Epistemic legibility: being easy to argue with is a virtue
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Epistemic legibility: being easy to argue with is a virtue
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Re: Epistemic legibility: being easy to argue with is a virtue
#2I believe that this is a key aspect of data-driven leadership, and the Friday meeting that Google founders started and many other companies imitated: make it easier for employees to argue against decisions. No organisation is perfect, or even good, so any effort to make complaints louder, clearer, more structured is incredibly valuable. One grostesque example of where that chain of information is broken is how Customer service teams are isolated.
Re: Epistemic legibility: being easy to argue with is a virtue
#3“That’s gibberish” probably could be better said as “that goes against all factual truths that I’ve learned.”
Re: Epistemic legibility: being easy to argue with is a virtue
#4Superbly written and argued. Assessing an argument's Epistemic Legibility is a new tool in my toolbox for identifying weak arguments.
> I expect having a handle with which to say “no I don’t have a concise argument about why this work is wrong, and that’s a fact about the work” to be very useful.
This was my favorite quote from the article
Re: Epistemic legibility: being easy to argue with is a virtue
#5I thought the concept of Epistemic Spot Checks was a great idea, so I was hoping that there might be some on the blog checking materials I had previously read so I could compare my intuitions with the author's hobby, but I didn't find anything.
The About Me says the author gave up the project after a year or so, but I'm still curious about updating my own epistemological toolbox. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Re: Epistemic legibility: being easy to argue with is a virtue
#6An excellent piece of terminology. Closely related to the concept of "not even wrong", I think?
Re: Epistemic legibility: being easy to argue with is a virtue
#7I didn't see it mentioned, I think I "epistemic literacy" is the other side of the coin. I see examples of people demanding citations for reasoning that is part of a work, of people just not understanding something, or of only really being able to blindly follow based on province or authority without trying to reconcile back to what they know.
If there is going to be a standard for legibility, there should be one for literacy too - it's especially important when learning from a debate where readers and writers (or sources and sinks) switch roles, to understand how different positions are engaging with each other's arguments, not just how they are making them
Re: Epistemic legibility: being easy to argue with is a virtue
#8Superbly written and argued. Assessing an argument's Epistemic Legibility is a new tool in my toolbox for identifying weak arguments. > I expect having a handle with which to say “no I don’t have a concise argument about why this work is wrong, and that’s a fact about the work” to be very useful. This was my favorite quote from the article
I’ve seen “Source?” used as a concise critique against what I consider to be epistemically illegible arguments.
Re: Epistemic legibility: being easy to argue with is a virtue
#9...Falsifiable? The author uses a lot of words and seems to appreciate brevity, but isn't the entire article summarized by this one word?
Re: Epistemic legibility: being easy to argue with is a virtue
#10“That’s gibberish” probably could be better said as “that goes against all factual truths that I’ve learned.”
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