Productive Disagreement Practice Thread: Meta and Planning
I floated the idea of a thread for practicing productive disagreement techniques on this Double Crux post and was modestly upvoted, so I’d like to try it. But first, I’m going to explain the format I have in mind and see if anyone has objections/improvements.
Proposed Disagreement Thread Rules (Discuss these, don’t follow them yet)
Discussions are to be one-on-one.
The default platform for discussions will be the comment thread, but participants can use others at their discretion, such as instant messaging platforms or maybe even video chat. Try to keep a shareable record so others can potentially learn from it.
It seems useful to have default options for these. Preferably anonymous and zero-setup. deadsimplechat.com looks reasonable for this.
To participate in the thread, either
make a top-level comment listing beliefs that you think might generate productive disagreements, as well as any preferences you have about discussion format,
or reply to someone else’s top-level comment, selecting one of their beliefs that you disagree with. Don’t make any arguments in this reply, just say which belief you’re selecting, and what platform you’d like to discuss it on if the top-level commenter gave multiple options.
The top-level poster and the replier then conduct their discussion in replies to that reply, or in the agreed-upon outside platform.
Inflammatory topics are better discussed out-of-band. When listing a topic you think likely to be inflammatory, flag it as such and don’t offer in-comments discussion as an option.
If this becomes a recurring thread, different techniques might be highlighted in different iterations, but for the first one participants should try to use the double crux technique.
There is no open thread for this kind of thing. So I am posting this here
It is a website for hosting disagreements. It looks interesting.
https://www.kialo.com/tour/
Kialo looks interesting, but wanted to note that SilentCal did post the open thread here:
https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/mkM3MAagrfumSJepi/productive-disagreement-practice-thread-double-crux
(Maybe would have been good for SilentCal to post this link here afterwards)
I meant a generic open thread for ideas/cool stuff, like the monthly one on LW 1.0 . I knew about that thread but didn’t want to post in it as I wasn’t making an argument. The meta thread seemed appropriate. *shrug*
Neato! This graphically works out a lot better than previous things I’ve seen, I think.
(I previously tried to prototype a site for double cruxing, which ended up having several major problems.)
The Harry Potter Fanfiction should be listed prominently at the top of the page of this site
This seems like a good first pass of rules. I think my main concern is something like people might not read all the rules. I’d list the rules in the order that are most important to counteract things people might do-by-default without thinking. Such as:
1. Do not directly argue about anything in this thread. Instead, people should post top level comments stating a position that they think others might disagree with. Then, if you see a top-level comment that you’d like to argue, reply with an expression of interest for a one-on-one discussion of that topic, to take place in private.
...with additional rules to clarify the fine details.
So I was actually considering in-thread discussion to be a valid option—‘one-on-one’ meaning, in that case, that only two people would participate in a given subthread. If you think that’s too optimistic, I might reconsider it. But I will definitely try to make the top point clearer, maybe
Discussions are to be one-on-one. Do not jump into anyone else’s thread.
Oops! Nothing to see here. I followed the rules when I wasn’t meant to.