I’ve seen mention of the your win/win decisive solutions approach a few times (such as the podcast in How Better Debates Would Improve the World).
I think I an intuitive agreement with win/win decisive solutions, as yes I think I’m sure I’ve come across something similar from Ayn Rand. I can’t remember exactly which of her books I’d have found it in and I think it’s something I’ve internalised in the years since. I previously had a lot of reservations about using statistics in truth decisions anyway (and generally think people are super bad at interpreting the significance of statistics).
Because my prior understanding is intuitive it’s hard to say how much of your idea is new to me here (and it kinda just fits in with my intuition pretty effortlessly). I think the debate tables helped clarify the process to do it better (i.e. breaking a goal into absolute requirements and whether an idea solves those requirements). I think it’s something I need to use in practise to understand better.
Anyway I thought I’d mention that as it might be weird not to say something about it since it’s come up multiple times.
I can’t say the same for Paths Forward. It seems good to me (I’ve gone through the curi.us articles) but I have some sort of intuitive resistance to it. I read it and consciously think it’s good and I want to be rational, so I think I should follow it but my subconscious doesn’t want to, I guess I feel some sort of pressure/imposed obligation from it.
I think maybe because it opens up a lot of uncertainty about how much time I’d be committing to try to follow it. I don’t know how to estimate how much time it would take up, so my subconscious is creating some sort of disaster scenario where I’d have to spend all my time on it and end up in an overwhelm situation again.
I think the root thing I don’t know is: What are the criteria for ideas that I should have public Paths Forward for? I don’t think it can be everything, everyone has tons of ideas about all sorts of stuff (from subconscious ideas about the qualia they experience, to long complex economic ideas). I don’t know what ideas I have that I should build Paths Forward for.
From Curiosity – Paths Forward Summary
the way to deal with ALL ideas that disagree with you is you either 1) write a refutation or, most of the time, 2) refer to a refutation already written by someone else or you. (you must take responsibility for it. if it’s wrong you don’t just blame the author, if you used it and it’s wrong, then you were wrong).
I guess this is one kind of idea that should be included in a person’s Paths Forwards but I don’t know about other ideas. Even this I think needs some discretion with scale, some disagreements are very small/low-impact and could be a big burden to try to write up answers to all of them.
So I have some guesses:
- Ideas that disagree with popular or high-impact ideas
- Ideas that have significant impact (it could help a significant number of people)
- Ideas about something new, some new way something that could be done (maybe without clear benefit, but could be a good new way to look at some problems)