I agree with you on what it feels like when things are solved, but not on what’s going on beneath the surface when it is, and therefore not on how to get (or stay) there.
“Not about dominant contests” is actually what good jiu jitsu gyms feel like too. The bit in your chess example where people offer helpful suggestions to their “opponents” actually happens (too much, sometimes). When your attention isn’t so focused on “Who is better”, then you start to disidentify with the techniques performed and instead of hearing/saying “Wow, you’re so good” it turns into things like “Wow, that choke was so tight/unexpected/etc”, and you’re back to talking about jiu jitsu itself. This absolutely does work better when “I’ve had enough for now” isn’t taken as a dishonest and defensive response to ego bruising, and jiu jitsu gyms mostly succeed at this, though obviously not with 100% success. The point is that you can’t get there by fiat, and that attempting to force interpretations that might not jive with the evidence isn’t a solution.
It’s also worth noting that even in rationality discussions, the structure behind the solution is “Enough security to let ‘who better?’ fade into the background where people make their own private judgements without desire to thumb anyone’s scales or over-interpret”, not “The question is somehow rendered completely irrelevant and left uncomputed”. If the last several times you disagreed with someone, it turned out that the disagreement was because you failed to see something they saw, you’ll probably recognize that it makes more sense to prioritize “understanding their perspective” over “conveying your own”, at least until you have some specific reason to think that this time will be different. “Who is better?” is an over-simplification, and actually thinking in those terms would be a sign that your thinking is locked up, but it is an accurate oversimplification of “If I were to disagree with them, I would probably be wrong”, and these things are important to track. Because as much as it is a virtue to form our own beliefs and challenge supposed authorities, there is still the question of how much effort ought to be spent trying to understand and charitably frame the perspective offered by a certain person before dismissing it as “[most likely] wrong”. If you sign up for a class and your teacher says “Your objection is actually wrong, and we’ll go over that next week”, you’ll likely say “Okay”, for example, since you expect that to actually mean that your objection is likely wrong and will be addressed when it is appropriate. If you’re talking to some rando who has earned no credibility in your eyes, “Okay, I’ll listen to you for another week and trust that you’re likely right until then” is less likely, and for good reason.
It’s not that we want people to be able to “learn from pain of losing” instead of “learning without framing it as losing”. The latter is absolutely preferable, and unfortunately we cannot ensure it by fiat. We have to create norms that incentivize people to choose cooperative framings over adversarial framings.
One piece of that is to not remove the natural incentive to do so. If I have a polite conversation with you about why you took “my” toy truck, I might realize that was mistaken and we can stay friends, no harm no foul. If I come at you with an attitude about it, I’m going to feel much more humiliated when your case turns out to be rock solid and I look like a jerk, and that’s a strong incentive for me to be nice and charitable about things in the first place.
The concern I have with “leaving orbit” as an explicit way of saying “Oh no, I’m not losing here”, is that it allows people to be less careful to stay cooperative when they know they can always save face by denying they lost and that people will be expected to respect that. That’s not to say we need to force people to “admit when they’re losing”, and that is actually bad for the same reasons.
When you want people to stick on the object level and not worry with what may be implied about “who better?” because it doesn’t matter, then we want norms that refocus attention on the object level and discourage fretting over “who better?” because it doesn’t matter. Not “I tap out”, just “Good point, I’ll think about it”. Not “Definitely not tapping out, just leaving orbit”, just leaving orbit. When that doesn’t feel good because it “feels like losing”, then that’s the sign that things weren’t purely cooperative from the start, and I’m uneasy about enabling people to ignore that error signal, especially when dojos that have done a very good job solving that problem in (IMO) significantly harder scenarios have done the opposite.
I agree with you on what it feels like when things are solved, but not on what’s going on beneath the surface when it is, and therefore not on how to get (or stay) there.
“Not about dominant contests” is actually what good jiu jitsu gyms feel like too. The bit in your chess example where people offer helpful suggestions to their “opponents” actually happens (too much, sometimes). When your attention isn’t so focused on “Who is better”, then you start to disidentify with the techniques performed and instead of hearing/saying “Wow, you’re so good” it turns into things like “Wow, that choke was so tight/unexpected/etc”, and you’re back to talking about jiu jitsu itself. This absolutely does work better when “I’ve had enough for now” isn’t taken as a dishonest and defensive response to ego bruising, and jiu jitsu gyms mostly succeed at this, though obviously not with 100% success. The point is that you can’t get there by fiat, and that attempting to force interpretations that might not jive with the evidence isn’t a solution.
It’s also worth noting that even in rationality discussions, the structure behind the solution is “Enough security to let ‘who better?’ fade into the background where people make their own private judgements without desire to thumb anyone’s scales or over-interpret”, not “The question is somehow rendered completely irrelevant and left uncomputed”. If the last several times you disagreed with someone, it turned out that the disagreement was because you failed to see something they saw, you’ll probably recognize that it makes more sense to prioritize “understanding their perspective” over “conveying your own”, at least until you have some specific reason to think that this time will be different. “Who is better?” is an over-simplification, and actually thinking in those terms would be a sign that your thinking is locked up, but it is an accurate oversimplification of “If I were to disagree with them, I would probably be wrong”, and these things are important to track. Because as much as it is a virtue to form our own beliefs and challenge supposed authorities, there is still the question of how much effort ought to be spent trying to understand and charitably frame the perspective offered by a certain person before dismissing it as “[most likely] wrong”. If you sign up for a class and your teacher says “Your objection is actually wrong, and we’ll go over that next week”, you’ll likely say “Okay”, for example, since you expect that to actually mean that your objection is likely wrong and will be addressed when it is appropriate. If you’re talking to some rando who has earned no credibility in your eyes, “Okay, I’ll listen to you for another week and trust that you’re likely right until then” is less likely, and for good reason.
It’s not that we want people to be able to “learn from pain of losing” instead of “learning without framing it as losing”. The latter is absolutely preferable, and unfortunately we cannot ensure it by fiat. We have to create norms that incentivize people to choose cooperative framings over adversarial framings.
One piece of that is to not remove the natural incentive to do so. If I have a polite conversation with you about why you took “my” toy truck, I might realize that was mistaken and we can stay friends, no harm no foul. If I come at you with an attitude about it, I’m going to feel much more humiliated when your case turns out to be rock solid and I look like a jerk, and that’s a strong incentive for me to be nice and charitable about things in the first place.
The concern I have with “leaving orbit” as an explicit way of saying “Oh no, I’m not losing here”, is that it allows people to be less careful to stay cooperative when they know they can always save face by denying they lost and that people will be expected to respect that. That’s not to say we need to force people to “admit when they’re losing”, and that is actually bad for the same reasons.
When you want people to stick on the object level and not worry with what may be implied about “who better?” because it doesn’t matter, then we want norms that refocus attention on the object level and discourage fretting over “who better?” because it doesn’t matter. Not “I tap out”, just “Good point, I’ll think about it”. Not “Definitely not tapping out, just leaving orbit”, just leaving orbit. When that doesn’t feel good because it “feels like losing”, then that’s the sign that things weren’t purely cooperative from the start, and I’m uneasy about enabling people to ignore that error signal, especially when dojos that have done a very good job solving that problem in (IMO) significantly harder scenarios have done the opposite.