This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://curi.us/2591-getting-stuck-in-discussions-meta-discussion
Often a discussion looks like this: Joe writes a blog post. Bob says some criticism. Joe sees many flaws in the criticism. Joe explains the flaws. Bob stops talking. This isn’t satisfying for Joe. He never got feedback on his post from post-misconception Bob. And Bob probably didn’t change his mind. And Bob didn’t even say what the outcome was. Or if Bob did change his mind about something, it’s often a partial change followed immediately by like a “you win; bye”. People routinely use conceding as a way to end discussions with no followups: no post mortem (learning about why the error happened and how to fix the underlying cause), no working out the consequences of the right ideas, etc. The correction doesn’t go anywhere.
That’s sad for Joe. He didn’t want to correct Bob just for fun. He wanted to correct Bob so it’d lead to something more directly beneficial to Joe. E.g. Joe’s correction could be criticized and that’d have value for Joe (he learns he was actually wrong in some way). Or Joe corrects Bob and then it leads to further discussion that’s valuable to Joe. If correcting people is pure charity – and you usually get ghosted without them admitting they were corrected – then people will even try to do it way less. There should be rewards like some sort of resolution to the issues and continuation.
And if critical discussion often goes like that then criticism can seem mostly annoying. Because you have to defend yourself but you don’t get almost anything back. Only defense no reward. Then you would’ve been better off not getting criticism, which is terrible because criticism should be a gift.
And one might think that correcting people with unpopular views should be especially easy (but actually people usually hold unpopular views for a reason, whereas if they hold a popular view they might never have thought about it much and not have a strong or informed opinion).
This was a bit surprising but makes a lot of sense. I think this is useful to know.
Continuing to speak generally not personally: If I try to talk about a discussion problem, and the guy responds defensively and fights back, what happens next? Will I learn from his negative comments? No. I will see it as flaming or shoddy argument. I won’t find out I was wrong. This happens often. Even if he gave a great rebuttal, the typical result is I’d still be biased and not get corrected. There’s nothing here that causes me to overcome my bias. I had a negative viewpoint, then I stated a problem, and he responded, and then why would I learn I’m wrong? What is going to make that amazing result happen? It’s a harder thing to be corrected about than a regular topic. Maybe. Is it? If I made a specific accusation and he gave a specific, short, clear response which engaged with those specific words, that’s fairly easy to be corrected by. Not easy but easy relative to most stuff. But more ego is involved. Maybe. People are really tribalist about most of the stuff they care enough about to talk about. If they don’t have some sort of emotional investment or bias or whatever – if they don’t care – then they tend not to talk about it on forums (they’ll talk about the weather in small talk without really caring though).
I found this paragraph confusing. I think it says: it’s hard to be corrected on claims of discussion problems because the other guy is usually defensive, mad and tribalist. And if they wouldn’t get mad then that’s because they don’t care much so then they won’t bother to discuss.
What do you do in a world where the dominant problem is people staying in discussions they don’t want to be in, sabotaging the hell out of them? And the concept of actually adding anti-bias procedures is a pipe dream that’ll threaten and pressure people into even more bad behavior? What a nightmare that is if straightforward rationality stuff actually makes things worse? What can be done?
sad.
And people will claim that of course learning from debate or saying ideas is one of the goals; but it usually isn’t really, not in a serious way; their focus is on being clever and saying things they think are right and they aren’t talking about actually learning to do a skill in the way people will try to learn to cook. They’re always saying like “I think X is true because Y” not “I need to figure out how to analyze this. What are some good techniques I could use? I better double check my books to make sure I do those techniques correctly.” Whereas with cooking people will ask how to cook something, and maybe double check some information source to remind themselves how to use a tool, which is more learning oriented than philosophy questions people ask like “What is a good answer to [complex, hard issue]?” When they ask for ready-made answers to tough topics, they aren’t learning to create those answers themselves; they aren’t learning all the steps to invent such an answer, compare it to other answers, and reach a good conclusion. With cooking, people often ask for enough information that they can do it themselves, so it’s more connected to actually learning something.
I do too much of the trying to say smart things instead of learning.
I enjoyed reading this even if was a bit hard to follow sometimes. I like the meandering posts too.