The Nonlinear Library LW - Ten Modes of Culture War Discourse by jchan
Feb 1, 2024
22:08
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Ten Modes of Culture War Discourse, published by jchan on February 1, 2024 on LessWrong.
Overview
This article is an extended reply to Scott Alexander's Conflict vs. Mistake.
Whenever the topic has come up in the past, I have always said I lean more towards conflict theory over mistake theory; however, on revisiting the original article, I realize that either I've been using those terms in a confusing way, and/or the usage of the terms has morphed in such a way that confusion is inevitable. My opinion now is that the conflict/mistake dichotomy is overly simplistic because:
One will generally have different kinds of conversations with different people at different times. I may adopt a "mistake" stance when talking with someone who's already on board with our shared goal X, where we try to figure out how best to achieve X; but then later adopt a "conflict" stance with someone who thinks X is bad. Nobody is a "mistake theorist" or "conflict theorist" simpliciter; the proper object of analysis is conversations, not persons or theories.
It conflates the distinct questions "What am I doing when I approach conversations?" and "What do I think other people are doing when they approach conversations?", assuming that they must always have the same answer, which is often not the case.
It has trouble accounting for conversations where the meta-level question "What kind of conversation are we having right now?" is itself one of the matters in dispute.
Instead, I suggest a model where there are 10 distinct modes of discourse, which are defined by which of the 16 roles each participant occupies in the conversation. The interplay between these modes, and the extent to which people may falsely believe themselves to occupy a certain role while in fact they occupy another, is (in my view) a more helpful way of understanding the issues raised in the Conflict/Mistake article.
The chart
Explanation of the chart
The bold labels in the chart are discursive roles. The roles are defined entirely by the mode of discourse they participate in (marked with the double lines), so for example there's no such thing as a "Troll/Wormtongue discourse," since the role of Troll only exists as part of a Feeder/Troll discourse, and Wormtongue as part of Quokka/Wormtongue. For the same reason, you can't say that someone "is a Quokka" full stop.
The roles are placed into quadrants based on which stance (sincere/insincere friendship/enmity) the person playing that role is taking towards their conversation partner.
The double arrows connect confusable roles - someone who is in fact playing one role might mistakenly believe they're playing the other, and vice-versa. The one-way arrows indicate one-way confusions - the person playing the role at the open end will always believe that they're playing the role at the pointed end, and never vice-versa. In other words, you will never think of yourself as occupying the role of Mule, Cassandra, Quokka, or Feeder (at least not while it's happening, although you may later realize it in retrospect).
Constructing the model
This model is not an empirical catalogue of conversations I've personally seen out in the wild, but an a priori derivation from a few basic assumptions. While in some regards this is a point in its favor, it's also it weakness - there are certain modes of discourse that the model "predicts" must exist, but where I have trouble thinking of any real-world examples, or even imagining hypothetically how such a conversation might go.
Four stances
We will start with the most basic kind of conversation - Alice and Bob are discussing some issue, and there are no other parties. On Alice's part, we can ask two questions:
Does Alice think that her and Bob's fundamental values are aligned, or does she think they're unaligned?
Does Alice say that her and Bob's fundame...
Overview
This article is an extended reply to Scott Alexander's Conflict vs. Mistake.
Whenever the topic has come up in the past, I have always said I lean more towards conflict theory over mistake theory; however, on revisiting the original article, I realize that either I've been using those terms in a confusing way, and/or the usage of the terms has morphed in such a way that confusion is inevitable. My opinion now is that the conflict/mistake dichotomy is overly simplistic because:
One will generally have different kinds of conversations with different people at different times. I may adopt a "mistake" stance when talking with someone who's already on board with our shared goal X, where we try to figure out how best to achieve X; but then later adopt a "conflict" stance with someone who thinks X is bad. Nobody is a "mistake theorist" or "conflict theorist" simpliciter; the proper object of analysis is conversations, not persons or theories.
It conflates the distinct questions "What am I doing when I approach conversations?" and "What do I think other people are doing when they approach conversations?", assuming that they must always have the same answer, which is often not the case.
It has trouble accounting for conversations where the meta-level question "What kind of conversation are we having right now?" is itself one of the matters in dispute.
Instead, I suggest a model where there are 10 distinct modes of discourse, which are defined by which of the 16 roles each participant occupies in the conversation. The interplay between these modes, and the extent to which people may falsely believe themselves to occupy a certain role while in fact they occupy another, is (in my view) a more helpful way of understanding the issues raised in the Conflict/Mistake article.
The chart
Explanation of the chart
The bold labels in the chart are discursive roles. The roles are defined entirely by the mode of discourse they participate in (marked with the double lines), so for example there's no such thing as a "Troll/Wormtongue discourse," since the role of Troll only exists as part of a Feeder/Troll discourse, and Wormtongue as part of Quokka/Wormtongue. For the same reason, you can't say that someone "is a Quokka" full stop.
The roles are placed into quadrants based on which stance (sincere/insincere friendship/enmity) the person playing that role is taking towards their conversation partner.
The double arrows connect confusable roles - someone who is in fact playing one role might mistakenly believe they're playing the other, and vice-versa. The one-way arrows indicate one-way confusions - the person playing the role at the open end will always believe that they're playing the role at the pointed end, and never vice-versa. In other words, you will never think of yourself as occupying the role of Mule, Cassandra, Quokka, or Feeder (at least not while it's happening, although you may later realize it in retrospect).
Constructing the model
This model is not an empirical catalogue of conversations I've personally seen out in the wild, but an a priori derivation from a few basic assumptions. While in some regards this is a point in its favor, it's also it weakness - there are certain modes of discourse that the model "predicts" must exist, but where I have trouble thinking of any real-world examples, or even imagining hypothetically how such a conversation might go.
Four stances
We will start with the most basic kind of conversation - Alice and Bob are discussing some issue, and there are no other parties. On Alice's part, we can ask two questions:
Does Alice think that her and Bob's fundamental values are aligned, or does she think they're unaligned?
Does Alice say that her and Bob's fundame...