In my experience, where Double Crux is easiest is also where it’s the least interesting to resolve a disagreement because usually such disagreements are already fairly easily resolved or the disagreement is just uninteresting.
An inconveniently large portion of the time disagreements are so complex that the effort required to drill down to the real crux is just...exhausting. By “complex” I don’t necessarily mean the disagreements are based upon some super advanced model of the world, but just that the real cruxes are hidden under so much human baggage.
This is related to a point I’ve made here before about Aumann’s agreement theorem being used as a cudgel in an argument...in many of the most interesting and important cases it usually requires a lot of effort to get people on the same page and the number of times where all participants in a conversation are willing to put in that effort seems vanishingly small.
In other words, double crux is most useful when all participants are equally interested in seeking truth. It’s least useful in most of the real disagreements people have.
I don’t think this is an indictment of double cruxin’, but just a warning for someone who reads this and thinks “hot damn, this is going to help me so much”.
In my experience, where Double Crux is easiest is also where it’s the least interesting to resolve a disagreement because usually such disagreements are already fairly easily resolved or the disagreement is just uninteresting.
An inconveniently large portion of the time disagreements are so complex that the effort required to drill down to the real crux is just...exhausting. By “complex” I don’t necessarily mean the disagreements are based upon some super advanced model of the world, but just that the real cruxes are hidden under so much human baggage.
So I broadly agree with this.
When I facilitate “real conversations”, including those in the Double Crux framework, I ussually prefer to schedule at least a 4 hour block, and most of that time is spent navigating the psychological threads that arise (things like triggeredness, defensiveness, subtle bucket errors, and compulsions to stand up for something important) and/or iteratively parsing what one person is saying well enough to translate it into the other person’s ontology, as opposed to finding cruxes.
in many of the most interesting and important cases it usually requires a lot of effort to get people on the same page and the number of times where all participants in a conversation are willing to put in that effort seems vanishingly small.
Seems right. I will say that people are often more inclined to put in 4+ hours if they have reference experiences of that actually working.
But, yep.
In other words, double crux is most useful when all participants are equally interested in seeking truth.
I’ll add a caveat to this though: the spirit of Double Crux is one of trying to learn and change your own mind, not trying to persuade others. And you can do almost all components of a Double Crux conversation (paraphrasing, operationalizing, checking if things are cruxes for you and noting if they are, ect) unilaterally. And people are very often interested in spending a lot of time being listened to sincerely, even if they are not very interested in getting to the truth themselves.
That said, I don’t think that you can easily apply this pattern, in particular, unilaterally.
And you can do almost all components of a Double Crux conversation (paraphrasing, operationalizing, checking if things are cruxes for you and noting if they are, ect) unilaterally
I’ve been wondering about specifically training “Single Cruxing”, to hammer home that doublecux isn’t about changing the other person’s mind. I have some sense that the branding for Double Crux is somehow off, similar to how people seem to reliably misinterpret Crocker’s Rules to mean “I get to be rude to other people”.
I try to introduce doublecrux to people with the definition “Double Crux is where two people help each other each change their own mind.” My guess is that having that be the first sentence would help people orient to it better. But, I’m not really sure who “owns” the concept of Double Crux, and whether this is reasonable as the official definition.
This comment helped me articulate something that I hadn’t quite put my finger on before.
There are actually two things that I want to stand up for, which are, from naive perspective, in tension. So I think I need to make sure not to lump them together.
One the one hand, yeah, I think it is deeply true that you can unilaterally do the thing, and with sufficient skill, you can make “the Double Crux thing” work, even with a person who doesn’t explicitly opt in for that kind of discourse (because curiosity and empathy are contagious, and many (but not all, I think) of the problems of people “not being truth-seeking” are actually defense mechanism, rather than persistent character traits).
However, sometimes people have said things like “we should focus on and teach methods that involve seeking out your own single cruxes, because that’s where the action is at.” This has generally made me frown, for the reasons I outlined at the head of my post here: I feel like this is overlooking or discounting the really cool power of the Full Double Crux formalism. I don’t want the awareness of that awesomeness to fall out of the lexicon. (Granted, the current state less like “people are using this awesome technique, but maybe we’re going to loose it as a community” and more like “there’s this technique that most people are frustrated with because it doesn’t seem to work very well, but there is a nearby version that does seem useful to them, but I’m sitting here on the sidelines insisting that the “mainline version” actually is awesome, at least in some limited circumstances.”)
Anyway, I think these are separate things, and I should optimize for them separately, instead of (something like) trying to uphold both at once.
In my experience, where Double Crux is easiest is also where it’s the least interesting to resolve a disagreement because usually such disagreements are already fairly easily resolved or the disagreement is just uninteresting.
An inconveniently large portion of the time disagreements are so complex that the effort required to drill down to the real crux is just...exhausting. By “complex” I don’t necessarily mean the disagreements are based upon some super advanced model of the world, but just that the real cruxes are hidden under so much human baggage.
This is related to a point I’ve made here before about Aumann’s agreement theorem being used as a cudgel in an argument...in many of the most interesting and important cases it usually requires a lot of effort to get people on the same page and the number of times where all participants in a conversation are willing to put in that effort seems vanishingly small.
In other words, double crux is most useful when all participants are equally interested in seeking truth. It’s least useful in most of the real disagreements people have.
I don’t think this is an indictment of double cruxin’, but just a warning for someone who reads this and thinks “hot damn, this is going to help me so much”.
So I broadly agree with this.
When I facilitate “real conversations”, including those in the Double Crux framework, I ussually prefer to schedule at least a 4 hour block, and most of that time is spent navigating the psychological threads that arise (things like triggeredness, defensiveness, subtle bucket errors, and compulsions to stand up for something important) and/or iteratively parsing what one person is saying well enough to translate it into the other person’s ontology, as opposed to finding cruxes.
Seems right. I will say that people are often more inclined to put in 4+ hours if they have reference experiences of that actually working.
But, yep.
I’ll add a caveat to this though: the spirit of Double Crux is one of trying to learn and change your own mind, not trying to persuade others. And you can do almost all components of a Double Crux conversation (paraphrasing, operationalizing, checking if things are cruxes for you and noting if they are, ect) unilaterally. And people are very often interested in spending a lot of time being listened to sincerely, even if they are not very interested in getting to the truth themselves.
That said, I don’t think that you can easily apply this pattern, in particular, unilaterally.
I’ve been wondering about specifically training “Single Cruxing”, to hammer home that doublecux isn’t about changing the other person’s mind. I have some sense that the branding for Double Crux is somehow off, similar to how people seem to reliably misinterpret Crocker’s Rules to mean “I get to be rude to other people”.
I try to introduce doublecrux to people with the definition “Double Crux is where two people help each other each change their own mind.” My guess is that having that be the first sentence would help people orient to it better. But, I’m not really sure who “owns” the concept of Double Crux, and whether this is reasonable as the official definition.
This comment helped me articulate something that I hadn’t quite put my finger on before.
There are actually two things that I want to stand up for, which are, from naive perspective, in tension. So I think I need to make sure not to lump them together.
One the one hand, yeah, I think it is deeply true that you can unilaterally do the thing, and with sufficient skill, you can make “the Double Crux thing” work, even with a person who doesn’t explicitly opt in for that kind of discourse (because curiosity and empathy are contagious, and many (but not all, I think) of the problems of people “not being truth-seeking” are actually defense mechanism, rather than persistent character traits).
However, sometimes people have said things like “we should focus on and teach methods that involve seeking out your own single cruxes, because that’s where the action is at.” This has generally made me frown, for the reasons I outlined at the head of my post here: I feel like this is overlooking or discounting the really cool power of the Full Double Crux formalism. I don’t want the awareness of that awesomeness to fall out of the lexicon. (Granted, the current state less like “people are using this awesome technique, but maybe we’re going to loose it as a community” and more like “there’s this technique that most people are frustrated with because it doesn’t seem to work very well, but there is a nearby version that does seem useful to them, but I’m sitting here on the sidelines insisting that the “mainline version” actually is awesome, at least in some limited circumstances.”)
Anyway, I think these are separate things, and I should optimize for them separately, instead of (something like) trying to uphold both at once.
Maybe we live in different bubbles.
I live in the bubble that literally invented Doublecrux, so, it indeed is not surprising if my experience doesn’t generalize.