Discussions should come to conclusions. Currently we often talk for ages, but I feel it often doesn’t go anywhere
I think this is an inevitable consequence of intellectual/political diversity. For example, conservatives and progressives have fundamentally different values, and as such are unlikely to come to the same conclusions from a social justice debate, other than basic stuff like “murder and assault is bad”.
I think trying to come to one single conclusion from all the discussion will probably just end up alienating whichever group is in the minority on that particular issue. This is especially the case when decided by an “upvote/downvote” poll, which could even encourage factionalism and brigading.
I actually think we should be encouraging people to be more okay with not coming to an agreement. a heated debate will often end only when one side gets exhausted and tired with it, which isn’t particularly pleasant for anyone. I think a norm of being like “I’m bowing out of this discussion, here are the key arguments I made, here are things I agree with the other person about, etc” should be encouraged.
So I think that in many discussions “murder and assault is bad” is a reasonable conclusion along that axis. And there are many axes of discussion.
Look at FTX. I reckon we could agree that:
FTX crash hurt lots of random people
On balance it seems like Alameda’s trades were bad at the time
It has caused much goodwill to evaporate for EA and while our new reputation might be more accurate, it may now be too harsh on us
Individual EAs had a sense that SBF took large risks, but its unclear how that should transfer to reporting
Those might seem like pretty simple conclusions, but agreement is good! It helps us move forward and figure out what we disagree on. I think it would be genuinely healthy for community discourse if in the Bostrom/Cotton-Barrett cases we could have found where the baseline agreement was. I think that makes a lot of people feel safer.
edit: I’d appreciate some comments on where you lot disagree
Baseline agreement is good, and I think that in general there should be more comments “stating the obvious”, so it is clear that there are things we mostly agree on.
However, “everyone agrees on this” statements will only capture a very small part of the issue. For example, say we ask the question: “what should be EA’s relationship with cryptocurrency in light of FTX?”. It’s a perfectly valid question, and one that sparked a lot of interesting discussion. But given that some people think crypto is the currency of the future and our best insurance against tyranny, and others think it’s a worthless ponzi scam that should be banned outright, you’ll never get a consensus answer. I think that’s fine! The discussion is still valuable, people get more information, and consider more arguments, and are ultimately more informed coming out than in.
Discussions should come to conclusions. Currently we often talk for ages, but I feel it often doesn’t go anywhere. I would prefer we had a process to:
find things we all agree on
save the key arguments
agree to run a poll/do research to find more information
I think this is an inevitable consequence of intellectual/political diversity. For example, conservatives and progressives have fundamentally different values, and as such are unlikely to come to the same conclusions from a social justice debate, other than basic stuff like “murder and assault is bad”.
I think trying to come to one single conclusion from all the discussion will probably just end up alienating whichever group is in the minority on that particular issue. This is especially the case when decided by an “upvote/downvote” poll, which could even encourage factionalism and brigading.
I actually think we should be encouraging people to be more okay with not coming to an agreement. a heated debate will often end only when one side gets exhausted and tired with it, which isn’t particularly pleasant for anyone. I think a norm of being like “I’m bowing out of this discussion, here are the key arguments I made, here are things I agree with the other person about, etc” should be encouraged.
So I think that in many discussions “murder and assault is bad” is a reasonable conclusion along that axis. And there are many axes of discussion.
Look at FTX. I reckon we could agree that:
FTX crash hurt lots of random people
On balance it seems like Alameda’s trades were bad at the time
It has caused much goodwill to evaporate for EA and while our new reputation might be more accurate, it may now be too harsh on us
Individual EAs had a sense that SBF took large risks, but its unclear how that should transfer to reporting
Those might seem like pretty simple conclusions, but agreement is good! It helps us move forward and figure out what we disagree on. I think it would be genuinely healthy for community discourse if in the Bostrom/Cotton-Barrett cases we could have found where the baseline agreement was. I think that makes a lot of people feel safer.
edit: I’d appreciate some comments on where you lot disagree
Baseline agreement is good, and I think that in general there should be more comments “stating the obvious”, so it is clear that there are things we mostly agree on.
However, “everyone agrees on this” statements will only capture a very small part of the issue. For example, say we ask the question: “what should be EA’s relationship with cryptocurrency in light of FTX?”. It’s a perfectly valid question, and one that sparked a lot of interesting discussion. But given that some people think crypto is the currency of the future and our best insurance against tyranny, and others think it’s a worthless ponzi scam that should be banned outright, you’ll never get a consensus answer. I think that’s fine! The discussion is still valuable, people get more information, and consider more arguments, and are ultimately more informed coming out than in.
meta af