doesn't think he's laying out a socratic argument or anything. But I think he does think the things he says aren't bullshit! And they're not all bullshit. But there's definitely a lot of total nonsense in there (like, whenever he talks about history, which he reasons about in the same way as other things)

There is a type of guy who wants to convince others that they are correct, who wants to be persuasive, or failing that, to at least explain their position well that others understand it. But then there's another type who looks similar, but only really wants to connect with people who already think the same way they do, naturally-aligned personalities among whom they can win acclaim and followers for their skill in rendering that shared mindscape. Influencers and gurus are the second type, mostly; they are performing a kind of birdsong, trying to "find their audience" and outcompete rivals for their affection. Philosophy runs the gamut from "math" to "hot takes" and these two types are I guess those two extremes; hot-take philosophy lies somewhere between art and politics, and it's a bracing reminder that it's impossible to completely separate truth from the feeling of knowing the truth, and that the latter captures much of what people actually want out of knowledge.

It comes off harshly when I put it that way, and I suppose I do have a dim opinion of those who treat justification-of-belief as a social performance of confidence instead of something grounded in epistemology. When coupled with the posture of truth-telling, this implies a certain disapproval or incomprehension of the concept of truth and of an exterior world, solipsistic exaltation of one's own subjectivity. But, you know, that's a big part of what makes good art, and I do like art! Art and politics genuinely are more productive and popular than philosophy, and they're unharmed by the deep intractability of open philosophical questions. So I can see the appeal, particularly when many of the formal truth-seeking philosophers are dreadful writers. I just kind of wish we didn't try to make these things into the same discipline. Sure, there's lots of transitional examples, but they're different things!

so, the self is definitely real. we are all experiencing having a self right now. buddhists, are, imo, at best doing word games and at worst attempting to abdicate from being a person. im really not interested in no-self positions, do not reply with them, i will block you.

so one natural question is "is atman real", is there an eternal, transcendent self. and ldk, *maybe*. but i think if atman IS real, it sort of doesnt matter? because the parts of the me that i care about, these are very fragile! you can modify them with all sorts of normal material stuff. hormones, drugs, stressors, etc.

it seems to me somewhat natural to model the self in a sort of two-part way, there's an assemblage of traits but there's also the experiencer. and the experiencer interfaces (word?) with those traits, and sort of "has" them. but sort of "experiences" them, do you know what i mean?

so this is all leading up to teleporter problems. even tho i said i wasnt interested in them. because the teleporter definitely preserves the assemblage of traits, at least the parts that we care about. but it seems that it doesnt preserve the experiencer. because, presumably, the experiencer was dissolved when the body was dissolved, the same as when a person dies. you could say the experiencer "jumps the gap", but idk why you would? reality has no problem creating and destroying experiencers, it happens all the time. there's no conservation law, or anything.

so then like. do we care? i guess, to the extent that i "am" the experiencer, i care. but i also "am" the assemblage. so im not sure. it seems like "you die in the teleporter, but it's not a big deal" is at least a valid position, even if it's not correct. death in real life is a big deal, but death destroys the experiencer *and* the assemblage of traits. so it doesnt tell us which part is important. certainly, if you lost all your traits, but maintained the same experiencer, this seems like it would be very bad, possibly in some sense "the same as" death. but maybe this is less bad than going through the teleporter?

@cauchesque said:

This is technically possible but I don't think it's really more likely than it is for sleep? Like. They give you an amnestic! No wonder you don't remember anything! All sorts of subtle mental activity coukd be going on. Afaik it most closely resembles slow wave sleep, and when you wake people from that, some of them say they were in the middle of dreaming.

It's an actual issue for sleep! Really, it's an issue for time -- it's not clear that the experiencer isn't constantly being destroyed and recreated moment to moment and just "smoothed over" the same way your eye smoothes over saccades, right?

I feel like this kind of phenomenological theory of consciousness always runs into problems in that it wants to, I guess, "have it both ways". It wants consciousness to be unalienably non-physical, but all its ideas about the persistence and ubiquity of consciousness -- all the stuff that goes beyond stating that it's real and how it feels to have it -- are inductive empiricist arguments based on loose reasoning from physical evidence!

Like, the teleported person with all the same traits presumably feels and acts as though they have an unbroken continuous consciousness -- after all, if they had all the same traits but reliably had a perceptibly different conscious experience, that'd be as big a discovery as the teleportation itself. So we have this non-materialist, experiential idea of consciousness, but then use empiricist reasoning to assert that consciousnesses may differ even when their experiences are identical. That's sort of awkward! We assume that other humans have consciousness on no evidence beyond the fact that they look like us and they act like us and they profess to have it. But these are the exact same qualities the teleporter clone evinces: it looks exactly like the other person, and it acts exactly like the other person, and it professes to have had conscious experiences both before and after.

It seems like the problem is in trying to situate the experiencer in a (literally) metaphysical position while reasoning about it as though it were a mechanical product of its assembled traits. Like, do you really have a distinct experiencer that's separate from all your memories and all the features of your personality? Becuase those are all "traits", right, they're all things the teleporter is assumed to copy perfectly. It's hard for me to imagine what it would mean to be separate from those, because it's so divorced from what "experiencing things" means to me.

It feels like the idea of a persistent experiencer just comes from the fact that you remember your past experiences and that your personality and cognitive faculties are reasonably stable. Experience without memory is -- what is it? It's not exactly instantaneous, because it's about progression, but it's like...the first derivative of being. I genuinely don't have a handle on whether that part of me is "enduring", whether there's something that's meaningfully "the same" about it after you've subtracted out everything that has a physicalist character. Does the ephemeral me having conscious experience right now really relate to the ephemeral me of my childhood, or does it just live in the same house? How do I know that ephemeral present experiencer isn't just a generic function that digests perceptions into mental outputs, like an LLM whose weights are fixed?

In light of all that I don't think it actually stands to reason that consciousness is not duplicated along with everything else! If it's ultimately purely physicalist, the experiencer can't be different when the traits are the same, but if it's transcendental, I don't think understanding the "process forking" as a mitosis of consciousness with no original/duplicate relationship is any less plausible.

so the problem with this type of discourse is that everyone (and tbc I don't exclude myself) just has their intuitions and thinks that other people's intuitions are stupid and there's never any real synthesis or development

I guess I will say that this crowd in particular seems to have a large subpopulation of people who become wedded to a particular formalization and try to retrofit their intuitions to the theory (you often see the same thing with utilitarians, cf. "shut up and multiply")

This isn't exactly the part that's frustrating to me, I don't think. Ultimately it does all boil down to show and tell, but that's not so bad, is it? Taking it to the point where you can understand the various positions people take is interesting in itself; identifying the kernel of a disagreement on fundamentals is no less uplifting than reaching an agreement. It's very rare that it happens, but it feels like that's telos of this sort of argument, doesn't it? And yet, it feels like we never quite get to showing and telling, like a show-and-tell where people allude obliquely to something they have hidden in a box.

There's an essential commonality between reason and mathematics, because math is what grows weedily on the bare edifice of logic. Mathematical proofs and derivations follow the same process we apply when seeking consistency in our beliefs and principles, and nobody finds it particularly troubling to contemplate different sets of axioms; the question is what those axioms lead to, and to what extent they're compatible with derived results. And when formalized to this degree, we find that any path takes you to strange places; every candidate set of axioms yields interestingly unintuitive results. We would expect this to hold in philosophy also, and if it does, that's valuable for its own sake.

But, you know, it takes two. Philosophical intuitions lack the formalization of axioms -- even the categorical imperative has fuzzy edges -- and so they can only be investigated using someone who has the intuition as an oracle. And while there's any number of people out there eager to strike a moralistically contemptuous posture for an audience, but it's pretty hard to find someone who's willing to collaborate into digging into the subject of difference, or who can explain their position effectively to those with different intuitions without this sort of collaboration. I don't think the irreconcilability of differences should be cited to excuse this tendency, because it comes from something else. (Not necessarily from a personal failing, I should note -- on Tumblr part of the problem is just that the site is awful for dialogue, since it's a battle royale and a long exchange spams the dashboard.)

This isn't a phenomenon particular to philosophy or other recondite subjects; it comes up in the most prosaic political and factional discussions. People want to advertise their positions but they don't want to think about them, and they're untroubled by their inability to explain themselves or even to point to some canonical source that does a better job of it. That's appropriate insofar as we, our discussions, and their social context are not important; but if the topic is important to people, it kind of feels like they should show a genuine interest and concern about it, and if it's not, then I guess is the point to re-evaluate how they feel about it.

I still don't really understand what you think is being "alluded to but not outright stated"?

like at least my contention is just

I suppose there's also the claim that personhood is tied to this notion of physical identity, but I'm actually much less bullish on this than annie is (which is why, after my op, I've been trying to keep the discussion to physical objects, which I think is much less fraught/confused)

This is a lot better than most posts on the topic, actually! It's clear-cut and can be used either as a fruitful direction for further discussion or as a good stopping point. But at the same time, I feel like I'd agree with both of these stances and yet might not agree with you in generality. (Though actually I think we personally are pretty close; I didn't mean this to be about you in particular.)

Having said that: much of my frustration with this topic comes from people treating identity as though it's an uncontroversial shared foundation, generally understood, above consideration, and more or less binary in character, and I think this is one of the contexts where that's least true. In that light then I'd say that "the object" and "its future and past selves" aren't actually concepts stand on their own without further justification. This is not to say that they're hard to justify, necessarily, but that there is not a single answer or a single way of justifying it, and those differences shed light on the topic. Positions on this question generally entail positions on the Ship of Theseus, for instance, but the process of entailment isn't very straightforward, because the sentiment we're using as a touchstone is complex and multifactorial.

I guess I would also suggst that the focus on how others feel about the thing in question adds complications, even if it removes others. It forces you to engage with how much the truth really matters to feelings that can only ever be mediated through fallible perceptions. A person may ascribe metaphysical importance to anything, real or imagined, true or false, but it's a very twisty line from that to a reasonability standard to the idea that the reasonability says something about the underlying property in question, right?

I realize I'm not breaking any ground here, but treating hypotheticals about the desirability or not of your beloved's clone as being primarily about ineffable essences of other people, rather than about our intuitions about loyalty as a value, seems to be missing something important.

So the bad news is that you're failing to understand the object of dispute, but the good news is that this is a great starting point from which to understand it as long as you keep going

Here's a hint to get you started: the people you're arguing against here don't take the virtue of loyalty less seriously than you do, and apparently they don't disagree with you about any of the physical particulars of the situation. How is it that they can construe these things so differently? You need a good answer to that before you can offer a substantive criticism of the position!

I could explain, but I mean, I've explained it all in the past. If people are still stuck at the threshold of the matter it's because they don't want to go in there.

honestly I think that part of the difficulty with clone- and teleporter-type thought experiments is that like there's a cohort here that just treats de re attitudes about anything as necessarily incoherent

@discoursedrome

so the wikipedia page on the terms is kind of garbage, but the section on desire might be helpful. my understanding of them in the context of love is that a de dicto attitude means loving someone for their properties, whereas a de re attitude means loving someone for their identity as a specific person

and I do think that many self-styled materialists pull a bit of slight-of-hand with these types of distinctions, with scenarios like, let's say you're showing me a yellow knitted cashmere hat. then let's say I, through whichever of superhuman fiber arts talents or atom-for-atom scanning and recombination technology you find more believable, create a so-called identical hat and place it down in front of you

I think the tendency here is for people to say that the "materialist" position is that the hats, being identical, are undifferentiatable without appealing to nonmaterialist metaphysical ideas; but of course you can differentiate them: for one, one of them is to the left of the other (maybe you prefer that one because it's slightly closer to you)

or maybe the cashmere hat that you were originally showing me is in fact a prized family heirloom, and in fact has been worn by many people throughout your family history. and you know that this is the one on the left, because, well, you saw me create the replica and place it on the right, and even if I created dna-for-dna copies of all the dead skin cells trapped within the fibers, you have your memories of coming in with the one hat—maybe there's even video evidence of you coming in with that hat (maybe you live in a far-future panopticon and there's even video evidence of everyone in your family having worn this very hat)

now of course that evidence might not exist, or it might exist in weak or partial forms, but even if you can't make the distinction in practice, I do think that it's still a sensible (and sensibly materialist) distinction to make at all. (I do not need to invoke nonmaterial metaphysics in order to have preferences about things that I cannot know for certain)

I don't know if any of these are arguments you personally would make or not, but this is a bit of what was going through my head when I made the op

Right, I've seen this, but this seems like an unproductive misreading of that distinction; if this is really what you're talking about it seems to reinforce the idea that the people using the term to describe their position should not be doing that.

I haven't seen an accounting of it which posits a differentiation on the basis of something other than qualities; here as in the SEP and several other sources I checked, the distinction is about the properties which were mentioned versus those that were not. It is difficult to imagine on what basis you could differentiate things other than their qualities. Like, from the examples you give it sounds as though you yourself aren't thinking of it in what you'd call "de re" terms; you also frame the distinctions in terms of differences in properties! This is what I'm talking about: is there a "transcendental" element which somehow behaves like a property but doesn't count as one, or is this just about the intricacy of real properties versus the sparsity of stated ones? If it's the latter, there's still a discussion to be had about the relationship between properties and meaning, but it's a different sort of discussion.

I don't really agree with this, in particular. My impression is that materialists are quite comfortable talking and thinking about these distinctions in these terms, but get confused or frustrated when people posit an antimaterialist category which can't be discussed this way, but has no discernable difference from things which can. To assert that the important distinctions are material is not to critique materialism but to concede to it, and if everyone was doing that then we could just go directly there and skip arguing about the importance of essences without qualities and things that act on the world but are not acted on by it!

Now, I'm skeptical of a transcendental phenomenological understanding of consciousness, but I'll concede that it's valid in a way that departs from the rest of this, and there's grounds there to not want to teleport. But you don't have access to other people's direct experiences -- you can't tell if they're p-zombies or whatever -- and so any question of how you feel about this in the context of other people is ultimately an empirical materialist question.

i dont "disagree" with de re attitudes about love but i think i might literally not be able to feel them? like i dont understand what feeling them would be like. what does it mean to relate to something independent of its traits. the traits are the part you can relate to

i feel like the examples i see are all about singular traits. which seems like a bad and confusing way to talk about it. obviously you wouldnt love someone for just one of their traits. but i dont understand what it would mean to love someone not for the collection of their traits. the traits are the part you access. like. if i loved someone and they had a phineas gage type accident, or became totally catatonic, or whatever, i would probably still be kind to them out of guilt but i dont think i would feel the same affection i did, and i dont really understand what love that survives such a change would be like. but its totally plausible that im the weirdo here, and people all over are experiencing these emotions-towards-essences that i dont get

It feels to me a lot like the materialist/anti-materialist discussion in that it's less about what properties exist than about whether some of those properties are "transcendentally separate" and yet causally linked to the others, and the skeptical position is just like "I don't really get how that would work, if this stuff were discernible and worked that way I'd just group it with the rest."

Like if you want to talk about the scenario where you don't love a perfect copy as much as the original, you could observe that the perfect copy isn't really perfect, is it, because calling it a "copy" implies that, at minimum, it has a different position and is made of different particles. This is how you actually apply this attitude in practice, right? We can conceptualize these concrete distinctions as flowing from an essential metaphysical character, but we can't ever engage with that character, or justify our belief in it, except through the concrete distinctions. You can hypothesize a transcendental element as much as you want, but it's like the transubstantiation of the host: it can't be detected, and it's never required to plausibly explain your experiences.

And when you actually talk about what these concrete qualities are, as above, they're kind of weird, in such a way that it seems bizarre to rest the entire weight of sentiment on them. Well, clearly not to everyone, but it seems bizarre to me: if changes in those traits are hard dealbreakers, it makes them among the most important traits to the experience of love, suggests that love owes more to position than to personality. To me it feels like an affront to the whole idea of love if the answer to "would you still love me if I were a worm" is mostly dependent on your atom inventory.

Like, to pick an example that's not so crassly physicalist, imagine one of those fantasy settings where people have an astrologically-identifiable soulmate, who is guaranteed good but not necessarily ideal compatibility, and is accorded great metaphysical importance. You can imagine that if someone discovered that their soulmate was misreported, some would stay in love with their current partner (instead of or in addition to the new person), while others would transfer their love to their newly-discovered true soulmate, and a third group would fall out of love with their false soulmate but would need time to come to love the real one.

In the latter two cases, it feels like their love was strongly about this concept of the "soulmate", like it was directed toward this metaphysical model of the world rather than to the actual person. It's like loving someone while they're young and beautiful, but falling out of love as they become old and ugly: the love of youth and beauty in abstraction intrudes sharply on the love you have for the other person. If you sort their qualities from most to least critical to your felt sense of love, we would like to see that the most important qualities are somehow about their character, right?

What I find is that people tend to cordon off certain qualities as "transcendental" and thus not subject to this consideration. I'm skeptical of this in general, but it's a valid position metaphysically; however, it can't really influence your feelings toward other people, because our apprehensions of other people are necessarily fallible and empirical, and such things -- the apprehensions, which may be wrong and may never be corrected -- are always reducible to grimy material properties.

the sociological posture to interesting philosophical questions is so damn annoying. "art is what they put in art galleries, math is what mathematicians do". an active turning-away from an interesting question, towards a boring non-answer. people should throw tomatoes at guys who say this

@youzicha said:

i think you're confusing "true" with "weak" (in the math sense). this sociological claim is very *weak*, it tells us very little. that makes it easier for it to be true than other, stronger claims. and i agree, those statements are true! art museums are full of art, mathematicans are doing math. but this isnt very informative! and i think we can and should go farther! we should, yknow, try to prove difficult theorems, so to speak

@youzicha said:

this is an allowed usage of the word "mean", a linguist's definition. but i think there's another more useful meaning of the word "mean" in this context. back to the hat example in another branch: when people refer to a "hat", they mean something! the definition of the word "hat" could change over time, such that the word starts to mean something else, and then it will mean that. but the IDEA that people had, what they meant, in the past, by that word, well. we can ask what they meant by that! what characterized that meaning, were they describing a natural category, and if they were, what were the properties of that category? now for hats that's not such an interesting question. but for art, we can say "what do we mean when we talk about art", "why does this category of unlike things seem natural to us", "what are the properties of said category".

like...my point is that when we group unlike things together as "art", we are making a fact claim about the world! that these things have some commonality. and yet the nature of that commonality is not obvious. and i think that fact claim is true, i think this category is a result of perceiving something actual! and we can elaborate and clarify that perception

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but it kind of sounds like you're treating "art" as corresponding to a latent definition which defines the criteria that make something art? As far as I can tell very few intuitive categories work this way; the model by which people categorize things seems to be much more about prototypes and "family resemblances", and in the case of "art" I'm not even sure there's any stable single "centre", since people are constantly challenging the definition and yanking around the archetypal idea of what art is.

This is still saying something -- it is a meaningful statement, when made sincerely! -- but it's saying something vague and diffuse, which can't be compressed into a concise "closed form", and the nature of this type of categorization is that the boundaries are fluid -- the binary distinction between "in" and "out" is somewhat arbitrary, either non-factual or minimally-factual, because you're dealing with something more like a continuous and multidimensional measure of proximity.

In practice, of course, you need to circumscribe things a bit more than this to have a theory of art, just as you do for a theory of games, and perhaps in the context of that theory you simply define "art" to mean some subset of the category as broadly construed. That's fine, as long as you're doing it to put a handle on your theory rather than to make some kind of prescriptive point about how other people use language. But this is ultimately just synecdoche, using a common word to talk about a referent that lacks a conventional name; you can't trace it back outward to learn more about the whole of "art".

"Art is whatever they put in art museums" and "Math is whatever mathematicians do" immediately lead to the questions,

"How do they decide what to put in an art museum?"

and

"How do we decide if somebody is a mathematician or not?"

The more concrete the domain the more obvious why this is a non-answer, despite its truth. "Fixing a car is what people do when they say, 'I'm fixing a car'; Posting on tumblr is what people do when they say, 'I just posted on tumblr'"

I mean, yes, but this just reinforces the position that the OP objects to, doesn't it? You're quite right that these questions are more a beginning than an ending, but they set you on a path that leads toward the sociopolitical aspects and away from the philosophical ones. With a very thorough treatment, you may be able to distill it back to the purely philosophical question, but it's an arduous process, because you're required to distill the philosophy from society and politics, rather than just "skipping over" them. As soon as you concede that the object of interest is crucially intermediated by social factors you're stuck, you need to import the whole thing into your scope of analysis!

I mean, the immediate objection I have from a sociological perspective would be that the individual actors don't think that way and would generally find such a definition to abstruse to the point of foolishness.

That seems like a pretty different objection than the one you originally raised -- it kind of sounds like you don't care how we decide what to put in art museums. You won't get very far in answering a question like that just by asking individual actors how they think of it and taking that as the plain truth, because you're going to almost immediately run into a huge multiplicity of both answers and ways of thinking.

And in fact one of those answers will be this one, because it's a commonplace way to define art -- that's what the thread is about, the fact that it's a common answer to the question! But, sure, most people will tell you something else, it's just that they won't all give you the same answer and the most popular answers will not suffice to explain how the term is actually used in practice. To all that, I can only refer you to my remarks from a few days ago that you were originally replying to, because that's still the answer.

the sociological posture to interesting philosophical questions is so damn annoying. "art is what they put in art galleries, math is what mathematicians do". an active turning-away from an interesting question, towards a boring non-answer. people should throw tomatoes at guys who say this

@youzicha said:

i think you're confusing "true" with "weak" (in the math sense). this sociological claim is very *weak*, it tells us very little. that makes it easier for it to be true than other, stronger claims. and i agree, those statements are true! art museums are full of art, mathematicans are doing math. but this isnt very informative! and i think we can and should go farther! we should, yknow, try to prove difficult theorems, so to speak

@youzicha said:

this is an allowed usage of the word "mean", a linguist's definition. but i think there's another more useful meaning of the word "mean" in this context. back to the hat example in another branch: when people refer to a "hat", they mean something! the definition of the word "hat" could change over time, such that the word starts to mean something else, and then it will mean that. but the IDEA that people had, what they meant, in the past, by that word, well. we can ask what they meant by that! what characterized that meaning, were they describing a natural category, and if they were, what were the properties of that category? now for hats that's not such an interesting question. but for art, we can say "what do we mean when we talk about art", "why does this category of unlike things seem natural to us", "what are the properties of said category".

like...my point is that when we group unlike things together as "art", we are making a fact claim about the world! that these things have some commonality. and yet the nature of that commonality is not obvious. and i think that fact claim is true, i think this category is a result of perceiving something actual! and we can elaborate and clarify that perception

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but it kind of sounds like you're treating "art" as corresponding to a latent definition which defines the criteria that make something art? As far as I can tell very few intuitive categories work this way; the model by which people categorize things seems to be much more about prototypes and "family resemblances", and in the case of "art" I'm not even sure there's any stable single "centre", since people are constantly challenging the definition and yanking around the archetypal idea of what art is.

This is still saying something -- it is a meaningful statement, when made sincerely! -- but it's saying something vague and diffuse, which can't be compressed into a concise "closed form", and the nature of this type of categorization is that the boundaries are fluid -- the binary distinction between "in" and "out" is somewhat arbitrary, either non-factual or minimally-factual, because you're dealing with something more like a continuous and multidimensional measure of proximity.

In practice, of course, you need to circumscribe things a bit more than this to have a theory of art, just as you do for a theory of games, and perhaps in the context of that theory you simply define "art" to mean some subset of the category as broadly construed. That's fine, as long as you're doing it to put a handle on your theory rather than to make some kind of prescriptive point about how other people use language. But this is ultimately just synecdoche, using a common word to talk about a referent that lacks a conventional name; you can't trace it back outward to learn more about the whole of "art".

"Art is whatever they put in art museums" and "Math is whatever mathematicians do" immediately lead to the questions,

"How do they decide what to put in an art museum?"

and

"How do we decide if somebody is a mathematician or not?"

The more concrete the domain the more obvious why this is a non-answer, despite its truth. "Fixing a car is what people do when they say, 'I'm fixing a car'; Posting on tumblr is what people do when they say, 'I just posted on tumblr'"

I mean, yes, but this just reinforces the position that the OP objects to, doesn't it? You're quite right that these questions are more a beginning than an ending, but they set you on a path that leads toward the sociopolitical aspects and away from the philosophical ones. With a very thorough treatment, you may be able to distill it back to the purely philosophical question, but it's an arduous process, because you're required to distill the philosophy from society and politics, rather than just "skipping over" them. As soon as you concede that the object of interest is crucially intermediated by social factors you're stuck, you need to import the whole thing into your scope of analysis!

the sociological posture to interesting philosophical questions is so damn annoying. "art is what they put in art galleries, math is what mathematicians do". an active turning-away from an interesting question, towards a boring non-answer. people should throw tomatoes at guys who say this

@youzicha said:

i think you're confusing "true" with "weak" (in the math sense). this sociological claim is very *weak*, it tells us very little. that makes it easier for it to be true than other, stronger claims. and i agree, those statements are true! art museums are full of art, mathematicans are doing math. but this isnt very informative! and i think we can and should go farther! we should, yknow, try to prove difficult theorems, so to speak

@youzicha said:

this is an allowed usage of the word "mean", a linguist's definition. but i think there's another more useful meaning of the word "mean" in this context. back to the hat example in another branch: when people refer to a "hat", they mean something! the definition of the word "hat" could change over time, such that the word starts to mean something else, and then it will mean that. but the IDEA that people had, what they meant, in the past, by that word, well. we can ask what they meant by that! what characterized that meaning, were they describing a natural category, and if they were, what were the properties of that category? now for hats that's not such an interesting question. but for art, we can say "what do we mean when we talk about art", "why does this category of unlike things seem natural to us", "what are the properties of said category".

like...my point is that when we group unlike things together as "art", we are making a fact claim about the world! that these things have some commonality. and yet the nature of that commonality is not obvious. and i think that fact claim is true, i think this category is a result of perceiving something actual! and we can elaborate and clarify that perception

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but it kind of sounds like you're treating "art" as corresponding to a latent definition which defines the criteria that make something art? As far as I can tell very few intuitive categories work this way; the model by which people categorize things seems to be much more about prototypes and "family resemblances", and in the case of "art" I'm not even sure there's any stable single "centre", since people are constantly challenging the definition and yanking around the archetypal idea of what art is.

This is still saying something -- it is a meaningful statement, when made sincerely! -- but it's saying something vague and diffuse, which can't be compressed into a concise "closed form", and the nature of this type of categorization is that the boundaries are fluid -- the binary distinction between "in" and "out" is somewhat arbitrary, either non-factual or minimally-factual, because you're dealing with something more like a continuous and multidimensional measure of proximity.

In practice, of course, you need to circumscribe things a bit more than this to have a theory of art, just as you do for a theory of games, and perhaps in the context of that theory you simply define "art" to mean some subset of the category as broadly construed. That's fine, as long as you're doing it to put a handle on your theory rather than to make some kind of prescriptive point about how other people use language. But this is ultimately just synecdoche, using a common word to talk about a referent that lacks a conventional name; you can't trace it back outward to learn more about the whole of "art".

more-ethical-but-less-pleasant/convenient-alternatives advocates stop lying challenge

i think the problem is that if you're a longtime firefox user using chrome kind of sucks! you run into lots of issues like "connect your account or no extensions for you unless you do weird hacks" which firefox doesn't have. and then you overgeneralize, maybe.

I do wonder how much of this is just that Different Is Unpleasant At First in the same way as wearing a new pair of glasses or living in a new apartment, because I've noticed that effect in a lot of cases. Firefox and Chrome seem almost identical nowadays -- Firefox has intentionally "followed" Chrome in UI decisions to make it more accessible, though if people still find it incredibly hard to use then maybe it was never worth it; the fact remains that I don't really have to think about it too much when jumping between them now. Software is like a pair of shoes; you have to break it in, and so there's always some grief when you change.

That being said, there are absolutely weird gaps in what features the different browsers implement, and a lot of it is going to come down to how important those features are to you. In the case of Chrome, there's exactly one thing I've noticed that it does dramatically better than FF, and that's tab groups -- these are transformatively superior to anything Firefox has ever offered, even with extensions, and if I had been accustomed to Chrome, I might have found migrating from these very painful. Still, this cuts both ways: Firefox is has tons of powerful extensions, is enormously customizable, and does not have much business reason to fear user control, and if you're used to that then it's very noticeable when migrating away from that ecosystem. There are also lots of little things: for instance, disabling CSS is a two-click basic menu option in Firefox, whereas in Chromium-basdd browsers the only way to do it is to go into devtools and comprhensively edit the document, individually or with script injection. Most people don't use this feature very often, but I use it all the time, because web design is so bad that this often improves sites' usability and accessibility, and I'm always thrown for a loop to discover that there isn't just some kind of switch for it.

If the latter example seems a bit obscure, that's partly the point: there are very few differences between Firefox and Chrome and none of them matter to the average user, but they may matter deeply to a given person; this will depend on one's personal workflow, which browser one used first, and when they switched. And so if the "you should change to Firefox" stuff isn't adequately explaining the problems it's usually going to be done in total innocence, just as the people who give up and keep using Chrome couldn't generally warn a Firefox user about the bad parts of switching the other way.

wait I realized I could be much stupider about this whole topic. let's stop talking about actual things and just be completely abstract.

this is just explore vs. exploit, right? whatever you've been doing for a long time is a local maximum. when you want to switch, you are looking for, if not a global maximum, at least a better extremum somewhere else. but this means that things are almost certain to get worse following the change, and you won't actually know if your new approach is better than the old one until you've spent a similar amount of time optimizing it, following upward gradients until you're in a position to match peak to peak. (and ah, can you do it even then, or will the difference between the past and the present bias your perceptions too much?)

so it's a very general problem. the high cost and uncertain return of disruption is reason enough to doubt it's worth the effort: you need to invest a long effort to even check if it's worth the trouble, and there's no clear relationship between how much worse it is after the "jump" and how good a maximum you can reach. worse, this is a case where "following the positive gradient" is about forming habits, which means that it's expensive to change back after you've invested in developing an alternative approach.

at the same time, it's always possible that it's worth the initial effort, that there's a lot to be gained or that a small gain, extended over the rest of your life, will outweigh the one-time cost to search. but how could you ever know? if it's true, and you do it, how then do you know not to do it again? this isn't just an unsolved problem, I think, it's one of a handful of elemental components which together underpin the whole abstract category of "problems". it's interesting to me for that reason, but sadly even if that's true it's 0% helpful in practice because any sort of standardized approach relies on numbers you completely made up, and thus the only intellectual value of this framing is that it facilitates the creation of Takes

for some reason I've only very recently realized that many of the smart, thoughtful people I know are forming their opinions on the basis of nothing but vibes. no fact checking, no data, just whatever feels right given their particular ideological leanings. had someone today express surprise when I told her that no, the majority of Taiwanese people did not in fact support unification with China. she presumably just heard this at PSL or something and decided it sounded good without ever checking. now I appreciate that I am the guy from the average familiarity xkcd when it comes to cross-strait politics, but I generally think it is bad practice to form opinions about geopolitics without doing the minimum legwork to figure out if your geopolitical intuitions are true. like at least check before you decide that the only reason Taiwanese people haven't returned to the embrace of the motherland is American imperialism!

I actually feel like it's reasonable for most of your opinions and beliefs to be low-information and vibes-based? Just because there are a zillion things to have opinions and beliefs about, and so you want the majority of them to be as low-cost as possible. I don't think that in itself is the issue; I don't think any of us has checked more than a small fraction of the assertions we've heard, even in geopolitics, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we should act exactly like we'd never heard them.

The ideal I think is that you formulate very cheap beliefs for most things, but you have the correct level of confidence in them -- usually meaning "very low" -- and you do the research as needed, to the extent that it's needed. The less consequential your opinion is, the less it matters if you're right, and most of our opinions are extremely inconsequential! It is very rare out here in the throng for the consequences of being wrong to be more severe than a momentary embarrassment.

It seems like, when it comes to just chatting or Posting, the most likely consequence is that other people will use your statements to structure their beliefs, and so it's "bad behaviour" to overstate the confidence of your positions in a context where they're likely to be interpreted as reported facts or authoritative statements, and that obligation gets stronger the heavier the latter conditions weigh.

This relates to something that comes up a lot in the context of criminal charges or accusations, where people will often try to impose the same standards required for conviction to public opinion -- judges have high standards because their opinions are very meaningful, but private individuals have very low ones because their opinions are usually irrelevant! Lots of things are like that, and of course it's a continuum and not a binary.

I think the actual ideal skillset here is, like: