[ I responded to an older, longer version of cousin_it’s comment here, which was very different from what it looks like at present; right now, my comment doesn’t make a whole lot of sense without that context, but I’ll leave it I guess ]
This is a fascinating, alternative perspective!
If this is what LW is for, then I’ve misjudged it and don’t yet know what to make of it.
To me, the game isn’t about changing minds, but about exchanging interesting ideas to mutual benefit. Zero-sum tugs of war are for political subreddits.
I disagree with the frame.
What I’m into is having a community steered towards seeking truth together. And this is NOT a zero-sum game at all. Changing people’s minds so that we’re all more aligned with truth seems infinite-sum to me.
Why? Because the more groundwork we lay for our foundation, the more we can DO.
Were rockets built by people who just exchanged interesting ideas for rocket-building but never bothered to check each other’s math? We wouldn’t have gotten very far if this is where we stayed. So resolving each layer of disagreement led to being able to coordinate on how to build rockets and then building them.
Similarly with rationality. I’m interested in changing your mind about a lot of things. I want to convince you that I can and am seeing things in the universe that, if we can agree on them one way or another, would then allow us to move to the next step, where we’d unearth a whole NEW set of disagreements to resolve. And so forth. That is progress.
I’m willing to concede that LW might not be for this thing, and that seems maybe fine. It might even be better!
But I’m going to look the thing somewhere, if not here.
Yup! That totally makes sense (the stuff in the link) and the thing about the coins.
Also not what I’m trying to talk about here.
I’m not interested in sharing posteriors. I’m interested in sharing the methods for which people arrive at their posteriors (this is what Double Crux is all about).
So in the fair/unfair coin example in the link, the way I’d “change your mind” about whether a coin flip was fair would be to ask, “You seem to think the coin has a 39% chance of being unfair. What would change your mind about that?”
If the answer is, “Well it depends on what happens when the coin is flipped.” And let’s say this is also a Double Crux for me.
At this point we’d have to start sharing our evidence or gathering more evidence to actually resolve the disagreement. And once we did, we’d both converge towards one truth.
[ I responded to an older, longer version of cousin_it’s comment here, which was very different from what it looks like at present; right now, my comment doesn’t make a whole lot of sense without that context, but I’ll leave it I guess ]
This is a fascinating, alternative perspective!
If this is what LW is for, then I’ve misjudged it and don’t yet know what to make of it.
I disagree with the frame.
What I’m into is having a community steered towards seeking truth together. And this is NOT a zero-sum game at all. Changing people’s minds so that we’re all more aligned with truth seems infinite-sum to me.
Why? Because the more groundwork we lay for our foundation, the more we can DO.
Were rockets built by people who just exchanged interesting ideas for rocket-building but never bothered to check each other’s math? We wouldn’t have gotten very far if this is where we stayed. So resolving each layer of disagreement led to being able to coordinate on how to build rockets and then building them.
Similarly with rationality. I’m interested in changing your mind about a lot of things. I want to convince you that I can and am seeing things in the universe that, if we can agree on them one way or another, would then allow us to move to the next step, where we’d unearth a whole NEW set of disagreements to resolve. And so forth. That is progress.
I’m willing to concede that LW might not be for this thing, and that seems maybe fine. It might even be better!
But I’m going to look the thing somewhere, if not here.
(I had a mathy argument here, pointing to this post as a motivation for exchanging ideas instead of changing minds. It had an error, so retracted.)
Yup! That totally makes sense (the stuff in the link) and the thing about the coins.
Also not what I’m trying to talk about here.
I’m not interested in sharing posteriors. I’m interested in sharing the methods for which people arrive at their posteriors (this is what Double Crux is all about).
So in the fair/unfair coin example in the link, the way I’d “change your mind” about whether a coin flip was fair would be to ask, “You seem to think the coin has a 39% chance of being unfair. What would change your mind about that?”
If the answer is, “Well it depends on what happens when the coin is flipped.” And let’s say this is also a Double Crux for me.
At this point we’d have to start sharing our evidence or gathering more evidence to actually resolve the disagreement. And once we did, we’d both converge towards one truth.