Not in a sarcastic way, but because I’m ignorant (and almost everyone here will be) and would appreciate you drilling down:
We don’t reward name or concept dropping, we don’t make people feel bad if they don’t express themselves cogently, and we encourage people who have a disagreement to talk it out later so that we can hear from more people who want to contribute something to the discussion.
This all sounds rather wishy-washy to me, but I suspect it’s not the full story. Could you paint a picture explaining how your group is investigating things more deeply than just chatting with people at a party? (Again, I’m not presupposing the answe is that you’re bad; I’m just trying to get you to add details at the top of the comments section)
We don’t reward name or concept dropping, we don’t make people feel bad if they don’t express themselves cogently, and we encourage people who have a disagreement to talk it out later so that we can hear from more people who want to contribute something to the discussion.
Here are specific ways we go about this:
At the beginning of each cafe, we go through some house rules. One of them is not to name or concept drop without saying why that person is relevant to the current discussion or defining your terms. We even came up with a silly little gesture (**jazz hands**) to normalize asking people to define their terms. We’ve found that many good ideas can be conveyed without technical jargon and it increases the likelihood that people will follow the point being made.
It’s a bit harder to illustrate how we “don’t make people feel bad for not being cogent.” One way I think we do this is that we show appreciation for contributions that people make to the large-group discussion even if the way they expressed their idea was messy. We do this by either thanking them for their contribution, or, as co-moderators, pull out what we understood their point to be before inviting someone else to contribute. This comes from a recognition that, for the most part, people’s contributions are works in progress. They may be thinking or expressing an idea out loud for the first time in their life and it won’t always be pretty. Others who do manage to have persuasive arguments get their fair share of recognition (people will come up to them after and say that they really enjoyed their contribution).
Lastly, if person A makes a point and person B responds by disagreeing with everything person A said, we don’t go back to person A to counter. We invite them (in the house rules) to use the disagreement as a starting point for a conversation during the break or after the event. At any given moment, there are usually 3+ people who have indicated that they want to say something (hand up and eye-contact with moderator) and it’s usually not about the disagreement at hand. We have a limited amount of time (30 minutes in small group discussions and 20 minutes in large) and want to use the large-group discussions to surface as many different ideas that came up during the small groups as possible.
I want to make clear that I don’t claim that we scratch past the surface at our events. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not aiming for greater understanding. At every cafe, we distribute a handout with a list of questions that are meant to guide small groups of attendees in their investigation of a given topic. The goal of these questions isn’t to systematically get us to an answer about what is meant by love, morality, or what a fair justice system looks like. The goal is to get people to explore important questions together with others using the tools and knowledge that are currently at their disposal. There are certainly other, more efficient ways to learn about the world, but I’d argue that at least for some topics where lived experience is involved, exploring with others is better than exploring alone.
I have strong upvoted this because of how helpful I think it is to understanding the post (even for people who disagree with your methods, knowing what they are should be very helpful!)
I think those sound like awesome ways to facilitate high-quality conversation between many more people than otherwise. You need a way for beginners to get good, of course, but sometimes it’s hard to build those skills without some help. It almost sounds like your goal (getting lots of people involved and sharing ideas) is intentionally opposed to a discussion that’s solely among practiced debaters with extremely coherent arguments (and little room for disagreement, since “correct” thinkers shouldn’t diverge by much, presumably). That seems OK to me, but I’m not certain you’d agree.
I’m sure Sofia can give a better answer but I can give a rough summary of the events I went to.
One was a close reading of a passage from Descartes’s First Meditation, done as an exercise to practice identifying arguments and supporting claims being made in a text, and assessing validity. That was facilitated by a philosophy professor who provided a five page handout with step by step instructions on what you should do, and walked us through a suggested process that involved five different colours of highlighter marker. This was a great skill to teach, and I was blackpilled by how people seemed to struggle to parse Descartes even though the translation we worked with was a very accessible one (Moriarty for Oxford World’s Classics).
The second was a more social event, where we began with a short lecture by someone with experience on the subject matter, was provided a one-page handout with three sets of three curated discussion questions, and then alternated between small and large group discussions until we worked though all the discussion questions. One set was asking about our own personal experiences, one set was about a hypothetical scenario we were invited to think through, I forget if there was a theme to the third set. This was a really well facilitated event, and I was blackpilled by the cornucopia of bad takes on offer.
...I hope my unpleasant baby tree frog ways are becoming clearer. People keep saying that actually the other patches of rainforest are polluted garbage. No! I just need a problematically extensive selection of epistemic microbiota in my biome.
I am so curious now to hear examples of these bad takes. Maybe you could return to a meeting to act as an observer, learning more about how people get the things wrong that they get wrong?
lesswrong I think does a good job of giving good tools for rational thinking to those people already inclined towards it, or motivated to improve, but I don’t think the rationalist community is very good about how to spread its ideas past its own bubble.
Not in a sarcastic way, but because I’m ignorant (and almost everyone here will be) and would appreciate you drilling down:
This all sounds rather wishy-washy to me, but I suspect it’s not the full story. Could you paint a picture explaining how your group is investigating things more deeply than just chatting with people at a party? (Again, I’m not presupposing the answe is that you’re bad; I’m just trying to get you to add details at the top of the comments section)
Here are specific ways we go about this:
At the beginning of each cafe, we go through some house rules. One of them is not to name or concept drop without saying why that person is relevant to the current discussion or defining your terms. We even came up with a silly little gesture (**jazz hands**) to normalize asking people to define their terms. We’ve found that many good ideas can be conveyed without technical jargon and it increases the likelihood that people will follow the point being made.
It’s a bit harder to illustrate how we “don’t make people feel bad for not being cogent.” One way I think we do this is that we show appreciation for contributions that people make to the large-group discussion even if the way they expressed their idea was messy. We do this by either thanking them for their contribution, or, as co-moderators, pull out what we understood their point to be before inviting someone else to contribute. This comes from a recognition that, for the most part, people’s contributions are works in progress. They may be thinking or expressing an idea out loud for the first time in their life and it won’t always be pretty. Others who do manage to have persuasive arguments get their fair share of recognition (people will come up to them after and say that they really enjoyed their contribution).
Lastly, if person A makes a point and person B responds by disagreeing with everything person A said, we don’t go back to person A to counter. We invite them (in the house rules) to use the disagreement as a starting point for a conversation during the break or after the event. At any given moment, there are usually 3+ people who have indicated that they want to say something (hand up and eye-contact with moderator) and it’s usually not about the disagreement at hand. We have a limited amount of time (30 minutes in small group discussions and 20 minutes in large) and want to use the large-group discussions to surface as many different ideas that came up during the small groups as possible.
I want to make clear that I don’t claim that we scratch past the surface at our events. But that doesn’t mean that we’re not aiming for greater understanding. At every cafe, we distribute a handout with a list of questions that are meant to guide small groups of attendees in their investigation of a given topic. The goal of these questions isn’t to systematically get us to an answer about what is meant by love, morality, or what a fair justice system looks like. The goal is to get people to explore important questions together with others using the tools and knowledge that are currently at their disposal. There are certainly other, more efficient ways to learn about the world, but I’d argue that at least for some topics where lived experience is involved, exploring with others is better than exploring alone.
I have strong upvoted this because of how helpful I think it is to understanding the post (even for people who disagree with your methods, knowing what they are should be very helpful!)
I think those sound like awesome ways to facilitate high-quality conversation between many more people than otherwise. You need a way for beginners to get good, of course, but sometimes it’s hard to build those skills without some help. It almost sounds like your goal (getting lots of people involved and sharing ideas) is intentionally opposed to a discussion that’s solely among practiced debaters with extremely coherent arguments (and little room for disagreement, since “correct” thinkers shouldn’t diverge by much, presumably). That seems OK to me, but I’m not certain you’d agree.
I’m sure Sofia can give a better answer but I can give a rough summary of the events I went to.
One was a close reading of a passage from Descartes’s First Meditation, done as an exercise to practice identifying arguments and supporting claims being made in a text, and assessing validity. That was facilitated by a philosophy professor who provided a five page handout with step by step instructions on what you should do, and walked us through a suggested process that involved five different colours of highlighter marker. This was a great skill to teach, and I was blackpilled by how people seemed to struggle to parse Descartes even though the translation we worked with was a very accessible one (Moriarty for Oxford World’s Classics).
The second was a more social event, where we began with a short lecture by someone with experience on the subject matter, was provided a one-page handout with three sets of three curated discussion questions, and then alternated between small and large group discussions until we worked though all the discussion questions. One set was asking about our own personal experiences, one set was about a hypothetical scenario we were invited to think through, I forget if there was a theme to the third set. This was a really well facilitated event, and I was blackpilled by the cornucopia of bad takes on offer.
...I hope my unpleasant baby tree frog ways are becoming clearer. People keep saying that actually the other patches of rainforest are polluted garbage. No! I just need a problematically extensive selection of epistemic microbiota in my biome.
“cornucopia of bad takes on offer”
I am so curious now to hear examples of these bad takes. Maybe you could return to a meeting to act as an observer, learning more about how people get the things wrong that they get wrong?
lesswrong I think does a good job of giving good tools for rational thinking to those people already inclined towards it, or motivated to improve, but I don’t think the rationalist community is very good about how to spread its ideas past its own bubble.