Something I found when cleaning my old "to read" queue, that people could find interesting. This submission is a bit meta, but it talks about things that are recurring topics on HN too. The thing that interested me most was the generalized form of the titular term, "conceptual landmines". It gave a name and provided a description of a discussion dynamic that I could never quite put into focus in my mind myself.
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.
There are several other, deeper, dynamics at play that the article doesn't seem to deal with but that are still important. The situation is not as damaging as the author might believe (although it is very disruptive to complex arguments).
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 believe littering the ground with philosophical landmines is possibly deliberate. I attribute to a passage I read by Imre Lakatos, the idea that if you can force people into a paralysis of endless debate over the nature of truth, you create a power vacuum that can only be filled by people who are capable of acting in the absence of debate and truth, such as thugs and tyrants.
I think this is the primary reason for the "anti truth" movement today.
This reminds me of Schopenhauer's (rather funny) essay The Art of Being Right where he exposes various strategies by which people can be right, without actually being right.
> I believe littering the ground with philosophical landmines is possibly deliberate.
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.
In the 1990’s I compiled a rather large set of cliches and stock phrases intended to help users avoid them in their writing.
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.
I think it might be that some terms are ambiguous, and people have either been tripped up by it, or have exploited it, so the next time someone brings it up, they are on guard.
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.
> The predictable consequence of this sort of statement is that someone starts going off about hospitals and terrorists and organs and moral philosophy and consent and rights and so on.
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.
Sometimes it might be possible to get agreement by posing your question in the form of a land mine. If you already know your audience's stock response, you could try to align your position with that. You might find them agreeing with you before they even realize what they said. If they hadn't considered the question much before, there's a chance they'll stick with it too.
After seeing the philosophical landscape in places like YouTube, I can't help but agree. A large proportion of Philosophy YouTube channels push forward arguments that are completely wild and outside the realm of experience of the normal citizen. Instead of philosophies that match real-life, these positions are instead supported by clever linguistic tricks and sophistry.
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.
One of the landmines that I consider inevitable is any form of:
> 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.
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.)
I think you just have to come up with strategies to force people to express these clichés in different words. With this one in particular I'd try to work down a tangent about how Libertarians take this as their basic "anti-violence" tenet in the NAP. Then I'd try to locate the boundaries where people end and begin through Buddhist/Hindu arguments (that usually ultimately deny those boundaries.) Penultimately, I'd start joking about all the strange things that Libertarians are forced to refer to as violence to justify their responses.
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.
If you take this metaphor and run with it, think of those war-torn country where the whole terrain is laced with landmines from past wars. In the US politics, we've had a very fractious decade, and even if things cool down as [virus ends, human contact resumes, jobs come back, Biden tries to reconcile everyone with results TBD, strife regresses to mean because this can't go on forever, can it?], we're going to live atop a minefield, with tons of words and memes that instantly polarize and derail by evoking divisions of the past. Think of "alt-right", "deep state", "swamp", "antifa", "Russia"...I'm sure you can think of others.
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".
<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.
Nothing. TFA just says that if you want to say that, and you use the (fully appropriate) word "consequentialism", there's a high probability it'll derail the conversation into debate about philosophy.
Well ac'shually in normal philosophical use "consequentialism" means the morality of an action depending only on the consequences of that action. And that is a much more controversial (and IMNSHO wrong) proposition.
I've had some brutal conversations around "quantum", especially in undergrad when I made the mistake of mentioning that I was taking a semiconductor physics course that required us to learn quantum mechanics at at least an introductory level. Many people seem to make a wild leap from "at a deeply microscopic scale, we have to use statistics to predict what's going to happen because it's not nearly as deterministic as it is in the macroscopic world" to "at a quantum level, all of our brains are resonating in quantum harmony and that's why my cat is so intuitive"
Wonderful typo with "landmind" by the way. It's perfect!
Is there free will, or is the universe "deterministic"?
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."
I think what the author means is that quantum mechanics is:
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?".
The "truth" and "reality" categories are particularly destructive landmines, as without a shared understanding of the world there can be no communication, therefore violent conflict is inevitable. It feels like these mental weapons are being deliberately deployed across the population, and the old ways of reconciling differences don't work any more.
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.
The article is not about that. It's about words which have a high probability of spinning off a tangential flamewar.
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 so we're not allowed to figure out what constitutes truth, and instead have to just take your definition by default? Sorry, but I can't get anything else out of this. Ignoring these landmines only benefits someone trying to sell you something on the basis of deceitful values of the landmine variables.
Your post got me thinking a bit. I see what you mean but I think it’s not the kind of thing the article is talking about. I should point out that I’m assuming conversations here are in the minutes-hours timeframe, not weeks-months timeframes.
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.
I understand, but I respectfully disagree. In your response you used words like “about that”, “high probability”, “frequently” and “unproductive,” all of which could be argued on a philosophical basis.
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?
I downvoted you because your comment didn't add substance by explaining what you meant. You made a statement that didn't seem to apply to article I read, which is fine in itself, but its brevity meant there was no way to evaluate what you meant, yet it seemed unnecessarily combative & overall unproductive to the conversation.
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.