I Changed My Mind about Error-Correcting Debate, Misogyny and More

Elliot Temple
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I changed my mind about some things. These examples are illustrative of potential weaknesses of focusing on error correction and critical discussion like Karl Popper advised. I don't think the weaknesses are inherent or unavoidable. They're practical issues that don't require different epistemology principles to address. They're just ways you can go wrong if you don't know enough.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://curi.us/2611-i-changed-my-mind-about-error-correcting-debate-misogyny-and-more
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Great post! Your willingness to change your mind and share your past mistakes is a big part of why I respect you.

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An implication is tht u may be right, correct? Like, ure idea wasnt refuted and tht it’s reasonable? Not too sure there.

From my experience, this attitude(??) u had, i thot it was cool cus it looks logic based and idk it’s talking from a place with a lot of in depth knowledge. When i first noticed tht attitude/idea i always noticed tht i tried to make sense of it on my own and tht it was hard to. But i would usually think like, “no this is how real intellectuals can think of things when they’ve become top in their expertise.” I think i never really tried being super curious about the attitude or try to use it or understand it for my learning. I thought it was a thing tht would come later when ure really good at things no? In a way i feel like im talking about something else in this reply so far. So mb if yea n i wanna know how if yea

In a way, I think ive dealt with something similar tht changed my mind. Like, I now think jus cuz i don hear any good arguments( i think) doesnt mean tht the other side doesnt have any good criticisms or things to consider. Wat made me realize tht is when i talked to my brother. We would disagree so much about a lot of things often, and in one convo i told him it was very difficult to talk to him cuz i try so hard to understand his side n account for it, but he jus keeps disagreeing with me on a lot of points anyways.

On a side note, I think im probably making many mistakes taking to him like how well am i actually understanding his side?

But it all made me think like maybe he does have some good points to bring up but hasnt said it yet or cuz of how conversation works im not gonna hear it. Like, it might be difficult to get the good point from him and i may never hear it without a lot of effort. Maybe u changing ur mind parallels me changing my mind?

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I enjoyed reading this, thanks. Some thoughts and reflections I had along the way:

People, including authors, pundits and academics, will use bad examples and bad evidence despite much better stuff being available.

How do we judge what is best? Is it possible that people use what they found persuasive and their sense of that is badly calibrated?

I have some thoughts but I’m not confident that I know an answer. Good arguments/evidence means it’s persuasive or resistant to criticism or something like that. Part of the problem is that, while I have a decent idea of what I think my keystone claims are (which I think are resilient and/or persuasive), I don’t know what other people (whom I disagree with) think are their keystone claims.

If cooperation is an option (so I can ask what their keystone claims are) then debate trees could solve this. The problem there is the requirement for near synchronicity. Large time gaps would be less of an issue if we publicly maintained debate trees, kind of like how academic journals can have debates that run for decades, but more organized and focused.

Failing that, my intuition says to read and listen and try and figure out what their keystones are, but that’s what you’ve done and found that it’s not very effective.

Do we have a term for ‘keystone claims’ yet? I feel like we should and I’m just not remembering it.

This resonates with me. It’s something I had no skill in or appreciation of prior to CF; I think I started really appreciating the idea in the 2020 tutoring.

I can’t remember if BoI encourages this much at all, but I think it’s notable that after reading BoI, I was convinced of fallibilism but I didn’t really have an appreciation of epistemic humility or know how to practice it, or even know that I should be practicing it. (I still have a lot of room left for improvement, of course.)

Also, thinking about how you changed your mind in the essay and the lengths you went to, I don’t think that I would have done that. Which is kind of exciting in that it’s a bit of a glimpse of stuff on the horizon. I don’t exactly have the words – it’s like the feeling of an amateur seeing an artisan and knowing that there’s a whole lot of progress to make if I want it.

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Yes. People go by a variety of things. What persuaded them, what they think will persuade or manipulate others, what’s popular, what’s socially acceptable, what their abstract logical analysis says is good, what their biases say is good, what is convenient, what they think sounds clever.

I don’t think BoI is effective at encouraging intellectual modesty/humility, partly because Deutsch isn’t actually good at it, and partly because he tries to pander to readers more than he tries to change them. Deutsch’s fan community is generally rather irrational even when they aren’t harassing me. They’re silly and arrogant on Twitter, and they also do things like form an Institute and publish books on topics they know little about: Curiosity – The Sovereign Child Contradicts Taking Children Seriously And they may be even less open to debate than Less Wrong or Effective Altruism.

Deutsch also talks about grand stuff like theories of everything and he broadly thinks his ideas are super important and high quality on many topics (not just for one or two specialities).

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I fear what too many people did with me (and with Deutsch and many others) is try to agree instead of giving critical feedback. I think a lot of responses are polarized between trying to agree or being broadly argumentative, and more mixed or nuanced responses are less common.

So I shared some stuff trying to get critical feedback and thought it had been exposed to people’s critical thinking when it hadn’t and they were just trying to learn it and agree with it even though it was tentative stuff I wanted to explore not teach. This came up with repeating things Deutsch told me (which, even if he believed them for many years with confidence, I still wanted to expose to critical scrutiny) and with some early-stages ideas of my own.

The argumentative people often don’t give good criticism either even when there are better arguments available on their side, which they don’t know about, don’t like, or don’t use for other reasons. So winning arguments with some people and getting praise from others doesn’t mean the ideas have been exposed to very good critical thinking even if everyone says they’re Popperians who did critical thinking.

Lots of people withhold intuitive, practical, or experience-based criticisms/disagreements/counter-examples when they are trying to be clever intellectuals and use logical philosophical arguments.