I think the main problem with my other replies is that they weren’t direct enough in owning that defensiveness
Yeah, I had something like this intuition as well but wanted to keep it simple in my original comment. One might more precisely say that there’s some intrinsic adversariality in any ideological conflict, but the lever is more about not being reactive about it, processing it before putting it back into the world, making it conscious/overt so our system-2 can deal with it, etc. And that this generally leads to less intense polarization (since it will be more about high-level beliefs and less (though still nonzero) about deep gut-level emotions).
(Having said that, I don’t endorse “maybe better not to reply since doing so is already energetically participating in the collective polarization pattern”. People reread LessWrong for a long time, and ducking out is rightly seen as some evidence that you have no response to give. Better I think to just wait longer before replying, or take more time on a reply.)
Yeah that’s true, agreed now that you say it—I didn’t think of that option some reason.
I’m more like a diffusion model and other rationalists are more like sequence models. That is, I’m starting off by trying to become confident about the highest-order bits, in a way that is locally less careful but IMO globally more careful (c.f. my comment above on “general-purpose suppressant of novel thinking”
That’s interesting, though I’m not sure I understand it well. What gets lost if I round this off to “more explore cognitive patterns, and less exploit ones”?
Cool, makes sense!
Yeah, I had something like this intuition as well but wanted to keep it simple in my original comment. One might more precisely say that there’s some intrinsic adversariality in any ideological conflict, but the lever is more about not being reactive about it, processing it before putting it back into the world, making it conscious/overt so our system-2 can deal with it, etc. And that this generally leads to less intense polarization (since it will be more about high-level beliefs and less (though still nonzero) about deep gut-level emotions).
Yeah that’s true, agreed now that you say it—I didn’t think of that option some reason.
That’s interesting, though I’m not sure I understand it well. What gets lost if I round this off to “more explore cognitive patterns, and less exploit ones”?