I sometimes see sharp knowledgeable well-meaning people persistently talk past each other in ways that seem substantially reducible by internalising Scott’s old comment
Success often feels like realizing that a topic you thought would have one clear answer actually has a million different answers depending on how you ask the question. You start with something like “did the economy do better or worse this year?”, you find that it’s actually a thousand different questions like “did unemployment get better or worse this year?” vs. “did the stock market get better or worse this year?” and end up with things even more complicated like “did employment as measured in percentage of job-seekers finding a job within six months get better” vs. “did employment as measured in total percent of workforce working get better?”. Then finally once you’ve disentangled all that and realized that the people saying “employment is getting better” or “employment is getting worse” are using statistics about subtly different things and talking past each other, you use all of the specific things you’ve discovered to reconstruct a picture of whether, in the ways important to you, the economy really is getting better or worse.
Imagine that the world was just a set of dots like this picture:
What happens then? Say Alice is told (or, because of psychological predilections, personal experiences or self interest, is more likely to internalize) that the world is a square (left picture), while Bob is told it’s a circle (right picture).
Alice and Bob now have differing ideas about which dots are the important ones, which are expressions of something fundamental (signal) and which are just isolated incidents (noise). They will be interested in and eager to talk about the dots that make up their preferred shape.
When Alice talks about any dot in the square she’s actually taking about the square and other dots are Beside The Point. When Bob talks about a dot that makes up the circle, he’s just ranting about some insignificant dot. If Alice is feeling uncharitable she might think Bob’s just talking about irrelevant dots because he doesn’t want to talk about the square. Bob thinks that Alice taking a great interest in dots in the square and dismisses dots in the circle is hypocritical.
Note that they don’t have to disagree on which dots exist or where they are. Savage political fights can happen without any factual disagreement or fundamental value difference.
There are of course more examples than capitalism. Like nature vs. nurture. “People’s behavior are the result of socialization that works to perpetuate power structures” and “people’s behavior are the result of biological impulses and instincts” are both partial truths. But the full truth is not “in the middle” but on another plane entirely. “History is determined by the actions of individuals” vs. “history is determined by large scale economic and technological forces.” “Art subverts the audience’s unexamined preconceptions” vs. “art is the creation of transcendent beauty.” “Sex is about satisfying basic, impersonal appetites” vs. “sex is an act of intimacy and an expression of love.” “Ethics is about maximizing happiness” vs. “ethics is about doing your duty”. “Science works by accumulating knowledge about the world, asymptotically approaching perfect correctness” vs. “science works by replacing one paradigm with another in a series of revolutions.” “Moral rules and norms are symmetrical, exactly the same for everyone” vs. “Moral rules are there to protect the weak, favoring them over the strong.”
I sometimes see sharp knowledgeable well-meaning people persistently talk past each other in ways that seem substantially reducible by internalising Scott’s old comment
and Nerst’s old passage