I am genuinely confused by the discourse around double crux. Several people I respect seem to think of DC as a key intellectual method. Duncan (curriculum director at CFAr) explicitly considers DC to be a cornerstone CFAR technique. However I have tried to use the technique and gotten nowhere.
Ray deserves credit for identifying and explicitly discussing some of the failure modes I ran into. In particular DC style discussion frequently seems to recurse down to very fundamental issues in philosophy and epistemology. Twice I have tried to discuss a concrete practical issue via DC and wound up discussing utility aggregation; in these cases we were both utilitarians and we still couldn’t get the method to work.
I have to second Said Achmiz’s request for public examples of double crux going well. I once asked Ray for an example via email and received the following link to Sarah Constantin’s blogpost . This post is quite good and caused me to update towards the view that DC can be productive. But this post doesn’t contain the actual DC conversation, just a summary of the events and the lessons learned. I want to see an actual, for real, fully detailed example of DC being used productively. I don’t understand why no such examples are publicly available.
whperson’s comment touches on why examples are rarely publicized.
I watched Constantin’s Double-Crux, and noticed that, no matter how much I identified with one participant or another, they were not representing me. They explored reciprocally and got to address concerns as they came up, while the audience gained information about them unilaterally. They could have changed each other’s minds without ever coming near points I considered relevant. Double-crux mostly accrues benefits to individuals in subtle shifts, rather than to the public in discrete actionable updates.
A good double-crux can get intensely personal. Double-crux has an empirical advantage over scientific debate because it focuses on integrating real, existing perspectives instead of attempting to simultaneously construct and deconstruct a solid position. On the flip side, you have to deal with real perspectives, not coherent platforms. Double-crux only integrates those two perspectives, cracked and flawed as they are. It’s not debate 2.0 and won’t solve the same problems that arguments do.
I also watched Constantin’s Double-Crux, and feel that most of my understanding of how the process works comes from that observation rather than any posts including Duncan’s. I also agree that her post of results, while excellent, does not do the job of explaining the process that was done by watching the process live. I wonder to what extent having an audience made the process unfold in a way that was easier to follow; on the surface both of them were ignoring us, and as hamnox says they were not trying to respond to our possible concerns, but I still got the instinctive sense that having people watching was making the process better or at least easier to parse.
The topic of that Crux was especially good for a demonstration, in that it involved a lot of disagreements over models, facts and probabilities. The underlying disagreements did not boil down to questions of philosophy.
I do think that finding out that the difference does boil down to philosophy or epistemology is a success mode rather than a failure mode—you’ve successfully identified important disagreements you can talk about now or another time, and ruled out other causes, so you don’t waste further time arguing over things that won’t change minds. It’s an unhint: You now think you’re worse off than you thought you were before, but you’re actually better off than you actually were.
It also points to the suggestion that if you’re frequently having important disagreements that boil down to philosophy, perhaps you should do more philosophy!
Strong agreement that identifying important root disagreements is success rather than failure. If people on opposite sides of the abortion debate got themselves boiled all the way down to virtue ethics vs. utilitarianism or some other similar thing, this would be miles better than current demonization and misunderstanding.
I am genuinely confused by the discourse around double crux. Several people I respect seem to think of DC as a key intellectual method. Duncan (curriculum director at CFAr) explicitly considers DC to be a cornerstone CFAR technique. However I have tried to use the technique and gotten nowhere.
Ray deserves credit for identifying and explicitly discussing some of the failure modes I ran into. In particular DC style discussion frequently seems to recurse down to very fundamental issues in philosophy and epistemology. Twice I have tried to discuss a concrete practical issue via DC and wound up discussing utility aggregation; in these cases we were both utilitarians and we still couldn’t get the method to work.
I have to second Said Achmiz’s request for public examples of double crux going well. I once asked Ray for an example via email and received the following link to Sarah Constantin’s blogpost . This post is quite good and caused me to update towards the view that DC can be productive. But this post doesn’t contain the actual DC conversation, just a summary of the events and the lessons learned. I want to see an actual, for real, fully detailed example of DC being used productively. I don’t understand why no such examples are publicly available.
whperson’s comment touches on why examples are rarely publicized.
I watched Constantin’s Double-Crux, and noticed that, no matter how much I identified with one participant or another, they were not representing me. They explored reciprocally and got to address concerns as they came up, while the audience gained information about them unilaterally. They could have changed each other’s minds without ever coming near points I considered relevant. Double-crux mostly accrues benefits to individuals in subtle shifts, rather than to the public in discrete actionable updates.
A good double-crux can get intensely personal. Double-crux has an empirical advantage over scientific debate because it focuses on integrating real, existing perspectives instead of attempting to simultaneously construct and deconstruct a solid position. On the flip side, you have to deal with real perspectives, not coherent platforms. Double-crux only integrates those two perspectives, cracked and flawed as they are. It’s not debate 2.0 and won’t solve the same problems that arguments do.
I also watched Constantin’s Double-Crux, and feel that most of my understanding of how the process works comes from that observation rather than any posts including Duncan’s. I also agree that her post of results, while excellent, does not do the job of explaining the process that was done by watching the process live. I wonder to what extent having an audience made the process unfold in a way that was easier to follow; on the surface both of them were ignoring us, and as hamnox says they were not trying to respond to our possible concerns, but I still got the instinctive sense that having people watching was making the process better or at least easier to parse.
The topic of that Crux was especially good for a demonstration, in that it involved a lot of disagreements over models, facts and probabilities. The underlying disagreements did not boil down to questions of philosophy.
I do think that finding out that the difference does boil down to philosophy or epistemology is a success mode rather than a failure mode—you’ve successfully identified important disagreements you can talk about now or another time, and ruled out other causes, so you don’t waste further time arguing over things that won’t change minds. It’s an unhint: You now think you’re worse off than you thought you were before, but you’re actually better off than you actually were.
It also points to the suggestion that if you’re frequently having important disagreements that boil down to philosophy, perhaps you should do more philosophy!
Strong agreement that identifying important root disagreements is success rather than failure. If people on opposite sides of the abortion debate got themselves boiled all the way down to virtue ethics vs. utilitarianism or some other similar thing, this would be miles better than current demonization and misunderstanding.