Framework And Debate Psychology

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(I have not read The Myth of Framework, so I’m guessing that framework essentially means perspective and world view)

Do you think it sometimes seems like debate isn’t working because of difference in framework (such that the debaters cannot understand each other), but in reality it’s because of not wanting to lose? Is it often a mix?

For Path Forwards to work and change the world, do people (probably me included) have to change their psychology (not having their ego hurt by “losing” and criticism, being open to change their mind) on debating? Do they first have to learn to want cooperative truth-seeking rather than adversarial debate?

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There are many factors.

You need 200, or 2,000, or 20,000 rational people in the English speaking world for massive change. Which one is debatable but it’s a tiny percent of the population.

How many already exist? Unknown. Maybe enough. Maybe not.

You also need millions of audience members who want intellectuals to have Paths Forward. How many is hard to say. These people don’t need to be very good at error correction, rationality, ego, debate, etc. They just have to judge intellectuals by whether the intellectuals are good at those things – whether the intellectuals participate in rational debates in public, have Paths Forward policies, etc.

In this scenario, we’d find out which current intellectuals are actually good and which aren’t. If a lot of bad intellectuals lost their positions, it would open up space for smart, rational new entrants to the field. It’d change who is getting fans, funding, etc., to be more merit based.

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FYI, that book is a collection of essays/lectures named after an essay of the same name, which is only ~23 pages long. (Actually it’s ~31 in my physical copy, and ~23 in my eBook copy.) The excerpt Elliot is talking about is from that essay.

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Maybe a bunch of people would figure out how to fool the audience instead of figuring out how to be rational or productive. As long as the audience members aren’t full-fledged rational intellectuals themselves, they’ll have some vulnerabilities. It’s hard to say just how hard it’d be to fool them vs. impress them with actual merit. At least with Paths Forward stuff, I think the difficulty of fooling them would be higher than now, and rationality would have more of a chance. Paths Forward requires e.g. more transparency and more engaging with other people in ways that risk losing, instead of just ignoring unpopular critics that are challenging to deal with.

Many people think we live in a fairly merit based world. I’m not sure exactly when or why I decided that we don’t. I think it was a gradual process. Now I think the world is so non-merit based that making it decently merit based would dramatically change/improve things.

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Paths Forward gives rational intellectuals the opportunity to point out ways that fake intellectuals are fooling the public. It gives them the chance to confront the fake intellectuals and get some responses. The current system doesn’t do that.

This makes the fakers have to have multiple layers of faking. Currently if you fool people on one level that works. With debate participation, including meta criticism, you’ll have someone point out what you’re doing and then have to give some response to that (response 2) capable of fooling lots of people. And then someone could point out how response 2 is irrational and trying to fool the public, and you’ll need a response to that (response 3) capable of fooling lots of people.

You don’t need an unlimited number of such responses. But with Paths Forward methods you need maybe 5 levels of meta responses instead of often 0 (or maybe what they sometimes use now is 1 level of meta response that in some way says meta discussion is invalid trash that they don’t have to engage with, which is in fact one level of meta response that seems able to fool a lot of the public but that specific attitude wouldn’t work on an audience that likes CF). If you could actually deal with 5 meta levels successfully, you could probably also get away with not allocating more time and energy for meta levels 6-10, which would probably be repetitive anyway.

This doesn’t mean people only get 5 chances to criticize you. Multiple criticisms can be made on the same level.

The alternative to having 5 levels of responses is fooling most or all of the intellectuals, not just fooling the public. If you don’t fool the rational intellectuals, then they’ll have criticism of what you’re doing (even if they don’t fully understand it and know all the details, they should be able to say something decent).

I think having to explain and defend your methods instead of just your object-level claims is important and makes fooling people harder.

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I started writing this post before you posted this:

What I was going to say is somewhat answered by your new post. There’s maybe something to talk about anyway.

Here is what I was going to say:

Maybe you don’t have to change the minds of the irrational intellectuals that much. If you get to have debate where they look bad, then that can change the minds of lots of audience members.

I was thinking that changing the minds of intellectuals is really hard since they have a bunch of reputation and identity at stake.

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Yes. The goal is for intellectuals to either be good or lose the respect of the audience and stop being influential.

I would expect the majority of current intellectuals to lose their place rather than get good. This can be a source of resistance to CF, however ~none of the intellectuals will want to admit that they think they’d lose their place, that their ideas can’t survive critical debate, that they are resisting rationality, etc. Having to resist covertly makes it harder for them. And making it even harder them, many of them have to lie to themselves too – make their resistance covert in their own minds because they don’t admit to themselves that they’re bad intellectuals who are actively harming society by having their position.

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I would expect that the majority of honest, rational intellectuals are not currently public intellectuals (with credentials, fans, influence, funding, societal legitimacy, etc.) because such positions are gained primarily through social climbing (along with being decently smart/clever, but not necessarily very honest or rational).

Part of the point of Paths Forward is to find a bunch of hidden gems – smart, rational, honest productive people who are being massively underutilized in the current world. Maybe there are thousands of them already out there. Or not. It’s hard to say. There are certainly thousands of people scattered through the world who look semi-promising – pretty good at something, pretty smart, some other good signs. A lot of businesses seem to have a few productive, effective people who make the business actually work (the majority of such people are under paid and under appreciated, and you can read some of their stories and complaints on in Reddit comments). However, what’s unclear is how many of those people would be open to more broad, less bounded error correction instead of only error correction at some specific stuff in their field (they must have some error correction working decently to be productive, but it could be pretty narrow). It’s also hard to say how much people can be more broadly open to error correction, and how useful that can be, without hitting a jump to universality where it abruptly has to be fully unbounded error correction.

Another part of the point is to let anyone make one single contribution. A lot of people are not all that rational but had one good idea, and in the current world it can be really hard for them to share that good idea and have it effect anything.

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Changing the minds of popular intellectuals in debate would probably be very effective, especially if they acknowledge defeat and talk about how they changed their mind. Lot’s of audience members (and other intellectuals too probably) would change their mind quickly. But making them look bad in debate would probably also be similarly effective. The extra effort to convert bad intellectuals probably isn’t worth it. I guess that the extra work would have to be to fool the intellectuals into changing their psychology, not make better arguments for the topic you’re debating. That seems very hard and not worth it.

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I should say “impactful” rather than “effective” given that I argue against the effectiveness with regard to effort later on.

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I think in the past I was a bit pessimistic with regard to debate and Paths Forward because I thought changing the minds of intellectuals was what was needed. Exposing their irrationality should be easier. It’s good to know the chances are higher.

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I’d think it’s worth it if they’re remotely reasonable.

I think a bigger concern than whether it’s worth the effort is just knowing how to do it successfully.

I have a hard time imagining knowing how to persuade/teach/etc a current intellectual, and having the opportunity, but it not being worth the time and effort. People who aren’t converted yet are not going to spend years going through some very long, gradual learning process and being your student in order to eventually actually want to learn from you long after they started doing it. Whatever you can do with them will have to be a lot faster, so it should be worth the time. And even if they would be a student but it’d take years, teaching them tons of things while having a big audience watching is a way to teach the audience a bunch of stuff too so there’s a lot of value there.

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Yeah I more thought that if they actually debated then they’d start losing debates and lots of them would be revealed as basically charlatans who don’t know much and don’t have much skill (about intellectual stuff – they instead have skill and knowledge about tricking the public or about social climbing).

Some would do well in debate but lots of current intellectuals just aren’t suited to the job, but current debating practices make it hard to expose them.

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I can hardly imagine public intellectuals learning grammar publicly. Do you think some of the current intellectuals need grammar practice? Maybe higher level like being competent at paragraph trees?

They don’t have to learn though, it would be embarrassing for them if people pointed out errors in their intellectual skill level.

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Yes. Approximately all of them.

I can imagine a rational, honest person learning it publicly given widespread acknowledgment that schools are failing to teach it effectively, so it’s not something that all smart people already learned in school.

Many of the people most suited to be intellectual leaders would be OK with making and correcting some errors in public.

If someone studies grammar privately and actually learns it and then joins the public debates, that’s OK too.

I want transparency and public discussions from people who claim to already be skilled public intellectuals. I don’t care much if learners want privacy. If an intellectual wants to switch to being a learner in private, then plans to come back later, that’s fine.

Also FYI grammar is a field with debatable controversies like e.g. whether Chomsky’s (currently influential) ideas about it are actually any good or not.

People need to learn that too.

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Oh God. That’s worse than I thought. Can you tell by their writing? How much is it because they try write impressively, or is it that they lack a bunch of grammar knowledge? It’s both probably.

That would be a great culture. A part of why I want to live forever is that I imagine the world could be so much greater. What if people were talking about the latest high profile debate rather than the latest sports game (not that there wouldn’t be sports games that people viewed). I like living now too, and I would like to live in this world forever too, but I think a future world with better culture and technology has so much value to offer.

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Yes it’s both. Yes I can tell by their writing. Example:

But also, when/where/how would they have learned to be good at grammar?

There are different levels of grammar knowledge.

Lots of current intellectuals know what a preposition is. That is actually taught in school (not very well, but smart students often learn it anyway, just like with many other topics).

A bit harder is commas, which are also taught in school badly. I think some intellectuals know how to use commas, but most don’t, and a lot of book and magazine editors don’t know either. The ones who don’t know how to use commas use rules of thumb, intuition, book-reading experience and guesswork so they’re right a lot of the time but they also make some errors that reveal they don’t have a good conceptual grasp of the comma rules. (I think I’m good at recognizing comma confusion partly because I didn’t learn how to use commas correctly until roughly 2018. My mentor didn’t understand commas, overestimated his grammar knowledge, and I think subtly discouraged me from learning grammar which is one of the reasons I only did it years after I stopped having conversations with him.)

Then there’s a harder level like pretty reliably, accurately knowing the parent/child relationships for the words in sentences. I see people get this wrong a lot. Lots of discussions or writing goes wrong because people are confused about e.g. what a modifier applies to or what a conjunction joins. This is one of the main reasons I took an interest in grammar. I was trying to break down what was going on when discussions failed, people got confused, people misread things, people wrote things that didn’t mean what they intended, etc. I looked into more advanced and complex stuff first – I think there are widespread biases related to having overly high expectations about people which are affecting you and which affected me and delayed me figuring out how basic a lot of the errors people make are. These biases make it hard for anyone to admit to errors on these topics where basically society as a whole is pretending that tons of people are already great at this stuff which society regards as basic.

There is also grammar as a small, niche field with some experts/specialists who actually know a bunch of detailed stuff. This is mostly not necessary for most intellectuals. I’ve learned some of this but haven’t focused on it.

There’s already lots of interest in that. Lots of people try to participate in some political debate. And the content of the most popular English podcast, Joe Rogan, is closer to intellectual debates than to sports talk. (I dislike Rogan and think he’s spreading some really harmful ideas like misogyny. But that means he’s spreading ideas not just talking sports! And he also does some good by platforming ideas that have trouble being heard elsewhere, some of which have merit. One of the things I think a lot of his audience likes is that he’s less into gatekeeping than most intellectuals, so that’s a good sign about millions of people already wanting to hear ideas and debates that the mainstream intellectuals are suppressing.)

Unfortunately with current intellectual leadership in biology, medicine, etc., I don’t see that happening.

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The alternative I could think of was them not understanding the text that they quote (the essay/article/book as a whole as well as the content in the quote it self and the immediate text around the quote). Are they bad at this as well? When they misquote are they perhaps unknowingly changing the meaning because of bad grammar (they think the change they made was okay because they thought it meant the same)? So essentially estimating their reading ability by how they treat other works.

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I think most inaccurate paraphrases are a skill issue not an ethics issue. (But the errors tend to fit their biases, not be random. But there is usually a genuine skill issue and no conscious intent to lie.)

With quotes it’s different. You can be deeply confused about what a passage means and still quote it accurately. You shouldn’t change the meaning because you shouldn’t be making any edits at all.

You can even accurately quote stuff from a foreign language that you don’t know a single word of.

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Yeah, I wasn’t thinking that the misquotes happen because of lack of grammar knowledge. I was thinking there were intellectuals who think misquotes are fine so long as the meaning is the same, but then they screw up the meaning as well.

Paraphrases seem like a better measure of reading ability than what I proposed.