It seems like you’re imagining a context that isn’t particularly conducive to making intellectual progress. Otherwise, why would it be the case that John feels the need to regularly argue for veganism? If it’s not obvious to the others that John’s not worth engaging with, they should double-crux and be done with it. The “needs” framing feels like a tell that talking, in this context, is mainly about showing that you have broadcast rights, rather than about informing others.
The main case I can imagine where a truth-tracking group should be rationing attention like this, is an emergency where there’s a time-sensitive question that needs to be answered, and things without an immediate bearing on it need to be suppressed for the duration.
The “needs” framing feels like a tell that talking, in this context, is mainly about showing that you have broadcast rights, rather than about informing others.
That’s because lots of talking is mainly about broadcast rights. Any doublecrux on this situation has to include both John’s explicit argument, AND his need for broadcast rights, or it won’t actually solve the underlying issue. He’ll fail to update, or choose another thing to continually bring up.
Pretending humans are only optimizing for truth is a recipe for spending lots of time having arguments that are pretend about one thing when they’re actually about broadcast rights or traumas.
The dialogue is portraying an organization that’s just realizing that the naive idea that more time spent on object level truths leads to more truth is wrong.
In the fully evolved form of the organization, someone (maybe even John himself) would have realized he had this need the first or second time it happened, and gone meta to address it. Then in the future, when it comes up, people could point out when it’s derailing the conversation in a way that puts John’s need above the need of the group to get to the truth. The organization would also set up times to debug, double Crux, or specifically address that need so that it wouldn’t keep coming up.
It seems like you’re imagining a context that isn’t particularly conducive to making intellectual progress. Otherwise, why would it be the case that John feels the need to regularly argue for veganism? If it’s not obvious to the others that John’s not worth engaging with, they should double-crux and be done with it. The “needs” framing feels like a tell that talking, in this context, is mainly about showing that you have broadcast rights, rather than about informing others.
The main case I can imagine where a truth-tracking group should be rationing attention like this, is an emergency where there’s a time-sensitive question that needs to be answered, and things without an immediate bearing on it need to be suppressed for the duration.
That’s because lots of talking is mainly about broadcast rights. Any doublecrux on this situation has to include both John’s explicit argument, AND his need for broadcast rights, or it won’t actually solve the underlying issue. He’ll fail to update, or choose another thing to continually bring up.
Pretending humans are only optimizing for truth is a recipe for spending lots of time having arguments that are pretend about one thing when they’re actually about broadcast rights or traumas.
The dialogue is portraying an organization that’s just realizing that the naive idea that more time spent on object level truths leads to more truth is wrong.
In the fully evolved form of the organization, someone (maybe even John himself) would have realized he had this need the first or second time it happened, and gone meta to address it. Then in the future, when it comes up, people could point out when it’s derailing the conversation in a way that puts John’s need above the need of the group to get to the truth. The organization would also set up times to debug, double Crux, or specifically address that need so that it wouldn’t keep coming up.
See this reply to Ruby for a more explicit argument in that vein:https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7vofFovKWPrnM7y9Q/appeal-to-consequence-value-tensions-and-robust#vgtQsT5dKCobNMAoJ