I must admit that I am trying to aim for a different approach: writing stuff adapted to human psychology.
I donāt go from postulates like āArticles should be evaluated primarily by whether people can refute what the article says or notā or āReaders should be flexible and tolerant, learn to skim as desired, etc.ā It would be very nice if people were to do that. But our brains, although they can learn that to some extent with the good educational methods and the right incentives, just didnāt really evolve for doing stuff like that, so I donāt expect people to do that.
Reading text which is long, abstract, dry, remote from our daily environments, and with no direct human interactions, is possible, but this is akin to swimming against the flow: if thereās a good reason to do that, I will, but it will be much harder. And I need to know what I can get out of itāwith a serious probability.
I guess thatās one reason people tend to ignore what science says: itās boring. It has a āreader-deterring styleā as one paper puts it.
I really recommend this paper by Ugo Bardi that explicits why that contributes to the decline of science:
The human mind has limits. So, how to make a mass of concepts available outside the specific fields that produced them? One option is to make them āmind-sizedā. It implies breaking down complex ideas into sub-units that can be easily digested.
Science is, after all, a human enterprise and it has to be understood in human terms, otherwise it becomes a baroque accumulation of decorative items. [...]
Scientific production and communication cannot be seen as separate tasks: they are one and the same thing.
The brain is better at processing stuff that is concrete. Visual stuff like pictures. Metaphores. Examples. Bullet points and bolding. Thereās a much better chance that people read things that the brain can process easilyāand itās useful even for your readers that are able to read dry stuff.
I think youāre mistaken about evolutionary psychology and brains, but I donāt know how to correct you (and many other people similar to you) because your approach is not optimized for debate and (boring!?) scholarship like mine. That is one of many topics where Iād have some things to say if people changed their debate methodology, scholarly standards, etc. (I already tried debating this topic and many others in the past, but I found that it didnāt work well enough and I identified issues like debate methodology as the root cause of various failures.)
I also agree with and already (try to) do some of what you say. I have lots of material breaking things into smaller parts and making it easier to learn. But there are difficulties, e.g. when the parts are small then the value from each one individually (usually) becomes small too. To get a big result people have to learn many small parts and combine them, which can be hard and require persistence and project management. Youāre not really saying anything new to me, which is fine, but FYI I already know about additional difficulties which itās harder to find answers for.
The brain is better at processing stuff that is concrete. Visual stuff like pictures.
Iām personally not a very visual thinker and Iām good at abstract thinking. This reads to me as denying my lived experience or forgetting that other types of people exist. If you had said that the majority of people like pictures, then I could have agreed with you. Itās not that big a deal ā Iām used to ignoring comments that assume I donāt exist or make general statements about what people are like which do not apply to me. Iām not going to get offended and stop talking to you over it. But I thought it was relevant enough to mention.
I think youāre mistaken about evolutionary psychology and brains, but I donāt know how to correct you (and many other people similar to you) because your approach is not optimized for debate
Iām actually interested in thatāif you have found sources and documents that provide a better picture of how brains work, Iād be interested. The way I work in debate is that if you provide somehing that explains the world in a better way than my current explanation, then Iāll use it.
Iām personally not a very visual thinker and Iām good at abstract thinking. This reads to me as denying my lived experience or forgetting that other types of people exist.
Ok, I didnāt mean that everybody is like that, I was making a generalization. Sorry you took it that way. What I had in mind was that when you see something hapening in front of you it sticks much better than reading about it.
Iām actually interested in thatāif you have found sources and documents that provide a better picture of how brains work, Iād be interested. The way I work in debate is that if you provide somehing that explains the world in a better way than my current explanation, then Iāll use it.
I have already tried telling people about evolutionary psychology and many other topics that they are interested in.
I determined that it mostly doesnāt work due to incorrect debate methodology, lack of intellectual skills (e.g. tree-making skills or any alternative to accomplish the same organizational purposes), too-low intellectual standards (like being dismissive of āsmallā errors instead of thinking errors merit post mortems), lack of persistence, quitting mid-discussion without explanation (often due to bias against claims youāre losing to in debate), poor project management, getting emotional, lack of background knowledge, lack of willingness to get new background knowledge mid-discussion, unwillingness to proceed in small, organized steps, imprecision, etc.
Hence Iāve focused on topics with priority which I believe are basically necessary prerequisite issues before dealing with the other stuff productively.
In other words, I determined that standard, widespread, common sense norms for rationality and debate are inadequate to reach true conclusions about evolutionary psychology, AGI, animal welfare, capitalism, what charity interventions should be pursued, and so on. The meta and methodological issues need to be dealt with first. And peopleās disinterest in those issues and resistance to dealing with them is a sign of irrationality and bias ā itās part of the problem.
So I donāt want to attempt to discuss evolutionary psychology with you because I donāt think it will work well due to those other issues. I donāt think you will discuss such a complex, hard issue in a way that will actually lead to a correct conclusion, even if that requires e.g. reading books and practicing skills as part of the process (which I suspect it would require). Like youāll make an inductivist or justificationist argument, and then Iāll mention that Popper refuted that, and then to resolve the issue weāll need a whole sub-discussion where you engage with Popper in a way capable of reaching an accurate conclusion. That will lead to some alternatives like you could read and study Popper, or you could review the literature for Popper critics who already did that who you could endorse, or you could argue that Popper is actually irrelevant, or there are other options but none are particularly easy. And there can be many layers of sub-issues, like most people should significantly improve their reading skills before itās reasonable to try to read a lot of complex literature and expect to find the truth (rather than doing it more for practice), and people should improve their grammar skills before expecting to write clear enough statements in debates, and people should improve their math and logic skills before expecting to actually get much right in debates, and people should improve their introspection skills before expecting to make reasonably unbiased claims in debates (and also so they can more accurately monitor when theyāre defensive or emotional).
I tried, many times, starting with an object level issue, discussing it until a few errors happened, and then trying to pivot the discussion to the issues which caused and/āor prevented correction of those errors. I tried using an initial discussion as a demonstration that the meta problems actually exist, that the debate wonāt work and will be full of errors, etc. I found basically that no one ever wanted to pivot to the meta topic. Having a few errors pointed out did not open their eyes to a bigger picture problem. One of the typical responses is doing a quick, superficial āfixā for each error and then wanting to move on without thinking about root causes, what process caused the error, what other errors the same process would cause, etc.
Sorry you took it that way.
This is an archetypical non-apology that puts blame on the person youāre speaking to. Itās a well known stereotype of how to do fake apologies. If you picked up this speech pattern by accident because itās a common pattern that youāve heard a lot, and you donāt realize what it means, then I wanted to warn you because youāll have a high chance of offending people by apologizing this way. I think maybe itās an accident here because I didnāt get a hostile vibe from you in the rest; this one sentence doesnāt fit well. Itās also an inaccurate sentence since I didnāt take it that way. I said how it reads. I spoke directly about interpretations rather than simply having one interpretation I took for granted and replied based on. I showed awareness that it could be read, interpreted or intended in multiple ways. I was helpfully letting you know about a problem rather than being offended.
I feel like we are starting to hit a dead-end here, which is a pity since I really want to learn stuff.
The problem is :
I am interested in learning concrete stuff to improve the way I think about the world
You point out that methodology and better norms for rationality and debate are necessary to get a productive conversation (which I can agree with, to some extent)
Except I have no way of knowing that your conclusions are better than mine. Itās entirely possible that yours are betterāyou spent a lot of time on this. But I just donāt have the motivation to do the many, many prerequisites you asked for, unless Iāve seen from experience that they provide better results.
This is the show donāt tell problem: youāve told me youāve got better conclusions (which is possible). But youāve not shown me that. I need to see that from experience.
I may be motivated to spend some time on improving rationality norms, and change my conclusions. But not without a (little) debate on some concrete stuff that would help understand that I can improve.
How about challenging my conclusion that energy depletion is a problem neglected by many, and that weāre starting to hit limits to growth ? We could do that in the other post you pointed to.
This is an archetypical non-apology that puts blame on the person youāre speaking to.
True. It was a mistake on my part. Itās just that the sentence āIām used to ignoring comments that assume I donāt existā felt a bit passive-agressive, so I got passive-agressive as well on that.
Itās not very rational. I shouldnāt have done that, youāre right.
How about challenging my conclusion that energy depletion is a problem neglected by many, and that weāre starting to hit limits to growth ?
OK, as a kind of demonstration, I will try engaging about this some, and I will even skip over asking about why this issue is an important priority compared to alternative issues.
First question: What thinkers/āideas have you read that disagree with you, and what did you do to address them and conclude that theyāre wrong?
First, most of what Iām saying challenges deeply what is usually said about energy, resources or the economy.
So the ideas that disagree with me are the established consensus, which is why Iām already familiar with the counter-arguments usually put forward against to energy depletion:
Weāve heard about it earlier and didnāt ārun outā
Prices will increase gradually
Technology will improve and solve the problem
We can have a bigger economy and less energy
Weāll just adapt
So in my post I tried my best to adress these points by explaining why ecological economists and other experts on energy and resources think they wonāt solve the problem (and Iām in the process of writing a post more focused on adressing explicited these counter-arguments).
I also read some more advanced arguments against what these experts said (debates with Richard Heinberg, articles criticizing Jean-Marc Jancovici). But each time Iāve seen limits to the reasoning. For instance, what was said againt the Limits to growth report (turns out most criticism didnāt adress the core points of the report).
Iām not aware of any major thinker that is fluent on the topic of energy and its relationship with the economy, and optimistic on the topic. However, the one that was the most knowledgeable about this that I found was Dave Denkenberger, director of ALLFED, and we had a lot of exchanges, where he put some solid criticism against what I said. For some of what I wrote, I had to change my mind. For some other stuff, I had to check the litterature and I found limits that he didnāt take into account (like on investment). This was interesting (and we still do not agree, which I find weird). But I tried my best to find reviewers that could criticize what I said.
Oh, ok. I understand better your approach.
I must admit that I am trying to aim for a different approach: writing stuff adapted to human psychology.
I donāt go from postulates like āArticles should be evaluated primarily by whether people can refute what the article says or notā or āReaders should be flexible and tolerant, learn to skim as desired, etc.ā It would be very nice if people were to do that. But our brains, although they can learn that to some extent with the good educational methods and the right incentives, just didnāt really evolve for doing stuff like that, so I donāt expect people to do that.
Reading text which is long, abstract, dry, remote from our daily environments, and with no direct human interactions, is possible, but this is akin to swimming against the flow: if thereās a good reason to do that, I will, but it will be much harder. And I need to know what I can get out of itāwith a serious probability.
I guess thatās one reason people tend to ignore what science says: itās boring. It has a āreader-deterring styleā as one paper puts it.
I really recommend this paper by Ugo Bardi that explicits why that contributes to the decline of science:
The brain is better at processing stuff that is concrete. Visual stuff like pictures. Metaphores. Examples. Bullet points and bolding. Thereās a much better chance that people read things that the brain can process easilyāand itās useful even for your readers that are able to read dry stuff.
I think youāre mistaken about evolutionary psychology and brains, but I donāt know how to correct you (and many other people similar to you) because your approach is not optimized for debate and (boring!?) scholarship like mine. That is one of many topics where Iād have some things to say if people changed their debate methodology, scholarly standards, etc. (I already tried debating this topic and many others in the past, but I found that it didnāt work well enough and I identified issues like debate methodology as the root cause of various failures.)
I also agree with and already (try to) do some of what you say. I have lots of material breaking things into smaller parts and making it easier to learn. But there are difficulties, e.g. when the parts are small then the value from each one individually (usually) becomes small too. To get a big result people have to learn many small parts and combine them, which can be hard and require persistence and project management. Youāre not really saying anything new to me, which is fine, but FYI I already know about additional difficulties which itās harder to find answers for.
Iām personally not a very visual thinker and Iām good at abstract thinking. This reads to me as denying my lived experience or forgetting that other types of people exist. If you had said that the majority of people like pictures, then I could have agreed with you. Itās not that big a deal ā Iām used to ignoring comments that assume I donāt exist or make general statements about what people are like which do not apply to me. Iām not going to get offended and stop talking to you over it. But I thought it was relevant enough to mention.
Iām actually interested in thatāif you have found sources and documents that provide a better picture of how brains work, Iād be interested. The way I work in debate is that if you provide somehing that explains the world in a better way than my current explanation, then Iāll use it.
Ok, I didnāt mean that everybody is like that, I was making a generalization. Sorry you took it that way. What I had in mind was that when you see something hapening in front of you it sticks much better than reading about it.
I have already tried telling people about evolutionary psychology and many other topics that they are interested in.
I determined that it mostly doesnāt work due to incorrect debate methodology, lack of intellectual skills (e.g. tree-making skills or any alternative to accomplish the same organizational purposes), too-low intellectual standards (like being dismissive of āsmallā errors instead of thinking errors merit post mortems), lack of persistence, quitting mid-discussion without explanation (often due to bias against claims youāre losing to in debate), poor project management, getting emotional, lack of background knowledge, lack of willingness to get new background knowledge mid-discussion, unwillingness to proceed in small, organized steps, imprecision, etc.
Hence Iāve focused on topics with priority which I believe are basically necessary prerequisite issues before dealing with the other stuff productively.
In other words, I determined that standard, widespread, common sense norms for rationality and debate are inadequate to reach true conclusions about evolutionary psychology, AGI, animal welfare, capitalism, what charity interventions should be pursued, and so on. The meta and methodological issues need to be dealt with first. And peopleās disinterest in those issues and resistance to dealing with them is a sign of irrationality and bias ā itās part of the problem.
So I donāt want to attempt to discuss evolutionary psychology with you because I donāt think it will work well due to those other issues. I donāt think you will discuss such a complex, hard issue in a way that will actually lead to a correct conclusion, even if that requires e.g. reading books and practicing skills as part of the process (which I suspect it would require). Like youāll make an inductivist or justificationist argument, and then Iāll mention that Popper refuted that, and then to resolve the issue weāll need a whole sub-discussion where you engage with Popper in a way capable of reaching an accurate conclusion. That will lead to some alternatives like you could read and study Popper, or you could review the literature for Popper critics who already did that who you could endorse, or you could argue that Popper is actually irrelevant, or there are other options but none are particularly easy. And there can be many layers of sub-issues, like most people should significantly improve their reading skills before itās reasonable to try to read a lot of complex literature and expect to find the truth (rather than doing it more for practice), and people should improve their grammar skills before expecting to write clear enough statements in debates, and people should improve their math and logic skills before expecting to actually get much right in debates, and people should improve their introspection skills before expecting to make reasonably unbiased claims in debates (and also so they can more accurately monitor when theyāre defensive or emotional).
I tried, many times, starting with an object level issue, discussing it until a few errors happened, and then trying to pivot the discussion to the issues which caused and/āor prevented correction of those errors. I tried using an initial discussion as a demonstration that the meta problems actually exist, that the debate wonāt work and will be full of errors, etc. I found basically that no one ever wanted to pivot to the meta topic. Having a few errors pointed out did not open their eyes to a bigger picture problem. One of the typical responses is doing a quick, superficial āfixā for each error and then wanting to move on without thinking about root causes, what process caused the error, what other errors the same process would cause, etc.
This is an archetypical non-apology that puts blame on the person youāre speaking to. Itās a well known stereotype of how to do fake apologies. If you picked up this speech pattern by accident because itās a common pattern that youāve heard a lot, and you donāt realize what it means, then I wanted to warn you because youāll have a high chance of offending people by apologizing this way. I think maybe itās an accident here because I didnāt get a hostile vibe from you in the rest; this one sentence doesnāt fit well. Itās also an inaccurate sentence since I didnāt take it that way. I said how it reads. I spoke directly about interpretations rather than simply having one interpretation I took for granted and replied based on. I showed awareness that it could be read, interpreted or intended in multiple ways. I was helpfully letting you know about a problem rather than being offended.
I feel like we are starting to hit a dead-end here, which is a pity since I really want to learn stuff.
The problem is :
I am interested in learning concrete stuff to improve the way I think about the world
You point out that methodology and better norms for rationality and debate are necessary to get a productive conversation (which I can agree with, to some extent)
Except I have no way of knowing that your conclusions are better than mine. Itās entirely possible that yours are betterāyou spent a lot of time on this. But I just donāt have the motivation to do the many, many prerequisites you asked for, unless Iāve seen from experience that they provide better results.
This is the show donāt tell problem: youāve told me youāve got better conclusions (which is possible). But youāve not shown me that. I need to see that from experience.
I may be motivated to spend some time on improving rationality norms, and change my conclusions. But not without a (little) debate on some concrete stuff that would help understand that I can improve.
How about challenging my conclusion that energy depletion is a problem neglected by many, and that weāre starting to hit limits to growth ? We could do that in the other post you pointed to.
True. It was a mistake on my part. Itās just that the sentence āIām used to ignoring comments that assume I donāt existā felt a bit passive-agressive, so I got passive-agressive as well on that.
Itās not very rational. I shouldnāt have done that, youāre right.
OK, as a kind of demonstration, I will try engaging about this some, and I will even skip over asking about why this issue is an important priority compared to alternative issues.
First question: What thinkers/āideas have you read that disagree with you, and what did you do to address them and conclude that theyāre wrong?
Ok, interesting question.
First, most of what Iām saying challenges deeply what is usually said about energy, resources or the economy.
So the ideas that disagree with me are the established consensus, which is why Iām already familiar with the counter-arguments usually put forward against to energy depletion:
Weāve heard about it earlier and didnāt ārun outā
Prices will increase gradually
Technology will improve and solve the problem
We can have a bigger economy and less energy
Weāll just adapt
So in my post I tried my best to adress these points by explaining why ecological economists and other experts on energy and resources think they wonāt solve the problem (and Iām in the process of writing a post more focused on adressing explicited these counter-arguments).
I also read some more advanced arguments against what these experts said (debates with Richard Heinberg, articles criticizing Jean-Marc Jancovici). But each time Iāve seen limits to the reasoning. For instance, what was said againt the Limits to growth report (turns out most criticism didnāt adress the core points of the report).
Iām not aware of any major thinker that is fluent on the topic of energy and its relationship with the economy, and optimistic on the topic. However, the one that was the most knowledgeable about this that I found was Dave Denkenberger, director of ALLFED, and we had a lot of exchanges, where he put some solid criticism against what I said. For some of what I wrote, I had to change my mind. For some other stuff, I had to check the litterature and I found limits that he didnāt take into account (like on investment). This was interesting (and we still do not agree, which I find weird). But I tried my best to find reviewers that could criticize what I said.