I think some people don’t have those concepts, and some people know those concepts at a shallow level but haven’t integrated them into their worldviews. And for people who have them deeply, they assume these concepts are so obvious that it can’t possibly be the reason other people are confused (instead they must have a deeper disagreement, or are trolling). Whereas I tend to believe that the world is full of more trivial mistakes.
But I don’t have strong evidence that I’m right here. The nature of unknown knowns also means that, to the degree I’m right, it’s harder to discuss than usual.
One indirect piece of evidence is an anecdote recounted by Thomas Shelling in the preface to the 1980 edition of The Strategy of Conflict. The anecdote suggests that we may overestimate people’s familiarity with seemingly obvious concepts.
The book has had a good reception, and many have cheered me by telling me they liked it or learned from it. But the response that warms me most after twenty years is the late John Strachey’s. John Strachey, whose books I had read in college, had been an outstanding Marxist economist in the 1930s. After the war he had been defense minister in Britain’s Labor Government. Some of us at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs invited him to visit because he was writing a book on disarmament and arms control. When he called on me he exclaimed how much this book had done for his thinking, and as he talked with enthusiasm I tried to guess which of my sophisticated ideas in which chapters had made so much difference to him. It turned out it wasn’t any particular idea in any particular chapter. Until he read this book, he had simply not comprehended that an inherently non-zero-sum conflict could exist. He had known that conflict could coexist with common interest but had thought, or taken for granted, that they were essentially separable, not aspects of an integral structure. A scholar concerned with monopoly capitalism and class struggle, nuclear strategy and alliance politics, working late in his career on arms control and peacemaking, had tumbled, in reading my book, to an idea so rudimentary that I hadn’t even known it wasn’t obvious.
Schelling’s specific point actually feels relevant to me and a blindspot among (at least some) rationalists or EAs when they talk about “conflict” vs “mistake” theory. I’ve recently thought about the “conflict vs mistake theory” framing some more, and think it misses out a lot of the learnings that are standard in, eg, negotiation classes or bargaining theory, or international relations/game theory writ large.
I think a lot of the time a better position is something roughly like: “I have my interests and intend to pursue mine own interests to the best of my ability. I respect you as an agent with your interests and willing to pursue yours. Sometimes our interests come into conflict, and we take actions detrimental to each other. However, it is implausible that our interests are directly opposed, and there are often plausible gains from trade.”
A plausible example of mistake theory inhibiting gains from trade is when (supposedly) Obama often tried to lecture Republican lawmakers about their mistakes, instead of taking their interests as a given and tried to negotiate more.
Broadly agree—I overstated my point; of course some people don’t have these concepts. But I think there is a big gap between having these concepts as theory (eg IVT in pure math) and applying them in practice to less obvious cases.
(Cf Wittgenstein thought that understanding a concept just was knowing how to apply it—you don’t fully understand it until you know how to use it.)
I think some people don’t have those concepts, and some people know those concepts at a shallow level but haven’t integrated them into their worldviews. And for people who have them deeply, they assume these concepts are so obvious that it can’t possibly be the reason other people are confused (instead they must have a deeper disagreement, or are trolling). Whereas I tend to believe that the world is full of more trivial mistakes.
But I don’t have strong evidence that I’m right here. The nature of unknown knowns also means that, to the degree I’m right, it’s harder to discuss than usual.
One indirect piece of evidence is an anecdote recounted by Thomas Shelling in the preface to the 1980 edition of The Strategy of Conflict. The anecdote suggests that we may overestimate people’s familiarity with seemingly obvious concepts.
Thanks, this is helpful.
Schelling’s specific point actually feels relevant to me and a blindspot among (at least some) rationalists or EAs when they talk about “conflict” vs “mistake” theory. I’ve recently thought about the “conflict vs mistake theory” framing some more, and think it misses out a lot of the learnings that are standard in, eg, negotiation classes or bargaining theory, or international relations/game theory writ large.
I think a lot of the time a better position is something roughly like: “I have my interests and intend to pursue mine own interests to the best of my ability. I respect you as an agent with your interests and willing to pursue yours. Sometimes our interests come into conflict, and we take actions detrimental to each other. However, it is implausible that our interests are directly opposed, and there are often plausible gains from trade.”
A plausible example of mistake theory inhibiting gains from trade is when (supposedly) Obama often tried to lecture Republican lawmakers about their mistakes, instead of taking their interests as a given and tried to negotiate more.
Of course, conflict theory can inhibit gains from trade if it prevents people from coming to the negotiation table, or just not notice that bargaining is almost always a better option than war.
Broadly agree—I overstated my point; of course some people don’t have these concepts. But I think there is a big gap between having these concepts as theory (eg IVT in pure math) and applying them in practice to less obvious cases.
(Cf Wittgenstein thought that understanding a concept just was knowing how to apply it—you don’t fully understand it until you know how to use it.)