The rule itself sounds reasonable but I find it odd that it would come up often enough. Here’s an alternative I have found useful: Disengage when people are stubborn and overconfident. It seems like a possible red flag to me if an environment needs rules for how to “resolve” factual disagreements. When I’m around reasonable people I feel like we usually agree quite easily what qualifies as convincing evidence.
Disengage when people are stubborn and overconfident. It seems like a possible red flag to me if an environment needs rules for how to “resolve” factual disagreements.
Seems reasonable, but doesn’t feel like a match to our use of it. It’s more something we use when something isn’t that important, because it comes up in passing or is a minor point of a larger debate. If the disagreeing parties each did a search, they might often each (with the best of intentions) find a website or essay that supports their point. By setting this convention, there’s a quick way to get a good-enough-for-now reference point.
Sufficiently minor factual points like the population of Estonia don’t typically require this (everyone’s going to find the same answer when they search). A major point that’s central to a disagreement requires more than this, and someone will likely want to do enough research to convincingly disagree with Wikipedia. But there’s a sweet spot in the middle where this solution works well in my experience.
So to try to come up with a concrete example, imagine we were talking about the culture of Argentina, and a sub-thread was about economics, and a sub-sub-thread was about the effects of poverty, and a sub-sub-sub-thread was about whether poverty has increased or decreased under Milei. Just doing a web search would find claims in both directions (eg increase, decrease). We could stop the discussion and spend a while researching it, or we could check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javier_Milei#Poverty and accept its verdict, which lets us quickly pop back up the discussion stack at least one level.
Maybe someone says, ‘Wait, I’m pretty confident this is wrong, let’s pause the discussion so I can go check Wikipedia’s sources and look at other sources and figure it out.’ Which is fine! But more often than not, it lets us move forward more smoothly and quickly.
(It’s not an ideal example because in this case it’s just that poverty went up and then down, and that would probably be pretty quick to figure out. But it’s the first one that occurred to me, and is at least not a terrible example.)
The rule itself sounds reasonable but I find it odd that it would come up often enough. Here’s an alternative I have found useful: Disengage when people are stubborn and overconfident. It seems like a possible red flag to me if an environment needs rules for how to “resolve” factual disagreements. When I’m around reasonable people I feel like we usually agree quite easily what qualifies as convincing evidence.
Seems reasonable, but doesn’t feel like a match to our use of it. It’s more something we use when something isn’t that important, because it comes up in passing or is a minor point of a larger debate. If the disagreeing parties each did a search, they might often each (with the best of intentions) find a website or essay that supports their point. By setting this convention, there’s a quick way to get a good-enough-for-now reference point.
Sufficiently minor factual points like the population of Estonia don’t typically require this (everyone’s going to find the same answer when they search). A major point that’s central to a disagreement requires more than this, and someone will likely want to do enough research to convincingly disagree with Wikipedia. But there’s a sweet spot in the middle where this solution works well in my experience.
So to try to come up with a concrete example, imagine we were talking about the culture of Argentina, and a sub-thread was about economics, and a sub-sub-thread was about the effects of poverty, and a sub-sub-sub-thread was about whether poverty has increased or decreased under Milei. Just doing a web search would find claims in both directions (eg increase, decrease). We could stop the discussion and spend a while researching it, or we could check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javier_Milei#Poverty and accept its verdict, which lets us quickly pop back up the discussion stack at least one level.
Maybe someone says, ‘Wait, I’m pretty confident this is wrong, let’s pause the discussion so I can go check Wikipedia’s sources and look at other sources and figure it out.’ Which is fine! But more often than not, it lets us move forward more smoothly and quickly.
(It’s not an ideal example because in this case it’s just that poverty went up and then down, and that would probably be pretty quick to figure out. But it’s the first one that occurred to me, and is at least not a terrible example.)