Beware boolean disagreements
(Meta: This is largely a re-framing of Consider your appetite for disagreements.)
Poker players get into arguments a lot. Back when I used to play I would review hands with a friend and we’d get into these passionate disagreements about what the right decision is.
To keep it simple, suppose that my opponent goes all in on the river and I have two choices:
Call
Fold
Suppose my friend Alice thinks I should call and I think I should fold. Alice and I would spend hours and hours going back and forth trying to weigh all the considerations. We’d agree on a large majority of these considerations, but often times we just couldn’t seem to agree on what the actual best play is: call or fold.
There are various things that I think went wrong in our conversations, but the biggest is probably a type error: we were disagreeing about a boolean instead of a number.
When making decisions in poker (and life!), the thing that matters is expected value (EV). Suppose the buy-in is $200, Alice thinks calling has an EV of +$1.00, and I think that calling has an EV of -$0.75. In this scenario, the magnitude of our disagreement is less than a measly big blind!
In other words, Alice thinks that calling is very slightly better than folding whereas I think that it is very slightly worse. We’re basically in agreement with one another, but framing things as a boolean rather than a number masks this fact.
I wouldn’t say that framing a disagreement around booleans is never useful; that’d be a very strong claim that I don’t feel confident enough to make. But I do get the sense that the boolean framing usually isn’t useful, and so my position is that you should beware of boolean disagreements.
Your boolean disagreement is relevant because it’s actionable. Suppose that:
Alice thinks calling is +$100 EV
Bob thinks calling is +$10 EV
Claire thinks folding is +$10 EV
David thinks folding is +$100 EV
In this case, Bob is much closer to Claire than to Alice in terms of their beliefs. But Bob agrees with Alice about the correct action, which is often the thing where disagreement actually matters.
(Politics-related examples are left as exercises for the reader).
Even though they’d take the same action, it still seems like Alice and Bob disagree more than Bob and Claire. I’d argue that Bob and Claire probably have more similar world models and are more likely to agree on other actions than Alice and Bob are.
I guess it depends on what you’re trying to achieve with an argument. If Alice and Bob have to agree on a decision for a single hand, then it’s convenient that they can agree on the action, but I suspect if they had to team up long-term, Bob and Claire would find it easier to work together than Alice and Bob would, and Alice and Bob are more likely to have major disagreements which would improve their play to resolve.