LW4EA: Yes Requires the Possibility of No

This is part of LessWrong for EA, a LessWrong repost & low-commitment discussion group (inspired by this comment). Each week I will revive a highly upvoted, EA-relevant post from the LessWrong Archives, more or less at random

Excerpt from the post:

1. A group wants to try an activity that really requires a lot of group buy in. The activity will not work as well if there is doubt that everyone really wants to do it. They establish common knowledge of the need for buy in. They then have a group conversation in which several people make comments about how great the activity is and how much they want to do it. Everyone wants to do the activity, but is aware that if they did not want to do the activity, it would be awkward to admit. They do the activity. It goes poorly.
2. Alice strongly wants to believe A. She searches for evidence of A. She implements a biased search, ignoring evidence against A. She finds justifications for her conclusion. She can then point to the justifications, and tell herself that A is true. However, there is always this nagging thought in the back of her mind that maybe A is false. She never fully believes A as strongly as she would have believed it if she just implemented an an unbiased search, and found out that A was, in fact, true.
3. Bob wants Charlie to do a task for him. Bob phrases the request in a way that makes Charlie afraid to refuse. Charlie agrees to do the task. Charlie would have been happy to do the task otherwise, but now Charlie does the task while feeling resentful towards Bob for violating his consent. (Full Post on LW)

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Initially I talked about hosting Zoom discussion for those that were interested, but I think it’s a bit more than I can take on right now (not so low-commitment). If anyone wants to organize one, comment or PM me and I will be happy to coordinate for future posts.

For now I will include an excerpt from each post, but if anyone wants to volunteer to do a brief summary instead, please get in touch.