43 Comments

I do not want to start a flame war in such an old thread but I will point out that much to the contrary of the statement by Phil Goetz (#2), correct in its attempts or not (or in the arguments both made then and now) there is *reasoning* involved in and behind the free culture and related movements. It was defensible both then and now. There may be issues which the touch of reason is utterly vacant on one side of an ingroup-outgroup struggle, but the struggle over the control of technology via monopolistic and paternalistic fiat is not one of them.

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In an ideal world, disagreements would not exist.

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Is this a secret code? Somebody looks on OB at this thread and sees the message, and depending on just how it's phrased and who the author is they know which secret orders to follow?

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David Friedman's idea can be generalized according to Rawles' idea of isonomy through ignorance. Just as Rawles asked what legal structure would be most fair to adopt in the absence of knowledge of where one's position in society would be, so we can ask what argumentative structure would be optimal given zero knowledge of how it will be recieved and by whom.

If you did not know whom a given argument came from, or who will see your counter argument, what is the best strategy for your expressing your position?

This constraint alone would mitigate the felt urge to engage in ad hominems, polite evasions, and most redundant information-reducing mechanisms so common in arguments over Big Questions.

I think consistent adherency would lead us all to act like Feynman: clear, concise, and without any qualms at all about refuting an idiotic statement no matter where it comes from.

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It's an interesting argument.

One possible solution is to do your disagreeing with people you are not in social competition with. That includes people who are dead but whose arguments survive in their books, people whose social status is much higher than yours already, people you are interacting with only via arguments, whom you will never meet and be in competition with, ... . One could even set up an internet forum where all posters were anonymous, with some mechanism for matching up those with differing beliefs on a variety of subjects.

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Stirling,You must know some very difficult people!I generally find people magnanimous in victory.One effect I have noticed that might be related is that when you want to concede you generally don't want to concede everything that was discussed. If you highlight that it draws attention to the remaining issue. The other side may interpret it as you saying that was what "really mattered" in the first place and be too committed to winning to be able to let it go.

BTW great post Hal.

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"In an ideal world, disagreements would not exist."

Really? How do you know this? Isn't this begging the question?

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Strangely enough, since most humans refuse to easily concede defeat in an intellectual disagreement, doing so seldom works. I'm always willing to admit when I'm wrong, but I've discovered the following failure modes to doing so:

1) People assume you are insincere. They don't believe you think they are right, and get upset when you tell them you concede. They insist on continuing to try to 'convince' you until they see signals that they believe in.

2) When you tell someone that they've just made a telling point and that you're going to have to sit back and rethink your entire argument, they won't let you. In fact, they most often keep reiterating bits of information that you've already covered and had no effect on your position (either because you agreed to them, or because you could provide cogent counterarguments.) I've had to actually RUN AWAY from people who would win the argument by simply shutting up, but who seemed constitutionally incapable of doing so, to the extent that leaving was the only way to end the 'debate'.

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I like the post, but I'm having a hard time coming up with good test cases. I do, in fact, change my mind often, and I try to assign probability distributions to my beliefs rather than binary ones. This has served me well, but I still have disagreements, especially with those who present their beliefs otherwise.

The majority of disagreements I have which result in the mutual disrespect of agreeing to disagree seem to be on topics where additional evidence is hard to come by, and suspicion of bias (likely true!) in both participants degrades communication.

What disagreements have you successfully practiced on?

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After reading a comment on a subsequent post, I ask Why should you care what anyone else thinks? Why should you need to convince them?

Perhaps you are a candidate for the Nice party, which seeks to win power in order to enslave the whole population apart from a small clique. Then you seek to convince people to vote for you, out of personal interest.

Perhaps you are part of a small tribe, just managing to support itself, with a strong moral sense that no-one should be allowed to starve. You try to persuade someone that his farming method could be improved, for your own good.

However, it is in my interest to be as close to right about things as I can possibly be. This involves assessing other's views, and changing my own when appropriate. If X thinks he will gain kudos by overcoming in argument someone who actually knows better than him, I believe that his loss when he finally comes up against reality will be greater than any loss of kudos from admitting earlier that he was wrong.

Why should Dawkins care if someone believes that the world was created in six days six thousand years ago, if that belief makes the believer happy?

I do agree to disagree about lots of things, especially where my potential loss from being wrong is low. It may be better to live with a false but unimportant belief about X, than to spend the energy necessary to find what belief about X is perfectly right.

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I suspect that many OB readers are already somewhat alienated from popular human social mores.

It's so true. *Sob*

Alan, there's a huge amount of maths here that defines terms like 'disagreement' and 'evidence' in a very fixed way, which addresses your first few points.

a samurai empties his mind, all the better to respond automatically.

Not sure how this is being framed as a bad thing. Those automatic responses are probably as close to a bias-free answer as you can get from a human. Remember that precious half-second before your mind is made up.

For point 5, it may well be true that alpha-arrogance is an evolutionarily useful response. But you don't come to this site for that, you come to find out how to get closer to rationality. If it's the pursuit of truth you're after, then yes, it is worth it. Point 6 is a very good one.

Point 8,: put aside that immediate moral repugnance and ask 'are they right?' If so, update. If not, convince them that they're wrong.

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"[A]greeing to disagree" is a sign of mutual disrespect and contempt.

In universes where Overcoming Bias t-shirts and coffee mugs exist, this quote is one of the top sellers.

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Even Eliezer's recent explanations of his various disagreements largely come down to making cases for why his disputants should agree with him, not for why they should all continue to disagree.

Hahaha. That's different from any other person arguing how?

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"In fact, we often see a sort of bargaining process, in which adopting certain aspects of one's opponent's views leads to demands that the other side adopt something of one's own views in return."

This may be more reasonable than Hal seems to suggest. Generally in a disagreement it is unlikely that one person is totally wrong and the other totally right. This is why the suggestion to consider what is right about the other person's views is so often fruitful. So if one person adopts certain aspects of his opponent's view, but his opponent refuses to adopt anything of the first person's view, in most cases (not all) the person who refuses to change his views is the less reasonable one.

However, it would be totally unreasonable to say, "I will accept some of what you say if you accept some of what I say," leaving the first move for the other. The reason for this is that in this case there is nothing left but a bargaining process, as Hal called it, without any search for truth. For if you already suspect that there is some truth in your opponent's view, then you should adopt it immediately, without waiting for him to respond.

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Phil: thanks, I understand your point now in terms of how other people would treat those who shunned social games. I was thinking that you meant such people would be less effective thinkers rather than that they would be treated differently by other people and thus have less influence.

Having said that, I'm not so sure that the response would be so universally negative. It would be the natural and immediate reaction for many people, but there would certainly be widespread discussion of the issue if more than a few undertook the practice systematically. I think that upon reflection many would see the sense behind abandoning some of the more pernicious games we play.

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Joseph,"The question under consideration was whether caring less about the social embarrassment of publicly being wrong would reduce the effectiveness of thinking people, as Phil stated. How does what you wrote relate to that?"Because I think1. Thinking people are rational to care about the social embarrassment of publicly being wrong, due to what could be called an embarrasser's veto (like the heckler's veto).2. We can get many (and perhaps all) of the benefits of thinking people putting out ideas that could be socially embarrassing if proved wrong, by encouraging them to publicize those ideas anonymously. An archetypal example of this might be the Federalist Papers. The icing is that there can be mechanisms for the anonymous thinker to then claim credit as the originator of those ideas if they're likely to add to the thinker's status rather than detract from it.

These points are trivial. So it's puzzling to me why many OB contributors act like belief in and publicization of an idea isn't separable from public performance of one's beliefs.

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