This post sums over a lot of argumentative experiences, and condenses them into an image to remember it by, which is a great way to try to help people understand communication.
Many of Scott’s posts provide a glimpse of this model, where he, say, shows why a particular sociology or medical study doesn’t actually end a big debate, or responds to someone lower down the triangle by moving up a level and doing a literature review; but those are all in the context of very specific arguments, and aren’t supposed to be about helping the reader look at this bigger picture. This post takes the lessons from all of those experiences and produces some high-level, general insights about how argument, communication and rationality works.
I think if you’d asked me to classify types of argument, I would’ve dived straight into the grey triangle at the top, and come back with some bad first-principles models (maybe looking a bit like my post with drawings about good communication), and I really appreciate that someone with such a varied experience of arguing on the internet did this more empirical version, with so many examples.
This post sums over a lot of argumentative experiences, and condenses them into an image to remember it by, which is a great way to try to help people understand communication.
Many of Scott’s posts provide a glimpse of this model, where he, say, shows why a particular sociology or medical study doesn’t actually end a big debate, or responds to someone lower down the triangle by moving up a level and doing a literature review; but those are all in the context of very specific arguments, and aren’t supposed to be about helping the reader look at this bigger picture. This post takes the lessons from all of those experiences and produces some high-level, general insights about how argument, communication and rationality works.
I think if you’d asked me to classify types of argument, I would’ve dived straight into the grey triangle at the top, and come back with some bad first-principles models (maybe looking a bit like my post with drawings about good communication), and I really appreciate that someone with such a varied experience of arguing on the internet did this more empirical version, with so many examples.