Chat Room/Open Topic Experiment

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61

I can see this, and with DW in general I often have moments where I think they’re pushing into extreme partisan positions which is more about stirring outrage and buzz than seeking the truth.

I’m not conservative (I don’t really feel comfortable associating with any political group) and I’m an atheist so I have a number of disagreements with them.

I think Crowder does do some stuff that’s good for debate e.g. his public debate segments which are often civil and constructive and I think it’s helpful for that sort of thing to be visible in popular media and see people with extremely different political views have a respectful conversation. It’s something that has improved my perception of people and restored some lost hope.

I think overall they’re more positive than negative, more so in Crowder’s case than DW.

62

Very much so!

Though I’ve read a lot of Rand and only recently started reading Popper with C&R. I don’t know if his other books are like that.

C&R I think is difficult to follow as it covers a TON of different ideas so there’s a lot to process in a relatively short space.

63

Would you link one that you regard as especially good and rational while also being pretty representative (there are a fair amount more that have similar merits)?

64

For people who find Popper hard to read:

1 Like
65

I had forgotten in my previous post that the name for the segments I mean is the “Change my mind” segments. Crowder sits at a table in public space with a sign with a controversial opinion and invites passers-by to sit and debate.

I remember this one having an interesting conversation including one debater who much more seriously thoughtful on the subject than I’d expect from a typical passer-by (that is the debate beginning at the linked time stamp at 112 seconds).

There are flaws (compared to, say, a forum debate like this) in that it’s in person with a rough kind of time limit, the people who come to debate him are unable to research his points in depth so they’re often winging it. He’s well prepared to deal with conventional arguments which he knows are the majority of what he will get. So there’s not a lot of room for progress and new idea creation in the debate.

I guess the value I’ve found in them is also substantially inexplicit, challenging some of my expectations about how often people are open to civil debate, expectations which might have been set by a skewed perspective from too much social media. It’s also useful to see someone maintain their composure and civility in the face of provocation as Crowder also gets verbally abused quite a lot (and in some cases, even assaulted).

66

I think it’s easier to get people to be civil

  1. in person
  2. with a camera crew
  3. when you’re high status – some kind of impressive successful person

I remember seeing Alex Epstein talking to people (and getting some kinda civil and productive seeming conversations) and trying to teach other people to do what he does. But he was oblivious to how he was using his status in his discussions. You couldn’t replicate what he was doing without similar status (or some substitute/alternative that you’d have to figure out yourself).

Damn that sucks.

useful to see someone maintain their composure and civility in the face of provocation

Here is an example of that by me:

The vegan debater Ask Yourself (not bryn who talked first) yelled at me and I was calm. Video description specifies timestamps:

40:52 Start of voice debate with bryn and Ask Yourself. Debate continues until 1:06:51.

We were only on voice chat because they didn’t want to debate in text. I was trying to ask for a debate where we cited literature but this voice debate was all I could get instead.

He was sufficiently unashamed of his behavior that he posted a recording on his own YT too.

67

I listened to most of the section you mentioned.

They seem very eager to attribute you questioning their premises to poor faith/avoiding questions. I don’t think they understand the problems of voice debate. Or maybe they think they have a “winning” strategy in voice debate which is why they avoid text debate. Their “winning” strategy seem to be looking for reasons to invent a poor faith narrative and dismiss you rather than trying to understand you, they’re more interested in a “social victory” than new ideas. Anything you said which they didn’t understand they characterised as “rambling” or being evasive/dishonest/dumb rather than trying to understand why you weren’t giving the kind of answers they demanded.

68

I’ve been thinking about your side of the discussion. I had some comments on it too but had some conflicts with them and couldn’t tell why at first. I think I’ve worked out why now.

So my original thoughts about your part were:

  • Why didn’t you try to make space in the conversation to explain yourself? (e.g. ask for them to hear you out/let you finish when they kept interrupting)
  • This one is hard to put into words - something like “Why didn’t you fight?” or “Why didn’t you push back harder?”

Reflecting on it and my conflicts, I think my underlying reaction was an emotional one and I was projecting my feelings - I wanted you to win because I’d want to win in that situation.

But that’s not good. To be clear when I say “want to win” I don’t mean “want to be right”. This part of me wants to win social status in debates and be seen as right even if that means trying to put people down. I don’t like this, and I think I’ve avoided looking straight at it for a long time.

This part of me doesn’t come up very often. Typically only in group interaction (especially if I don’t know and like all the people in the group). It may be a big factor in social anxiety, as this part of me would typically be suppressed by other parts of me that are ashamed of getting confrontational or aggressive or scared of embarassment. With that mess of conflicts going on, I make stupid decisions because I’m distracted/overwhelmed (e.g. I’ve sometimes found in multi-player board games, I play much worse than in two player games). It’s not impossible that it comes up in text communication, but I think I’ve only noticed it in conversations that are already emotional, or that are fast paced (e.g. chat rooms). I don’t consider it a risk in this sort of forum conversation.

So I have the idea “I should try to win social status in arguments”. I’m going to explore this more. For clarity I’m going call this idea my bad idea.

I went back to your Improving Emotions article while thinking about this.

All further quotes from the article:

Like most of your more intuitive ideas, emotions are generally pretty in line with traditional and conventional knowledge, and shouldn’t be ignored.

My bad idea is a very conventional one. I think a lot of people have it.

Never assume your emotions are fully wrong or irrational. Instead, they should be treated like an idea that has a point, reasoning and arguments.

I guess the utility of it is when you’re in a tribalist environment, being able to win status this way can be very rewarding. People still behave this way in many places (as demonstrated by the other people in your discussion video). A tiny part of me even finds this attractive, which may be worth exploring further at another time. The rest of me wants nothing to do with it, so this utility is almost entirely irrelevant to me.

The relevant use case for this idea is an actual self-defence situation, where people are not being rational and the only defence is to influence a mob. This is a terrifying but super-duper rare possibility civilised Western society and has at least never happened to me, though I have seen it in videos.

So I think my bad idea is of non-zero value, but I don’t consider it realistic that it will ever come up. The problem is that it sometimes does come up anyway in group interactions, when there are people I don’t know and like.

When my bad idea comes up like that, it’s making assumptions about the people I’m interacting with. I’m assuming that they value social status above truth. I’m assuming they will validate social climbing. I do not value or validate these things.
In other words, I’m assuming they’re people that are not like me and that I don’t like. If I were to have a positive effect on people by acting on my bad idea, I would actually think less of them afterwards.
There are people that I would like to think positively of me. But my bad idea is trying to seek approval from people who I will dislike for approving while it will alienate people who I might actually like if I gave them more credit and didn’t act on my bad idea.

So any realistic situation where I could act on my bad idea would actually do me harm and alienate potential friends.

I’m not sure if this has had much impact on how much my bad idea will come up. I think understanding better the (very narrow) situations where it may be relevant will help. I think improved awareness of it, and reminding myself “I don’t want anything that will come of this bad idea, I don’t want the approval of people who like it, I don’t want to alienate the people who dislike it” may help answer it when it comes up.

69

Heh. I thought I did win. I thought a reasonable observer would be easily able to judge that I did better than my opponents in the debate. (And I got to put it on my YT.)

  • This one is hard to put into words - something like “Why didn’t you fight?” or “Why didn’t you push back harder?”

Didn’t I fight? I challenged them and publicly stood up to them. I said things that were extremely unacceptable to them instead of toning it down to reduce conflict. I didn’t back down despite their bad behavior.

70

To a reasonable observer, in a reasonable sense of a win, you did. My post was focused on the part of me that was looking for a social status win, not a rational win.

You did. I meant “fight” in that context as “join the social status fight”.

71

I don’t know what concrete actions would have socially impressed you or that part of you wanted.

72

How can I search the FI archives to find these two posts from ET’s philosophy outline?
https://www.elliottemple.com/reason-and-morality/

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I think the links are both dead. Hovering over the links shows that they may correspond to post numbers 23,335 and 23,907.

I think I’m also having problems using advanced search in Adobe Acrobat. I watched Justin’s video on the subject but I think I will have to do more research. Searching terms was taking forever. I had a search running for like 30 minutes but only made through 20k pages of the 90k pages.

73

I listened to that voice debate with the vegans too. I would have felt pretty bad in that situation and probably would have hung up earlier or responded with something like “dude, just chill so we can talk” or “bro, I’m not trying to make you mad but I need to say more than one word at a time”. I think anything that ET or someone else in his situation would have said would only make those angrier. There was a schoolyard bully vibe to the whole conversation. One of the guys just sounded malicious with almost no pretext of interest in the topic of debate. I think his primary goal was to try to hurt ET. I was impressed at ET’s ability to continue quickly thinking of alternative explanations and points in an attempt to breakthrough with those guys.

74

5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Non-Tribalist Politics Megathread

75

I was watching some Feyman videos to see if he ever talked about his blank sheet method and I saw this clip.

He talks about how initial conditions have yet to really be considered as a part of physics, analogous to the way in which chemical properties weren’t thought of as part of physics in 1800s. It sounds similar to starting point of Deutsch’s Constructor Theory project.

76

Actually, I can’t tell whether he said 1800s or 1900s.

77

Leaving the pdf open in acrobat for a few days may improve search speed.

I don’t know if you can find anything by message id.

Verizon bought Yahoo and deleted Yahoo Groups.

Some posts are also on Google Groups but that doesn’t help with finding posts by yahoo id. similar i have the emails in my mail client but that doesn’t help.

but we submitted the group to archive.org to archive it after verizon gave way too little notice before deleting stuff. so i just checked and it looks like they got it. so maybe you can find the right posts there!

otherwise you’d have to ask justin or alan. i wrote the outline and they picked the links so one of them might know which posts they were talking about.

if you wait and keyword text search speeds up, then you can probably find lots of interesting posts but maybe not those exact ones.

78

I think there might be some underlying miscommunication.

My guess is that I’m using “social status” differently to you.

I think of it in a negative way and don’t see there as a “good” social status, I guess I always think of it as a tribalistic or irrational thing. So there’s no way of doing something that I would think of as “socially impressing me” in general (just that part of me).

I might be misunderstanding, but my sense of your response is you’re talking about some sort of good/rational social status.

I guess I hadn’t really every thought about “social status” as ever having a positive interpretation. It’s something that I think I just came across the words and decided it sounds like a bad thing (associating it immediately with tribalism and irrationality) and left it at that.

Even a brief glance at just the wiki page corrects that misconception.

(following quotes from wiki page)

Social status is the level of social value a person is considered to possess.[1][2] More specifically, it refers to the relative level of respect, honour, assumed competence, and deference accorded to people, groups, and organizations in a society.

That list of things are not fundamentally bad (tribalistic/irrational) reasons to hold someone as high social status. I guess I was thinking of it as something like “the shouting mob agrees with you” (like in your discussion video, they’re all being mean, rude, name-calling collectively, amongst their group I’m sure they all felt like they were high status there). I’ll be more careful talking about “social status”.

The wiki page intro also quickly starts to look like it’s written by someone who thinks that unequal distributions of resources and power is bad and that doesn’t even need to be stated, but it can be made to look good.

In doing so, these shared cultural beliefs make unequal distributions of resources and power appear natural and fair, supporting systems of social stratification.

79

I didn’t mean to talk about social status positively there. Earlier you wrote:

Reflecting on it and my conflicts, I think my underlying reaction was an emotional one and I was projecting my feelings - I wanted you to win because I’d want to win in that situation.

I meant: What does (social) “winning” look like (in terms of concrete actions I could have done in the debate) to the part of you that wants it?

80

Oh, ok.

Still I think it’s good I’m more aware of the arbitrary nature of my contempt for social status, which I think was based on social hangups. It’s not super relevant to my life right now, but if/when it is I’ll analyse it more seriously. I have in mind a post to write in the goals forum which may bring me back to this.

I guess that part of me wants something like raising your voice, putting them down, asserting social dominance. I have a vague blurry kind of mental image of various “gotchas” from TV shows where people who are being “disrespectful” are stunned into stopping and listening.

I think TV shows can really screw up how people think human interaction should work.