Informal arguments were fine. The harder case is when you struggle to put an intuition into words. Then, no clear guidance. I’ve never seen any intellectuals give much guidance for that besides my intuition articles.
this seems like the hardest version of the critic-pool problem. you’ve got the people, they’ve got relevant information, but they can’t get it to you.
thinking about it like a system design problem: the incoming signal from people is naturally very noisy, timid, and informal. if you have messy inputs that contain vital data, you usually have to write a parser that’s forgiving enough to extract the signal without just throwing an exception.
but from reading Paths Forward and the debate policies, they seem optimized for inputs that are already highly rigorous, confident, and formalized.
do you think there was a structural mismatch there? like, if an error-correcting system’s parser rejects low-confidence or half-formed intuitions, how does it avoid filtering out the exact people who might be holding the missing pieces?
People should be open to learning from informal discussion, but a lot of them already try to be (including people who are bad at it). One way to approach this problem is to write about biases, rationality, fallibility and intellectual tolerance. This has been tried but there is certainly room for better writing.
Another approach is to set up an error correction system with guarantees in it. Debate policies do this.
The two approaches are compatible. Both can be used at once.
A person with a debate policy can be as friendly and relaxed with the rules as they want. They can have informal discussions, talk to people who don’t meet all policy requirements, talk more than their policy requires, help improve arguments made by critics, etc.
However, all of those efforts are subject to potential systematic bias. Debate policies have the ability to overrule one’s own judgment. This has advantages for combatting bias/errors because your judgment may be biased/wrong.
Policy guarantees and being overruled also have downsides and dangers. It’s important to put limits on this stuff.
The case of a critic who has a criticism ready and can argue it is a relatively easy case which a restricted debate policy can cover. Most intellectuals usually screw it up, so I think this would be a big improvement even though most living people aren’t prepared to argue their points effectively.
Debate policies are meant for people who claim they can help/correct you, not for people seeking help/teaching/mentoring (which, for a skilled public intellectual, is what friendly, informal conversations with people without well-formulated criticisms usually turn into). Policies for helping others have to be more restricted and guarded or people will take up all your time, at least if you’re popular. You don’t want to have a policy making you teach someone who your best judgment says isn’t a good person to invest that effort in.
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i think that’s the crux then. the guaranteed channel was mainly for people who could already formulate a criticism well, while the people carrying the missing signal were often in the weaker category: low-confidence, half-formed, intuitive, practical, experience-based.
if so, doesn’t that mean the guaranteed part of the system was protecting against one class of failure while leaving the key failure mode in the discretionary/judgment-heavy part?
in other words, the place where your own judgment could be overruled was not the place where the missing criticisms were most likely to appear.
I don’t agree. I think there are thousands of people who could make effective arguments. If a thousand popular intellectuals had debate policies, I think they would get useful corrections from their audiences that they aren’t getting now. That would expose debate policy opportunities to millions of people – vastly more than have read my debate policy.
I would personally give out a lot of corrections if intellectuals had debate policies, but I really don’t think I’m the only one.
maybe those are two different questions though.
one is whether widespread debate policies would help lots of intellectuals compared to the status quo. i can easily believe yes.
the other is what the main bottleneck was in your own case.
from your recantation, the missing criticisms seem to have often been intuitive, practical, experience-based, low-confidence, or otherwise not well-formulated. if that is right, then it sounds like the main problem in your case was not the lack of a guaranteed channel for already-effective arguers. it was whether weaker signals could get through in a usable form at all.
so even if debate policies would help with one class of errors, were they aimed at the actual bottleneck in your case?
People were welcome to post informally. I had a forum and was talkative. Prior to the harassment, I allowed anonymous posting with no paywall without even registering an account. Yeah debate policies don’t cover all this but I was doing other things too.
i’m asking about reliability, not mere permission.
if the missing criticism was often low-confidence, intuitive, practical, hard to formulate, and socially awkward to raise, then what made that informal channel likely to surface it reliably rather than just leaving it to chance?
isn’t that where the real bottleneck was?
I was working on those things too. That’s part of why I figured out the ideas in the intuition articles. If you have suggestions for more to do, let me know.
i think i see the issue more clearly now.
having two lanes is not enough by itself. what matters is where the stronger structure was, relative to the kind of criticism that actually needed to get through.
the more explicit structure seems to have been on the already articulate debate lane.
but the criticism you later said mattered most seems to have lived in the weaker signal lane.
so what i’m trying to understand is whether that weaker signal lane had any comparably strong anti-bias structure of its own, or whether that was still the part where things mostly depended on your judgment, since in a more informal and casual setting it was still on you to notice whether a weak signal should be taken seriously.
Yeah, judgment is used there, plus other things which are not guarantees, such as a general policy of allowing free speech on my forum and responding to questions and criticism. I don’t know how to do better. From my point of view, having guarantees in some cases is a big improvement over the status quo of having them in no cases.
i think there may be a further issue here. i’m trying to locate where the bottleneck is. even tho the weaker signal lane existed, the setup around you may have made that lane weaker than ordinary informal discussion would be for most people. if someone sees you as unusually rational or intellectually high status, it seems easy for that to create exactly the kind of self-doubt you mentioned earlier. things like he probably already thought of this, if i can’t explain it well i’m probably just confused, etc.
that would mean the weaker signal lane was not just less structured than the debate lane, it was also socially weaker than it looked. that looks like the real bottleneck to me… not just that it lacked formal guarantees.
yeah that’s a concern.
I wonder why that is. I think people struggle with connecting ideas and situations maybe? Also maybe people are just so used to it in their workplace they don’t notice? Maybe the timing of when they learned ideas matters? Though I’m a but unsure on that. I could notice sexism at work even though I had the idea that sexism is rare prior to working, but I could see someone whos used to certain behaviors and not giving them extra thought after learning more.
Also for the kind of person who doesn’t notice the sexism at work, I wonder how much is also people compartmentalizing(?) ideas and stuff. The kind of thing where they read something and “understand” it on paper but fail to apply it to the real world. They may read that sexism is or is not an issue at work but don’t spend any time trying to observe any of the stuff at work for whether its sexist or not.
Hmm. Something else: why doesn’t someone who sees, idk, a blatant example of sexism contradict the sentiment that sexism is rare? maybe their used to it so they fail to think of it as sexism or maybe they see the event but assume its a rare occurrence and if they see it often they may think its localized to their work environment. after all sexism being rare is compatible with any one particular workplace being super sexist so long as everyone else is not. maybe that kind of assumption is going on in the head?
thats interesting, makes you realize(?)/see that no one/not many people are interested in debate or have good arguments.
really? in what way? i guess I could look at some of the stuff thats claimed that in the past and actually try to understand it. i think the usual conservative claim against that was that you literally could not pay a man and women differently for the same job. so like at my Starbucks job you get paid by your position and tenure. so theres no real chance for discrimination in pay.
This reminded me of a clip I saw recently of her where she said that she knows and doesn’t care about how corrupt Trump is and just cares about illegal immigrants getting deported.
really? I wonder how that argument goes, maybe something like richer white people can afford cards and by having a car central country you can control access to certain things? i get that i think but i ~wonder, is the claim that the reason a train system fails to be built in xyz location is because of racism? and not strict special interests of car companies for example?
in practice too, right? not just theoretically.
i mean that it did reduce how much corrective power that weaker signal lane had.