At first glance, mistake theory fits novel/rare ideas (for some audience), while conflict theory fits well-known ideas; though novel arguments for well-known ideas muddle this picture, making even debates and criticism a poor fit when pursuing cultural accumulation specifically. You can come to a conflict with a novel/rare idea and usefully educate people about it, and a discussion turns into a conflict if you keep insisting that a well-understood idea demonstrates a mistake. Conflicts shift culture, change the attitudes to existing well-known ideas. Promotion of novel or rare ideas contributes to cultural accumulation, and works orthogonally to cultural conflicts.
Thus it’s practical for someone with novel ideas (or for a scholarly type promoting rare ideas) to adopt mistake theory even when encountering a conflict, and to reframe them without triggering even the mistake-level kind of discord. But for someone promoting a well-known idea as the guiding policy/virtue that shifts the cultural attitudes to it, mistake theory is a misleading framing.
There are often novel/rare arguments for changing the cultural attitudes towards well-known ideas, fit for being promoted in the mistake theory framing. Unfortunately, this creates the temptation to start taking a mistake theory framing for promotion of the well-known ideas the novel arguments support, in a way that forgets about the novel arguments, destroying the credibility of acting within that framing. Polarizing the discussion of the novel/rare arguments also promotes them out of being rare, at which point they no longer have a claim for a place within the mistake theory framing (for a given audience), but it simultaneously creates their distorted versions, and thus emerge the novel/rare mistakes of being confused about the original argument (now somewhat well-known).
The whole thing can be robustly sidestepped by anti-inductively promoting novel/rare arguments in a way that seeks to avoid conflict or even disagreement, stopping once they are no longer rare, possibly shifting to the novel/rare confusions about what the previously novel/rare ideas claimed, and switching to other things once there is no longer a valuable idea that remains novel/rare. This works for ensuring cultural accumulation, but doesn’t engage with shifting the cultural attitudes and can even be counterproductive for driving cultural attitudes you might endorse. It doesn’t work though then there are existing conflict theory guardrails that make you unable to openly discuss the novel/rare idea (even in a way that seeks to avoid disagreement), thus the mistake/conflict attractor can’t be always sidestepped, so there’s some motivation to engage with it even when all you care about is cultural accumulation, because it can oppose cultural accumulation itself on particular topics.
So both mistake theory framings (beliefs; debates, criticism, education, marketing, descriptive propaganda) and conflict theory framings (values; healthy egoism, norms, taboos, culture wars, prescriptive propaganda, book burnings, direct coercion) exist in an attractor of driving the cultural attitudes towards particular well-known ideas, and only incidentally do they participate in the initial/occasional dissemination of novel/rare ideas, being the pervasive backdrop of discourse. While the purpose of dissemination of novel/rare ideas (descriptive understanding/awareness that doesn’t require belief or endorsement) is often well-served by sidestepping this attractor entirely, including its mistake theory aspect of debate/criticism/education.
At first glance, mistake theory fits novel/rare ideas (for some audience), while conflict theory fits well-known ideas; though novel arguments for well-known ideas muddle this picture, making even debates and criticism a poor fit when pursuing cultural accumulation specifically. You can come to a conflict with a novel/rare idea and usefully educate people about it, and a discussion turns into a conflict if you keep insisting that a well-understood idea demonstrates a mistake. Conflicts shift culture, change the attitudes to existing well-known ideas. Promotion of novel or rare ideas contributes to cultural accumulation, and works orthogonally to cultural conflicts.
Thus it’s practical for someone with novel ideas (or for a scholarly type promoting rare ideas) to adopt mistake theory even when encountering a conflict, and to reframe them without triggering even the mistake-level kind of discord. But for someone promoting a well-known idea as the guiding policy/virtue that shifts the cultural attitudes to it, mistake theory is a misleading framing.
There are often novel/rare arguments for changing the cultural attitudes towards well-known ideas, fit for being promoted in the mistake theory framing. Unfortunately, this creates the temptation to start taking a mistake theory framing for promotion of the well-known ideas the novel arguments support, in a way that forgets about the novel arguments, destroying the credibility of acting within that framing. Polarizing the discussion of the novel/rare arguments also promotes them out of being rare, at which point they no longer have a claim for a place within the mistake theory framing (for a given audience), but it simultaneously creates their distorted versions, and thus emerge the novel/rare mistakes of being confused about the original argument (now somewhat well-known).
The whole thing can be robustly sidestepped by anti-inductively promoting novel/rare arguments in a way that seeks to avoid conflict or even disagreement, stopping once they are no longer rare, possibly shifting to the novel/rare confusions about what the previously novel/rare ideas claimed, and switching to other things once there is no longer a valuable idea that remains novel/rare. This works for ensuring cultural accumulation, but doesn’t engage with shifting the cultural attitudes and can even be counterproductive for driving cultural attitudes you might endorse. It doesn’t work though then there are existing conflict theory guardrails that make you unable to openly discuss the novel/rare idea (even in a way that seeks to avoid disagreement), thus the mistake/conflict attractor can’t be always sidestepped, so there’s some motivation to engage with it even when all you care about is cultural accumulation, because it can oppose cultural accumulation itself on particular topics.
So both mistake theory framings (beliefs; debates, criticism, education, marketing, descriptive propaganda) and conflict theory framings (values; healthy egoism, norms, taboos, culture wars, prescriptive propaganda, book burnings, direct coercion) exist in an attractor of driving the cultural attitudes towards particular well-known ideas, and only incidentally do they participate in the initial/occasional dissemination of novel/rare ideas, being the pervasive backdrop of discourse. While the purpose of dissemination of novel/rare ideas (descriptive understanding/awareness that doesn’t require belief or endorsement) is often well-served by sidestepping this attractor entirely, including its mistake theory aspect of debate/criticism/education.
Could you provide a worked example? My favorite is of course propagating AI risk awareness into the public discourse.
I’m not entirely following your logic in its abstract form.