I attended the world’s only yeshiva that is explicitly more open to science and progress than the Orthodox movement for about a year. It is, e.g., co-educational, features openly gay and/or atheist faculty, and pays a certain amount of attention to higher literary criticism. Ironically, it is called the “Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem.”
While there, I had a chevruta partner for about two months. It functioned exactly as touted in the Wikipedia article, except that ultimately my partner and I realized that we had a fundamental disagreement about epistemology—he was willing to accept arguments with even minimal plausibility as long as they made him feel good, whereas I required significant plausibility. We parted ways with good will, but not mutual respect—he saw my insistence on evidence as stingy, and I saw his openness to unsupported traditional claims as irresponsible.
I disagree with JoshuaZ’s point about affective death spirals, because, at least at my yeshiva, time in chevruta alternated on a 1:1 basis with time spent in ‘seminar’ or ‘shiur’ groups of 10-12 students led by a senior faculty member, in which there was group discussion. Stupid or incoherent ideas were frequently (several times per seminar session) exposed as such by either the group or the faculty member. Moreover, people usually chose partners who had a different background or otherwise had something interesting and valuable to share...nobody really wanted to fly across the world and study texts with little commercial value just so that they could confirm their prior opinions as being correct. Thus, there was little opportunity for two people to permanently drift away into a radically (more) unrealistic point of view than the rest of the group.
I strongly encourage anyone who is interested to give rational chevrutas a try.
ultimately my partner and I realized that we had a fundamental disagreement about epistemology—he was willing to accept arguments with even minimal plausibility as long as they made him feel good, whereas I required significant plausibility. We parted ways with good will, but not mutual respect—he saw my insistence on evidence as stingy, and I saw his openness to unsupported traditional claims as irresponsible.
I’d say this reduction of the issues to a disagreement about epistemology is precisely the sort of thing we would expect based on Aumann’s Agreement Theorem. Did you happen to try discussing the means by which the priors originated, a la Robin Hanson’s argument? If so, what went wrong?
It’s kind of you to say so, but our disagreement went deeper than just having different priors. We used different functions to evaluate whether a given proposition was worthy of the adjective “true.” I suppose on LW everyone more or less aspires to be a perfect Bayesian, but at the yeshiva there was widespread disagreeement on what should count as true. Amazing though it may sound (har), we actually made decisions based on predictions about what would happen next based on other variables besides just what we actually expected to happen next—and we were proud of it. It was seen as generally a good and wise idea to make decisions based on factors like “consistency of this model with traditional models” or “compatibility of this model with feelings of spiritual uplift.” My partner and I just had a disagreement about to what degree these other factors should be allowed to intrude into ordinary decision-making.
As for discussing the means by which our value systems originated, no, we didn’t try it. We already knew a fair bit about each other’s background/history, and it seemed too condescending to pry into each others’ subconsciouses and say “Oh, you have this value system because of what happened to you as a kid.” I might try it now, very carefully, if something similar cropped up. I was 21 at the time; he was 18. It can be hard to analyze that stuff without being offensively rude until you’ve had a bit of life experience.
We used different functions to evaluate whether a given proposition was worthy of the adjective “true.”
Interesting. I’ve been thinking exactly that lately.
In the same way that Haidt finds different moral modalities, I suspect there are different truth modalities. And I expect hard wired pattern recognizers to be involved for the different moral and truth modalities.
I attended the world’s only yeshiva that is explicitly more open to science and progress than the Orthodox movement for about a year. It is, e.g., co-educational, features openly gay and/or atheist faculty, and pays a certain amount of attention to higher literary criticism. Ironically, it is called the “Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem.”
http://www.conservativeyeshiva.org/about/egalitarian-yeshiva-philosophy/
While there, I had a chevruta partner for about two months. It functioned exactly as touted in the Wikipedia article, except that ultimately my partner and I realized that we had a fundamental disagreement about epistemology—he was willing to accept arguments with even minimal plausibility as long as they made him feel good, whereas I required significant plausibility. We parted ways with good will, but not mutual respect—he saw my insistence on evidence as stingy, and I saw his openness to unsupported traditional claims as irresponsible.
I disagree with JoshuaZ’s point about affective death spirals, because, at least at my yeshiva, time in chevruta alternated on a 1:1 basis with time spent in ‘seminar’ or ‘shiur’ groups of 10-12 students led by a senior faculty member, in which there was group discussion. Stupid or incoherent ideas were frequently (several times per seminar session) exposed as such by either the group or the faculty member. Moreover, people usually chose partners who had a different background or otherwise had something interesting and valuable to share...nobody really wanted to fly across the world and study texts with little commercial value just so that they could confirm their prior opinions as being correct. Thus, there was little opportunity for two people to permanently drift away into a radically (more) unrealistic point of view than the rest of the group.
I strongly encourage anyone who is interested to give rational chevrutas a try.
I’d say this reduction of the issues to a disagreement about epistemology is precisely the sort of thing we would expect based on Aumann’s Agreement Theorem. Did you happen to try discussing the means by which the priors originated, a la Robin Hanson’s argument? If so, what went wrong?
It’s kind of you to say so, but our disagreement went deeper than just having different priors. We used different functions to evaluate whether a given proposition was worthy of the adjective “true.” I suppose on LW everyone more or less aspires to be a perfect Bayesian, but at the yeshiva there was widespread disagreeement on what should count as true. Amazing though it may sound (har), we actually made decisions based on predictions about what would happen next based on other variables besides just what we actually expected to happen next—and we were proud of it. It was seen as generally a good and wise idea to make decisions based on factors like “consistency of this model with traditional models” or “compatibility of this model with feelings of spiritual uplift.” My partner and I just had a disagreement about to what degree these other factors should be allowed to intrude into ordinary decision-making.
As for discussing the means by which our value systems originated, no, we didn’t try it. We already knew a fair bit about each other’s background/history, and it seemed too condescending to pry into each others’ subconsciouses and say “Oh, you have this value system because of what happened to you as a kid.” I might try it now, very carefully, if something similar cropped up. I was 21 at the time; he was 18. It can be hard to analyze that stuff without being offensively rude until you’ve had a bit of life experience.
Interesting. I’ve been thinking exactly that lately.
In the same way that Haidt finds different moral modalities, I suspect there are different truth modalities. And I expect hard wired pattern recognizers to be involved for the different moral and truth modalities.