There are multiple reasons. You’re doing fine.
I’m continuing the Resolving Conflicting Ideas article by going through its child article Curiosity – We Can Always Act on Non-Criticized Ideas :
Consider situations in the general form:
X disagrees with (conflicts with) Y about Z.
Let’s consider a more specific example.
X is some idea, e.g. that I’ll have pizza for dinner.
Y is a criticism of X, e.g. that I haven’t got enough money to afford pizza.
So, what happens? I use an option that I have no criticism of. I get a dinner I can afford.
Now we’ll add more detail to make it harder. This time, X also includes criticism of all non-X dinner plans, e.g. that they won’t taste like pizza (and pizza tastes good, which is a good thing).
Now I can’t simply choose some other dinner which I can afford, because I have a criticism of that.
X = X1 + X2 . . .
X1 = have pizza for dinner
X2 = non-pizza things don’t taste like pizza and pizza tastes good
Y = I haven’t got enough money for pizza
W = Get a non-pizza dinner that you can afford
Y is a criticism of X. X2 is a criticism of W.
So we can’t afford pizza. But we can’t get something non-pizza.
To solve this, I could refute the second part of X and change my preferences, e.g. by figuring out that something else besides pizza is good too. Or I could acquire some more money. Or adjust my budget.
Right. Refuting X2 means that we could get something else for dinner. Refuting Y (by e.g getting more money or adjusting budget) means we could get pizza.
What if I get stuck? I want pizza, because it’s delicious, but I also don’t want pizza, because I’m too poor. Whatever I do I have a criticism of it. I try to think of ideas like adjusting my budget, or eating something else, but I don’t see how to make them work.
So getting stuck here means: not having a way to proceed that you don’t have criticisms of. That makes sense and resembles what stuck normally means to me. You get stuck when you’re e.g. playing a video game, and you’ve tried a bunch of things that haven’t worked, and you can’t think of something to try yet (that you don’t think will fail).
All conflicts, as we’ve been discussing, always raise new problems. In particular:
X disagrees with (conflicts with) Y about Z.
If we don’t solve this directly, it raises the problem:
Given X disagrees with (conflicts with) Y about Z, then what should I do?
This is a new problem. And it has several positive features:
Solving it directly I think would be like how in the first pizza example the idea of getting something you can afford solves it.
Likewise, in the second pizza example, if we refute Y or X2, that would solve the conflict directly.
Given X disagrees with (conflicts with) Y about Z, then what should I do?
I think I’m a little confused here, because this is a similar question to what you’d ask yourself if you were going to try and solve it directly, like the examples above. (I might be making a mistake about what solving it ‘directly’ means here.) Like with the first pizza example one, the question you ask yourself is: given I can’t afford pizza for dinner, what should I do? So it seems like the problem raised when directly solving it, and the problem raised if you don’t solve it directly, are the same?
Maybe putting it like this makes the distinction clearer:
- Given X disagrees with (conflicts with) Y about Z, and we’re stuck on that conflict, then what should I do?
Because I think being stuck means being unable to directly solve the conflict (?).
So it’s like: what do we do if we get stuck?
The title of this article is “we can always act on non-criticized ideas”. In the parent article Resolving Conflicting Ideas, Elliot says:
In We Can Always Act on Non-Criticized Ideas, I talk about how there are always win/win solutions available that none of our ideas have objections to (criticisms of).
I think the point of this article is that we never have to stay stuck, or act on ideas we have criticisms of (which is related to being stuck, and the concept of TCS-coercion).
We can always ask: what we can do given we’re stuck? and find some new idea that we aren’t conflicted about. We can always avoid acting on criticised ideas by raising that problem of what to do when we’re stuck.
I’ll stop there for now.
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Read it as
Given X disagrees with (conflicts with) Y about Z, and that conflict remains unresolved, then what should I do?
yes
we can always ask what to do given we’re stuck about some specific, finite thing (or list of things). being stuck on some things, some sub-points, is different than being stuck globally, so it’s still possible to be unstuck (regarding what actions to take in your life) in the big picture even without solving those particular problems.
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Cool! I get it then.
Continuing with We Can Always Act on Non-Criticized Ideas
This is a new problem. And it has several positive features:
- This technique can be repeated unlimited times. If I use the technique once then get stuck again, I can use the technique again to get unstuck.
Sure, if you keep getting stuck, you can keep raising another problem that accounts for that.
- In general, any solutions we think of for this new problem will not be criticized by any of the criticisms we already had in mind. This makes it relatively easy to come up with a solution we don’t have any criticism of. All those criticisms we were having a hard time with are not directly relevant.
Thats good. That’s what you want in this situation: a new idea that isn’t criticised by the existing ideas. You’re trying to find a new uncriticised way to proceed. It’s not obvious to me why this is though.
- Every application of this technique provides an easier problem than we had before. So we don’t just get a new problem, but also an easier one. This, combined with the ability to use the technique repeatedly, lets us make our problem situation as easy as we like.
In the context of disagreements between persons, the problems this technique generates progressively tend towards less cooperation, which is easier. In the context of ideas within a person, it’s basically the same thing but a little harder to understand.
Some thoughts:
If using this technique means less cooperation between people, what does it mean for conflicts within a person? What does less cooperation within a person mean?
What if there is a conflict over using this technique versus solving the problem directly? I can imagine this happening within a person and within a relationship. One party wants to put more effort into solving the problem directly and one party wants to try something else. It seems that this technique could be a way to avoid solving lots of problems (whilst perhaps not coercing anyone). Should this technique be used sparingly?
This technique doesn’t seem like something you want to be doing all the time. It seems like you should put effort into resolving the conflicts directly. Within yourself you should perhaps put the most effort in, and then with select significant other people (spouse, child, close friends).
What do I think the point of this article is?
If CF says to seek win/win solutions, and reject picking winners/losers, it needs to be actually possible to find win/win solutions. I think this article is showing us that this is technically possible but also that there is a promising useful technique you can use.
The approach involves raising a new problem of what to do given you’re stuck on a specific problem. This technique can be repeated infinitely if you continue to get stuck. It generally avoids previous criticisms by raising new issues. It tends toward easier problems because it tends toward less cooperation between ideas/people.
(This makes me think. Cooperation can be hard because ideas/peoples ideas can conflict. (Rational) cooperation requires resolving conflicts in moral ideas (because ideas about what to do together are moral ideas e.g how to proceed/act). Resolving conflicts in moral ideas is truth seeking (since the truth has no conflicts pursuing a state of moral knowledge with no conflicts is truth seeking). Pursuing rational cooperation requires solving moral problems and building moral knowledge. This seems like a reason that rational cooperation is valuable and moral: it’s a way to provide opportunities to improve moral knowledge.)
What is the problem this article is trying to solve?
- CF recommends seeking win/win solutions to problems.
- Problem: Are win/win solutions always possible?
- Solution: Yes. We can always act on non-criticised ideas.
- Problem: How can we find win/win solutions?
- Solution: One way is the technique in the article “We Can Always Act on Non-Criticized Ideas”
- Problem: Are win/win solutions always possible?
Being stuck globally sounds bad. Does that mean you’re stuck on everything? Can that actually happen to people? Or does it mainly appear conceptually/abstractly, like here in a discussion of this topic?
In short: simpler, less ambitious solutions; lower standards.
It, or at least a close cousin, is used all the time. Consider: X and Y conflict. Figuring out the answer would require research. But I don’t care much. I don’t want to spend hours researching that. So I figure out what to do without research. People do this many times per day.
You aren’t exactly stuck here: you could do the research and probably figure out an answer. But in the context of resources limitations, plus not considering it important, you are basically stuck and can’t reach a conclusion about it.
We make decisions with limited knowledge and research every day.
Realistically, people aren’t fully stuck on pretty much anything given zero resource constraints. They could go to the library and read literally every book and that might help. They haven’t done that yet, so they have a way open to try to make more progress on ~any issue. So when people are “stuck” it’s always related to resource constraints, to not knowing efficient next steps and to prioritizing other things.
People get stuck in ways with ~global reach, like believing “anything that goes against the cult I joined is bad”. So they e.g. reject ~all the relevant books at the library. But problem solving is still possible.
Interesting yeah I think that’s true. I suppose being able to figure out which conflicts are important and deserve your resources and interest is an important problem and skill. I can imagine TOC ideas would be relevant to that problem.
Possible so long as they aren’t fully globally stuck? That makes sense.
Every time people eat, they have not fully worked out all the conflicts between all the published ideas about dietary health (not even all the popular and well known ones). They’ve probably done some informal research (e.g. read a few magazine articles) but could do a lifetime more research and still not figure it all out. So they have to decide what to eat given they don’t have all the perfect, non-contradictory answers about what’s optimal for health. People routinely face issues like “given an unresolved conflict between the mediterranean diet and the carnivore diet (and both of them conflict with the vegan diet and others), and given I won’t resolve these conflicts before this meal, then what should I eat?”
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The next article is Curiosity – Aubrey de Grey Discussion, 5
My initial plan is to read just the part of the post that introduces the arbitration model. I used find to find the word arbitration. It’s a big post and I don’t want to get stuck. I might change my plan and read more if I don’t have enough context.
Elliot introduces the article in the following paragraph of Resolving Conflicting Ideas
In part 5 of my Aubrey de Grey discussion, I wrote “Think of yourself as the arbiter, and the conflicting ideas as the different sides in the arbitration. Your goal is not to pick a winner. That’s what justificationism does. Your goal as arbiter, instead, is to resolve the conflict – help the sides figure out a win/win outcome.” Read the post for more explanation of the arbitration model. The whole discussion with de Grey is good, too.
The context that the arbitration idea came up in in the de Grey discussion is Elliot explaining a non-justificationist epistemology.
He is contrasting how a justificationist arbiter, and a non-justificationist arbiter would arbitrate a dispute/conflict between people.
A justificationist arbiter would hear each side, give each a score, and declare who wins and who loses.
A non-justificationist arbiter would try to find a new idea that all parties prefer to their original ideas.
The justificationist arbiter, in picking winners and losers, doesn’t resolve conflicts. “The loser is unsatisfied, still disagrees, and there’s still a conflict, so the arbitration failed.” There is still an active conflict between the ideas if you just pick one to win.
The non-justificationist arbiter, tries to resolve the conflict such that there is no active conflict. In successful arbitration, the parties to the conflict have dropped their conflicting positions and now hold a new common position (a common preference).
(Another way you could arbitrate a conflict is by getting all parties to compromise: to make mutual concessions. This is lose/lose because everyone gets a worse option than their preference; no one idea “wins”.)
I think I understand the idea of the arbiter to a conflict. An arbiter is not an advocate for either side, they are a third party tasked with resolving the conflict.
CF says that an arbiter should attempt to find a solution that all parties prefer to their initial, conflicting positions.
CF says we can imagine ourselves as the arbiter in conflicts between our internal ideas, and ideas between people, and that we should treat conflicts like the (non-justificationist) arbiter would. Treat the conflict as unresolved, be impartial, and help seek solutions that all sides prefer.
Earlier in the article Elliot says:
Justificationism is a mistake because it fundamentally does not solve the epistemology problem of conflicts between ideas. If two ideas conflict, and one is assigned a higher score, they still conflict.
Cool so part of the background to why CF says we should seek win/win solutions is that the justificationist alternative doesn’t solve the problem of resolving conflicting ideas. To CF, nothing short of win/win solutions can actually resolve conflicts between ideas (and therefore solve the important epistemological problem.)
TCS was wrong to be so anti-compromise.
Lots of concessions are non-coercive to make. Often, people’s initial position is not the minimum that they’re OK with. It’s just what they want, but a bit less in some ways would be fine with them. Only certain types of concessions would ruin things for people because e.g. that concession violates a principle they care about or crosses some breakpoint they don’t want to cross. But some concessions don’t cross a breakpoint, and the person’s initial ask had a margin of error built in, so it’s OK.
Sometimes people don’t even think of a concession, and that’s why it wasn’t included in their initial preference, and as soon as they hear it suggested they say “yeah sure, that’s no problem for me, so you can have that”. This is still commonly called a “concession” and “compromising” in normal terminology as long as there’s a (non-decisive) quantitative negative involved. Like if you say “oh sure, I’ll pay $1005 instead of $1000 to cover your bus fare – I thought exactly $1000 was a fair price for this but I hadn’t considered minor travel costs” that is reasonably called a “concession” b/c you end up with less money afterwards.
Lots of compromises are bad, and also lots are fine.
More broadly, instead of seeking “common preferences” meaning maximally preferred outcomes, people should generally seek outcomes they have no decisive criticisms of, and be happy with those without trying to maximize how perfect it is. You generally shouldn’t reject a solution because some other solution would give you marginally more without crossing any breakpoints. Such details can be negotiated sometimes for one or a few factors, but most factors need to be viewed as errors or non-errors to reduce complexity. Wanting larger amounts of excess capacity on many factors, and rejecting outcomes over that b/c you’d prefer more excess capacity so it isn’t your most preferred outcome, generally isn’t reasonable. Being that picky sabotages actually finding solutions that multiple people can agree on, and the whole maximizing lots of stuff to get your ideal outcome mindset is wrong.
You did fine summarizing. I think it’s better to look at the main goal as finding a new idea that all parties have no decisive objections to. This could be a little worse for them in some non-decisive ways compared to their original ideas. (You could say that getting the other person to agree makes it better. I prefer something that the other guy will actually agree to. But if you use that logic extensively it makes the concept of finding something that you prefer kinda misleading/confusing/unhelpful.)
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TCS seemed very ambitious on compromising (I don’t remember well exactly what TCS said about it.) Rand talked about not compromising on principles, that seemed more realistic. Seems like CF has good contributions to make to the understanding of compromises, especially on every-day non-principle stuff. I think it would be a great article topic. I would be interested.
I recognise this from my life. In fact I think it happens a lot. There are lots of times where making concessions is actually fine, helps with problem solving, and doesn’t feel bad or seem coercive. That makes sense that those occasions are when the concession doesn’t cross a breakpoint.
So there is concession in the sense of the option moving toward a breakpoint (quantitative negative), and there is concession in the sense of it crossing a breakpoint (qualitative negative). The former are non-coercive, the latter coercive.
When you’re closely collaborating with someone, sometimes a non-coercive concession on your part can make an option make or break for you collaborator (or vice versa). When I had encountered situations like this in the past, I worried that I was being lazy or unprincipled when I was willing to make a concession, when another wasn’t. But now I see that maybe it’s because of having different breakpoints.
Yes I totally recognise this.
Cool yes I agree. I can see how being so anti-compromise would be wrong. Making concessions that aren’t decisive seems like a common and reasonable way of solving problems.
Right, so aim for solutions with no decisive objections, not necessarily the most preferred solutions. I can see that rejecting a solution because another would give you marginally more isn’t a reason to reject it. It sounds like there you’d need extra factors or different breakpoints to help you distinguish them.
(I don’t quite understand the concept of excess capacity and how it’s used in this context, but I think it has something to do with how far a factor is from the breakpoint, like how much a factor can handle variance without crossing a breakpoint? I recognise it from Goldratt/TOC. I’m sure I’ll come across it in the near future so will leave it for now.)
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Note the old TCS glossary says:
Common preference
A common preference is a solution to a problem, or resolution of a disagreement, that all parties prefer to their prima facie positions, and to all other candidate solutions they can think of.
This suggests maximization of goodness by saying a solution has to be preferred, by every person involved, to all other candidate solutions.
Excess capacity basically means excess past a breakpoint.
In a simple production scenario with two people, I make 1 knife blade per day, and you can make up to 3 knife handles per day. You have excess capacity of 2 handles per day.
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Just an update: I’ve been away for a week visiting relatives. I’m back and have been working on conflicting ideas stuff today but don’t have something ready to post yet.
Also, I haven’t forgotten about your last reply in the Milton Friedman and Maximising Profits thread. I’m still interested in that topic. I started working on a postmortem of the Multi-Factor Decision Making Math article like you suggested. I don’t have anything ready to post yet.
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From Resolving Conflicting Ideas:
In Treat Yourself Rationally, I talk about not assuming which side is wrong when you have internal conflicts. Don’t delegitimize parts of yourself as “hang ups” or “irrationalities” and then try to suppress or fight them. Use reason to truth-seek as always. (The same thing applies to disagreements with other people. Coming up with excuses for why disagreements (with yourself or others) shouldn’t be dealt with using rational arguments is one of the major forms of irrationality in the world.)
People (myself included) often just assume which side to an internal conflict is wrong or right. They have irrational methods for preferring some of their ideas over others (like they might prefer an idea because it’s more explicit, or more culturally normal etc). Dealing with conflicting ideas should be approached the same for internal as well as external ideas; you should seek to resolve the conflict by finding a solution that no parties to the conflict have a problem with. Being prejudiced about which side to a internal conflict is right mistreats the dissenting part of you, like it would mistreat a dissenting person in a conflict.
From Treat Yourself Rationally:
You can’t tell whether an idea you have is an irrationality or a good idea until you resolve the conflict between it and your other ideas (the conflict is the thing that’s making you suspect it’s an irrationality).
Right. ‘Irrational’ and ‘good’ are evaluations of ideas. The existence of a conflict only tells you that there is an error in your ideas somewhere. It doesn’t tell you what/where the error is. In this way the conflict is symmetrical until it is resolved, which breaks the symmetry and allows you to evaluate the ideas.
From Treat Yourself Rationally:
If you declare something an irrationality, you’re saying you already know the answer to the conflict.
Yeah you’re claiming to know an idea about where the error(s) causing the conflict is.
From Treat Yourself Rationally:
You’re predicting what your answer to the conflict will be. But as DD has explained, the growth of knowledge isn’t predictable (if you could predict the answers, then you’d already know them – there’s no way to predict something is the right answer without knowing it’s the right answer).
This is a little confusing for me. I’ll try freewrite.
So say you’re making a claim about the outcome of a future process (a process of evaluating an idea/resolving a conflict) which depends on knowledge creation. Since the process involves knowledge creation it is fundamentally unpredictable. In BOI Deutsch calls predictions that depend on knowledge growth ‘prophesy’.
Okay wait. So, when you declare something an irrationality without having resolved the conflict, you’re claiming to know what the outcome of the process of resolving the conflict would be, but without performing that process. That process involves knowledge creation, and so can’t be predicted without already having the knowledge.
I’m finding it hard to look at this issue in this way. Maybe it doesn’t seem to me like someone is making a prediction when they’re being prejudiced.
Is a claim about the outcome of a process and a prediction of the outcome of a process the same thing? I can’t see that they aren’t. I just thought this might be somewhere I am getting confused.
When you judge something as irrational, without having resolved the conflict, you’re claiming to know the outcome of a fundamentally unpredictable process (resolving a conflict i.e creating knowledge).
Okay. I think I get it? I may be focussing on details too much. I think I have been doing that because I want to develop more sensitivity to when I don’t understand things. I suspect I can gloss over things I don’t understand.
I think the point here of the article is that you shouldn’t declare parts of yourself good or bad. You don’t whether they are good or bad until you’ve resolved the conflict. People are tempted to do this when they have internal conflicts, but being prejudiced about your ideas is irrational. It doesn’t make any sense. You need to resolve internal conflicts by seeking win/win solutions that the conflicting parts of you don’t have objections to.
Judgments about ideas are only available after the conflict they were involved in is resolved.
Elliot says at the end of Treat Yourself Rationally::
the point is: you have to deal with all disagreements by the normal methods of reason. don’t assume one side is the static meme side and then treat it like an enemy combatant and start making exceptions to reason.
Right. Don’t make exceptions to reason. Treating parts of you as bad and fighting them means making exceptions to reason. You’re making claims you can’t rationally make. You’re being biased.
This seems like something that is really worth practising. Recognising your internal conflicts, noticing biased self-judgement, and remembering that you should be neutral. I’ve had glimpses of thinking about my own day-to-day conflicts like this and it is calming and reassuring.
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Besides being able to resolve conflicts, it’s also important to be able to live and act with unresolved conflicts. This involves considering “Given X and Y conflict, and I haven’t resolved it, what actions should I take about Z today?” It’s important to be able to stop engaging in the conflict, stop arguing about why X or Y is correct, and take a neutral perspective.
Is this not just a variant of raising a new problem given we’re stuck on a certain conflict? A way of indirectly resolving a conflict?
From Resolving Conflicting Ideas:
Coercion relates conflicting ideas to human suffering and provides context for the original problem-solving method I present in Avoiding Coercion. The method involves recursively backing off to less ambitious goals when you get stuck while facing time pressure. Rational thinking involves finding common preferences (non-coercive, win/win solutions) between your ideas. I also wrote Avoiding Coercion Clarification, and I connected coercion with rationality in Coercion and Critical Preferences.
Notes on Coercion
Suffering
- is mental
- is not caused by physical pain
- is when someone minds that e.g., they are in physical pain
- is mental pain
Some problems are distressing/painful, some aren’t. Coercion refers to the state of having a distressing problem; to having a problem that one minds. So coercion causes suffering; it causes mental pain.
What are the details on this state?
From Coercion:
Coercion is the psychological state of enacting one idea or impulse while a conflicting impulse is still active in one’s mind.
Coercion is the state of two or more personality strands being expressed in different options of a single choice such that one cannot see a way to choose without forsaking some part of his personality.
A state of coercion is one in which a person has two active theories that conflict, and is being forced to enact one prior to resolving the conflict.
Coercion broadly comes from acting despite having actively conflicting ideas.
ideas, impulses, personality strands, theories, are all ideas (roughly autonomous pieces of one’s mind).
From Coercion:
The idea being described here could be stated as “acting against your own will”. It has a contradictory element to it.
Freewrite:
Right. Someone else could force you to act against your own will, and you would suffer. That’s an idea outside your mind forcing your mind. The contradictory element is the conflicting/contradicting ideas.
Inside one mind. Interesting how acting against your own will would require ‘willpower’. This makes sense when you think of yourself consisting of different parts/ideas that each have their own ‘will’. When using ‘willpower’, one part of you forces another part of you to act against its will. Exercising ‘willpower’ is difficult for a lot of people, why? Because it causes suffering.
Coercion:
- comes about from having to act despite having conflicting ideas
- involves perceived time constraints
- you never have to act unless it’s under time constraints/pressure. They don’t have to be real objective time constraints too. You can just think that there are. In fact, it seems lie real objective time constraints wouldn’t cause coercion until you knew about them (?)
We can want to do many things, but can only choose one thing to do right now. If you can’t make peace between your ideas for what to do right now, you can’t proceed without coercion. Making peace means, making an idea that doesn’t forsake the different parts of you that want to do different things. Like how in the example you don’t have to forsake biking by deciding to run now and bike later.
From Coercion:
if I can’t see any way to make peace between my theories, and propose something to do which they are all compatible with, then coercion will result. In general, this isn’t too hard. My valuing biking doesn’t involve wanting to do it all the time.
(I think I have a problem related to this. I feel guilty when I spend my time on some things and feel like I should be spending that time on other things. This can lead to me kind of doing nothing. It can cause a kind of paralysis. Maybe part of me does think that if I’m not putting heaps of time into something that I shouldn’t be doing it; that valuing it does (or should) involve wanting to do it all the time. But that means maybe making no progress at all. I should probably be trying to make progress on the things I value even if it’s small.)
From Coercion:
My theory about biking is more reasonable than that, and only makes me want to bike part of the time.
It does seem unreasonable to think you have to commit a lot of time on something or nothing. Because if you value it then you should pursue it, even if you can’t afford to spend heaps of time on it. You should try to make progress on it. If you just don’t do it, then you forsake the value. Shouldn’t the question of valuing be; should I pursue this? not, can I pursue this? Thinking you have to go all in on something maybe replaces the question of what to value with whether you can afford to value it.
Why is knowing about coercion important? Because coercion is what causes suffering. All suffering is mental; it involves a mind regarding something as a problem. Not all problems cause suffering, but the problems that do are due to coercion. Coercion, roughly, is a state of having to act on actively conflicting ideas. If we can resolve these conflicts in time, we can act on ideas that we have no problems with and so avoid coercion and suffering.
Yes it’s related.
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You could be at peace with doing your best in a bad situation. External force can’t guarantee coercion. (Torture does reliably cause coercion.) Without victim blaming, the coercion involves conflicting ideas like “I must go along with this” and “I don’t want to go along with this; there must be another way”.
For example, many people are able to pay their taxes non-coercively, even if they disapprove of taxes and even though the government forces them to pay. Why? Because they aren’t conflicted about it. They’re used to it, and non-payment isn’t tempting or appealing to them (too risky).
yeah. if you had 30 seconds left to make a decision, but you had no idea there was a rush, you’d just calmly keep considering and miss the deadline (or maybe calmly make the decision on time by dumb luck).
FYI the text you quoted spoke of biking all the time, not committing a lot of time to biking.
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