Inferential distance

[This is one reason I find conversations with certain people frustrating. E.g. on D&D message boards. Things that seem obvious to me are not always obvious to them, and they demand "proof" of trivialities, like the relative worthlessness of Improved Critical. Anyway, "inferential distance" seems like a useful concept. -Max]

https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/idea-inoculation-inferential-distance-848836a07a5b

Excerpt:

Inferential distance is the gap between [your hypotheses and world model], and [my hypotheses and world model]. It's just how far out we have to reach to one another in order to understand one another.

If you and I grew up in the same town, went to the same schools, have the same color of skin, have parents in the same economic bracket who attended the same social functions, and both ended up reading Less Wrong together, the odds are that the inferential distance between us for any given set of thoughts is pretty small. If I want to communicate some new insight to you, I don't have to reach out very far. I understand which parts will be leaps of faith for you, and which prerequisites you have versus which you don't — I can lean on a shared vocabulary and shared experiences and a shared understanding of how the world works. In short, I'm unlikely to be surprised by which parts of the explanation are easy and which parts you're going to struggle with.

If, on the other hand, I'm teleported back in time to the deck of the Santa Maria with the imperative to change Christopher Columbus's mind about a few things or all of humanity dies in a bleak and hopeless future, there's a lot less of that common context. Even assuming magical translation, Christopher Columbus and I are simply not going to understand each other. Things that are obviously true to one of us will seem confusing and false and badly in need of justification, and conclusions that seem to obviously follow for one of us will be gigantic leaps of faith for the other.

It's right in the name — inferential distance. It's not about the "what" so much as it is about the "how" — how you infer new conclusions from a given set of information. When there's a large inferential distance between you and someone else, you don't just disagree on the object level, you also often disagree about what counts as evidence, what counts as logic, and what counts as self-evident truth.

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If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

"Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else."