Yes, it can be learned—and I had to learn that in engineering school. But I didn’t like it. As I said, I found doing that sluggish, boring and not motivating. I can do it if I am forced to, but this makes me lose motivation—and keeping my motivation is very important for me to stay active. If learning about energy was purely abstract thinking, I simply wouldn’t bother, even if it’s important. So I prefer to play on my strong suits—that’s more sustainable for me.
Not gonna debate this right now (unless maybe you wanted to focus on this topic instead of others) but I wanted to clarify: When I said it’s learnable, I meant learnable in a way that you like it, don’t have motivation problems, aren’t bored, it isn’t sluggish, everything works well. Those things you talk about are serious problems – they mean something (fixable) is going wrong. That’s what I think.
I made a little list of feedback based on the I read in your posts.
Thanks. I appreciate work people do that facilitates me getting along with more EAs better, so that I can better share potentially valuable ideas with EA.
You said that you won every debate, and your way of doing works, but I have no way of knowing that from the outside.
Yeah I don’t expect anyone to trust that or to look through tens of thousands of pages of discussion history (which is publicly available FWIW). And I don’t know of any way to summarize past debates that will be very persuasive. Instead, all I really want, is that at least one person from EA is willing to debate, and if I get a good outcome, then a second person should become willing to debate, and so on. And e.g. if I get to 5 good debate outcomes with EA people then a lot more people ought to start paying some attention, considering my ideas, etc. It should be possible to get attention from EA people by a series of debates without doing marketing, making friends, or other social climbing. And starting with one at a time is fine but I shouldn’t have to go through hundreds of debates one at a time to persuade hundreds of EAs.
I think that’s a reasonable thing to ask for even if I had no past debate history. But I don’t know of any communities (besides my own) that actually offer it. I think that’s one of the major problems with the world which matters more than a lot of the causes EA works on. Imagine how much more easily EA could do huge amounts of good if just 10% of the charities and large companies were open to debate, and EAs could go win debates with them and then they’d actually change stuff.
You could provide an example of something specific that could be improved in animal welfare advocacy by using the Popper method, showing why it is superior.
I don’t have any quick win for that. Just a potential very very long debate involving learning a ton of ideas which could potentially lead to EAs changing their mind about some of these beliefs. I have long, complicated arguments regarding other EA topics too, such as AI alignment (which again depends significantly on epistemology, so Popper is relevant). I’ve been interested in talking about AI alignment for years but I don’t know any way to get anyone on the other side of the AI alignment debate to engage with me seriously.
Don’t try to sell a tool or a solution itself—show that you get better results this way (using examples). If it works, then some people will try to use the solution.
I often get results that I consider better, but which other people would evaluate differently, or wouldn’t know how to evaluate, or wouldn’t be able to replicate without learning a lot of the background knowledge I have. When people have different ideas, it often means the way of evaluating outcomes itself has to be debated/discussed – which partly means talking about concepts, abstractions, philosophy, etc. And then the specific evaluations can require a lot of discussion and debate too. So you can’t just show an outcome – there has to be substantial discussion for people to understand.
One of your post spent 22 minutes to say that people shouldn’t misquote. It’s a rather obvious conclusion that can be exposed in 3 minutes top. I think some people read that as a rant.
I’m highly confident that EAers broadly disagree with me on that topic, which is why I wrote that article. It’s not obvious. It’s controversial. And I believe it’s an ongoing, major problem on the forum that is not being solved.
It’s related to another article I’m considering writing, which would claim basically that raising intellectual standards would significantly improve EA’s effectiveness. Widespread misquoting, plus widespread not really caring about or minding misquotes, is one example of EA having intellectual standards that are too low. Low intellectual standards have negative consequences for having accurate views about the world and figuring out the right conclusions about various causes. And they also makes it extremely hard to have productive debates about hard issues, especially when there’s significant culture clash or even unfriendliness.
In general, you need either friendliness or high standards to have a productive discussion or debate. It’s super hard with neither. And friendliness towards critics with significant outsider/heresy ideas is rare in general. I think EA has more of that friendliness than typical but not nearly enough to replace high intellectual standards when dealing major differences in ideas.
Antagonizing people is easy, even by accident. I’m not saying you are doing that, but it’s still very important, so I add that just in case.
I know that I often antagonize people by accident. I’m not going to deny that or feel defensive about it. It’s a topic I’m happy to talk about openly, but IME other people often don’t want to. I have sometimes been accused of being mean, at which point I ask for quotes, at which point they usually don’t want to provide any quotes, or occasionally provide a quote they don’t want to analyze. Anyway it’s a difficult problem which I have worked on.
What follows logically, then, is what is the most effective way of making EA better?I don’t have a good answer to that yet, but that ’s what I will try to answer.
I don’t have a plan that I particularly expect to work, but I have a few things to try. One plan is getting people to debate or, failing that, to talk about issues like why debating matters. Another plan is to get a handful of people to take an interest, discuss stuff at length, learn more about my ideas, and then help change things. Another plan (that I’ve already been working on for 20 years) is to write good stuff – at EA or even just at my own websites – and maybe something good will happen as a result.
I think I’m aware of a bunch of problems and difficulties that you aren’t familiar with, which make the problem even harder. For example, I have objections to a lot of the psychology and marketing stuff you mention. But anyway, to summarize, I know something about debating issues rationally but less about getting anyone to like me or listen. One of the main problems is social hierarchies, and in very short I think any plan involving social climbing is the wrong plan. Eliezer Yudkowsky also has a lot of negative things to say about social hierarchies but unfortunately I don’t see that reflected in the EA or LW communities – I fear that no one figured out much about how to turn criticism of social hierarchies into action to actually create different types of communities.
Also, when you have conclusions that rely on different background knowledge than your audience has, it’s very hard to explain them in short ways, which are how people want and expect information, while also making it rationally persuasive (which requires explaining a lot of things people don’t already know, or else they should not find it persuasive without debating, discussing or studying it first to find out more).
“I know that I often antagonize people by accident.”
I think something that could help (maybe) is making the other person feel understood. Showing that you understand where they come from, that what the other says really makes sense for them, but that you have found some other way of seeing things that also makes sense. Direct accusations of doing stuff poorly rarely works, and comes off as judgemental. It’s better if you want to let people (have you read How to make friends by Dale Carnegie? Not perfect but gives some valuable insight). (Not sure I’m doing that with you, but you don’t seem to need it ^^)
“I’m highly confident that EAers broadly disagree with [the topic of misquoting], which is why I wrote that article.”
Still, 22 minutes is way too long. I read it for 5 minutes and did not feel this as a valuable use of my time—most of it was on the analogy with “deadnaming” but I think this derailed from the topic. This also greatly needed a structure like an executive summary style. Or a structure like 1) here’s an example of a misquote leading to a bad outcome 2) Miquoting in general poses problems 3) The EA forums needs to enfore rules against misquotes (and here’s how).
“When I said it’s learnable, I meant learnable in a way that you like it, don’t have motivation problems, aren’t bored, it isn’t sluggish, everything works well.”
Wow, this means you could have an entire class of people, including ones who have trouble with maths (with like say complex equations), and you ’d be able to teach them to do maths in ways they like ? That would be very impressive! I’d like to learn more, do you have sources on that ?
“When I said it’s learnable, I meant learnable in a way that you like it, don’t have motivation problems, aren’t bored, it isn’t sluggish, everything works well.”
Wow, this means you could have an entire class of people, including ones who have trouble with maths (with like say complex equations), and you ’d be able to teach them to do maths in ways they like ? That would be very impressive! I’d like to learn more, do you have sources on that ?
I have multiple types of writing (and videos) related to this:
educational and skill-building materials (e.g. grammar trees, text analysis or tutoring videos)
writing about how learning works (e.g. practice and mastery)
writing about epistemology – key philosophical concepts behind the other stuff
writing about why some opposing views (like genetic IQ) are mistaken
I’ve been developing and debating these ideas for many years, and I don’t know of any refutations or counter-examples to my claims, but I’m not popular/influential and have not gotten very many people to try my ideas much.
In terms of the subject matter itself, math is one of the better starting points. However, people often have some other stuff that gets in the way like issues with procrastination, motivation, project management, sleep schedule, “laziness”, planning ahead, time preference, resource budgeting (including mental energy), self-awareness, emotions, drug use (including caffeine, alcohol or nicotine), or clashes between their conscious ideas and intuitions/subconscious ideas. These things can be disruptive to math learning, so they may need to be addressed first. In other words, if one is conflicted about learning math – if part of them wants to and part doesn’t – then they may need to deal with that before studying math. There are also a lot of people who are mentally tired most of the time and they need to improve that situation rather than undertake a new project involving lots of thinking.
Also most current educational materials for math, like most topics, are not very good. It takes significant skill or help to deal with that.
There is an issue where, basically, most people don’t believe me that I have important knowledge and won’t listen. Initial skepticism is totally reasonable but I think what should happen next, from at least a few people, is a truth seeking process like a debate using rational methods instead of just ignoring something, on the assumption it’s probably wrong, with no attempt to identify any error. That way people can find errors in my ideas, or not, and either way someone can learn something.
Sounds like quite the challenge to learn maths ! I can understand why “you need to be really motivated and allocate a lot of time and resources and to avoid coffee and alcohol and cigarettes and to solve your problems of sleep and procrastination and emotions in order to learn maths” leads to not many people really learning maths !
I wouldn’t count on many people learning these skills in such a context.
And I though the issue was only because the educational material was poor.
Ok, then I’m not sure learning maths is the most valuable use of my time right now. Especially since I mostly aggregate the work of other experts and I let them do the research and the maths in my stead.
(Although I’d still be interested by the links in case that proves necessary for my research at some point in the future. Maybe the “how learning works” material could be of interest too)
Ok, all of this is interesting. Sorry for the late answer—I got caught watching the FTX debacle where I lost an ongoing project.
To summarize, I know something about debating issues rationally but less about getting anyone to like me or listen
I’m going to focus on that here.
This is related to why I was so late in answering: the longer the exchange is, the most you have to reply to. This means that the cost of answering, in time and brain resources, gets higher, lowering the proability of an answer. I think this is a reason why many people stop debating at some point.
A useful thing I try to keep in mind is that the brain tries to save energy. It can save energy by automating tasks (habits), by using shortcuts (heuristics), and by avoiding strong conclusions that would lead to a large reorganization in the way it currently does things (for instance, changing core beliefs and methods of reasoning). This avoidance can take the form of finding rationalizations to stuff it already does, or denial.
Of course, it’s not just about energy, since the brain can change its structure if there is a good reason. Motivation is a crucial part of people discussing anything—but for motivation you need a reason to keep motivated. But it’s really not obvious what the motivation is when discussing abstract methodology. What would that reason be?
Most of the time, the reason is direct feedback that it’s doing things wrong, and negative consequences if it doesn’t change. But we don’t have this feedback during an abstract discussion on methodology and epistemics.
There is no examples of feedback of the style “wow, the way that guy does things really looks better”, as you said.
Social validation doesn’t go our way either here.
You’re not at the top of a social hierachy
Plus, we’re not between friends and we’re remote in time and space (the point you made about debates being more conclusive where there is friendliness or high standards was really good, by the way).
Now, getting better and feeling right about something can be motivating to some people (like us). But if there appears to be no good pathway for me to get better, I’ll give up on the conversation, since my brain will see other stuff to do as more appealing (not right now of course. But at some point).
To prevent that, for me, the reward would be a concrete way to improve how I do things. I can agree with you that we (I) don’t have high enough standards for high-quality discourse, but that doesn’t tell me what to do. My brain cannot change if you don’t point to something specific I can apply (like a method or a rule you can enforce). Debate policies may be a start, but they won’t do if I have no idea what they look like.
We usually don’t learn by having more theoretical knowledge, althought that’s often necessary—but most of the time theoretical knowledge doesn’t necessarily influence action (think of “treat others as you would treat yourself”). But the kind of knowledge that really sticks and influences action comes from practice—by trying stuff and seeing by yourself how that works. Having these methological skills you talked about worked for you, so now you try to push them forward. This makes sense. But I can do the same only by trying and testing.
So, what could you provide your debate partners that would be attractive enough to keep them in the debate? I’m afraid that having extremely long discussions about theoretical stuff with no clear reward may be too much to expect.
“For example, I have objections to a lot of the psychology and marketing stuff you mention. ”
Now I’m interested. Do you have data that would refute what I said or that you think would work better ?
I’m afraid that having extremely long discussions about theoretical stuff with no clear reward may be too much to expect.
I don’t mind switching to saying one short thing at a time if you prefer. I find people often don’t prefer it, e.g. b/c dozens of short messages seems like too much. In my experience, people tend to stop discussing after a limited number of back-and-forths regardless of how long they are.
Ok, I understand—so if lenght isn’t the biggest problem, I guess what might cause more of an issue is that the topic is about “theoretical stuff with no clear reward”.
So I guess the main challenge is about solving that. Questions like: How can I show that this theoretical stuff can be useful in the real world ? What is the reason people might have to be interested in engaging with me ? If I can only have a limited number of replies, how do I make the most of that time, and what are the most valuables ideas, practices and concept that I can push for ?
Questions like: How can I show that this theoretical stuff can be useful in the real world ?
I have answers to this and various other things, but I don’t have short, convincing answers that work with pre-existing shared premises with most people. The difficulty is too much background knowledge is different. My ideas make more sense and can be explained in shorter ways if someone knows a lot about Karl Popper’s ideas. My Popperian background and perspective clashes with the Bayesian perspectives here and it’s not mainstream either. (There are no large Popperian communities comparable to LW or EA to go talk to instead.)
The lack of enough shared premises is also, in my experience, one of the main reasons people don’t like to debate with me. People usually don’t want to rethink fundamental issues and actually don’t know how to. If you go to a chemist and say “I disagree with the physics premises that all your chemistry ideas are based on”, they maybe won’t know how to, or want to, debate physics with you. People mostly want to talk about stuff within their field that they know about, not talk about premises that some other type of person would know about. The obvious solution to this is talk to philosophers, but unfortunately philosophy is one of the worst and most broken fields and there’s basically no one reasonable to talk to and almost no one doing reasonable work. Because philosophy is so broken, people should stop trusting it and getting premises from it. Everything else is downstream of philosophy, so it’s hurting EA and everything else. But this is a rather abstract issue which, so far, I haven’t been able to get many people to care much about.
I could phrase it using more specifics but then people will disagree with me. E.g. “induction is wrong so...” will get denials that induction is wrong. (Induction is one of the main things Popper criticized. I don’t think any philosopher has ever given a reasonable rebuttal to defend induction. I’ve gone through a lot of literature on that issue and asked a lot of people.) The people who deny induction is wrong consistently want to take next steps that I think are the wrong approach, such as debating induction without using literature references or ignoring the issue. Whereas I think the next step should basically be to review the literature instead of making ad hoc arguments. But that’s work. I’ve done that work but people don’t want to trust my results (which is fine) and also don’t want to do the work themselves, which leaves it difficult to make progress.
Have you tried putting stuff in a visual way ? Like breaking down the steps of your (different) reasoning in a diagram , in order to show why you have a different conclusion on a specific topic EA is doing.
For instance, let’s say one conclusion you have is “EAs interested in animal welfare should do X”. You could present stuff this way : [Argument A] + [Argument B] → [I use my way of estimating things] → [Conlusion X].
Maybe this could help.
unfortunately philosophy is one of the worst and most broken fields and there’s basically no one reasonable to talk to and almost no one doing reasonable work. Because philosophy is so broken, people should stop trusting it and getting premises from it.
Huhu can’t say I disagree, I really have problems seeing what I can get from the field of philosophy most of the time, in terms of practical advice on how to improve that works, not just ideas. (although saying “there’s no one reasonable to talk to in the field XXX” would flag you as a judgemental person nobody should talk to, so be careful issuing judgements around like that)
But it’s very hard to say “this is bad” about something without proposing something people better can turn to instead. And despite exchanging with you, I still don’t picture that “better” thing to turn to.
For instance, one of the (many) reasons the anti-capitalism movement is absolutely failing is not because capitalism is good (it’s pretty clear it’s leading us to environmental destruction) or because people support it (there have been surveys in France showing that a majority of people think we need to get out of the myth of infinite growth). It has a lot to do with how hard it is to actually picture alternatives to this system, how hard it is to put forward these alternatives, and how hard it is to implement them. Nothing can change if I can’t picture ways of doing things differently.
judge public intellectuals by how they handle debate, and judge ideas by the current objective state of the debate
read and engage with some other philosophers (e.g. Popper, Goldratt and myself)
actually write down what’s wrong with the bad philosophers in a clear way instead of just disliking them (this will facilitate debating and reaching conclusions about which ones are actually good)
investigate what philosophical premises you hold, and their sources, and reconsider them
There are sub-steps, e.g. to raise intellectual standards people need to improve their ability to read, write and analyze text, and practice that until a significantly higher skill level and effectiveness is intuitive/easy. That can be broken down into smaller steps such as learning grammar, learning to make sentence tree diagrams, learning to make paragraph tree diagrams, learning to make multi-paragraph tree diagrams, etc.
I have a forum people can join and plenty of writing and videos which include actionable suggestions about steps to take. I’ve also have proposed things that I think people can picture, like that all arguments are addressed in truth-seeking and time-efficient ways instead of ignored. If that was universal, it would have consequences such as it being possible to go to a charity or company and telling them some ideas and making some arguments and then, if you’re right, they probably change. If 10% of charities were open to changing due to rational argument, it’d enable a lot of resources to be used more effectively.
BTW, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have much confidence in your political opinions (or spend much time or effort on them) without doing those other kinds of activities first.
Ah, this is more like it: a list of stuff to do. Good !
Now that I see it in that format, maybe an interesting EA forum post would be to use the list above, and provide links for each of them. You could redirect each item to the best source you have found or produced on this topic. I feel it would be easier to convince people to adopt better rationality practices if they have a list of how to do that.
Well maybe not everyone, but I am drawing conclusions from my personal case: you seem to have some interesting techniques in store, but personally right now I just don’t see how acquire them—so the best links you have for that could help greatly.
This would centralize the information in one spot (that you can redirect people to in future debates and works).
An unrelated note: I liked your post on the damage big companies were doing on your forum. I don’t really understand why you think the damage they do is not compatible with capitalism—I don’t see anything in the definition of capitalism that would preclude such an outcome. But it was an interesting post.
I’m a bit more skeptical on your post about how to judge the ability of experts, however. If having a debate policy were a common practice, and it was notorious that people who refuse them have something to hide, then it would work. But right now such an advice doesn’t seem that useful, because very few people have such a debate policy—so you can’t distinguish between people who have something to hide and people who would be ok with the concept if they had heard about it. I don’t see such a practice becoming mainstream for the next few decades.
So in the absence of that, how can I really judge which experts are reliable ?
I’d like to judge by openness in debates, but it’s not clear to me how to get this information quickly. Especially when I’m seeing an expert for the first time.
For instance, let’s take someone like Nate Hagens. How would you go to judge his reliability?
Anyway, I have plenty more things I could try. I have plenty to say. And I know there’s plenty of room for improvement in my stuff including regarding organization. I will keep posting things at EA for now. Even if I stop, I’ll keep posting at my own sites. Even if no one listens, it doesn’t matter so much; I like figuring out and writing about these things; it’s my favorite activity.
An unrelated note: I liked your post on the damage big companies were doing on your forum.
FYI, it’s hard for me to know what post you mean without a link or title because I have thousands of posts, and I often have multiple posts about the same topic.
I don’t really understand why you think the damage they do is not compatible with capitalism—I don’t see anything in the definition of capitalism that would preclude such an outcome.
The definition of capitalism involves a free market where the initiation of force (including fraud) is prohibited. Today, fraud is pretty widespread at large companies. Also, many versions of capitalism allow the government to use force, but they do not allow the government to meddle in the economy and give advantages to some companies over others which are derived from the government’s use of force (so some companies are, indirectly via the government, using force against competitors). Those are just two examples (of many).
(I may not reply further about capitalism or anything political, but I thought that would be short and maybe helpful.)
so you can’t distinguish between people who have something to hide and people who would be ok with the concept if they had heard about it.
You can tell them about the debate policy concept and see how they react. You can also look at whether they respond to criticisms of their work. You can also make a tree of the field and look at whether that expert is contributing important nodes to it or not.
I don’t see such a practice becoming mainstream for the next few decades.
I think it could become important, widespread and influential in a few years if it had a few thousand initial supporters. I think getting even 100 initial supporters is the biggest obstacle, then turning that into a bigger group is second. Then once you have a bigger group that can be vocal enough in online discussions, they can get noticed by popular intellectuals and bring up debate policies to them and get responses of some kinds. Then you just need one famous guy to like the idea and it can get a lot more attention and it will then be possible to say “X has a debate policy; why don’t you?” And I can imagine tons of fans bringing that up in comment sections persistently for many of the popular online intellectuals. It’s easy to imagine fans of e.g. Jordan Peterson bugging him about it endlessly until he does it.
I think the reason that doesn’t happen is that most people don’t actually seem to want it, like it or care, so getting to even 100 supporters of the idea is very hard. The issue IMO is the masses resisting, rejecting or not caring about the idea (of the few who see it, most dislike or ignore it), including at EA, for reasons I don’t understand well enough.
For instance, let’s take someone like Nate Hagens. How would you go to judge his reliability?
I glanced at the table of contents and saw mention of Malthus. That’s a topic I know about, so I could read that section and be in a pretty good position to evaluate it or catch errors. Finding a section where I have expertise and checking that is a useful technique.
There’s a fairly common thing where people read the newspaper talking about their field and they are like “wow it’s so bad. this is so amateurish and full of obvious errors”. Then they read the newspaper on any other topic and believe the quality is decent. It isn’t. You should expect the correctness of the parts you know less about to probably be similar to the part you know a lot about.
At a glance at the Malthus section, the book seems to be on the same side as Malthus, which I disagree with. So a specific thing I’d look for is whether the book brings up and tries to address some of the arguments on my side that I regard as important. If it ignores the side of the debate I favor, and doesn’t have any criticisms of anything I believe, that’d be bad. I did a text search for “Godwin” and there are no results. (Godwin is a classical liberal political philosopher from the same time period as Malthus who I like a lot. He wrote a book about why Malthus was wrong.) There are also no results for “Burke” and no mention of Adam Smith (nor turgot, bastiat, condorcet, mises, rothbard, hayek). I see it as a potentially bad sign to look at old thinkers/writers only to bring up one who is on your side without talking about other ideas from the time period including disagreements and competing viewpoints. It can indicate bias to cherry pick one past thinker to bring up.
That’s inconclusive. Maybe it gives fair summaries of rival viewpoints and criticizes them; I didn’t look enough to actually know. I don’t want to spend more time and energy on this right now (also I dislike the format and would want to download a copy of the book to read it more). I think it gives you some idea about ways to approach this – methods – even though I didn’t actually do much. Also, in my experience, the majority of books like this will fail at fact checking at least once if you check five random cites, so that would be worth checking if you care about whether the facts in the book are trustworthy.
Ok—however, while this is better, this list is still very long, and quite daunting. It’s good as an index, but not as a “here’s the top priority stuff”.
I think a question you should ask yourself is “If I can only have a limited number of exchanges with people, and they have a limited time, what do I want them to learn?”. And then just mention a few things that are the best/most useful stuff you have in store.
This way people get a sample of what you can offer, and then they may be like “oh ok this might be useful, maybe I’ll dig more into that”.
Mentioning “read the entire work of this guy” or “check my entire forum” is probably not something people will readily use- because from the outside I have no way of knowing if this is a good use of my time. It would take too much effort just to check. So I need a sample that tells me “hey, that’s interesting” that pushes me to go onward.
So having a list of 1) Actionable advice 2) with the list with the best stuff to redirect people too would be useful.
You can also look at experts whether they respond to criticisms of their work
Same question—how do I check that ? There’s no under “answer section” under scientific papers or books, except some are ones. They could have answered the criticism in the - how do I check that quickly ?
For instance, from what I read, Nate Hagens did take into account the classic points put forward against the claims of Malthus (although he didn’t really quote many names). But it’s all over the book—so there’s no quick way of checking that.
I think the debate policy could become important, widespread and influential in a few years if it had a few thousand initial supporters. [...] I think the reason that doesn’t happen is that most people don’t actually seem to want it, like it or care, so getting to even 100 supporters of the idea is very hard. The issue IMO is the masses resisting, rejecting or not caring about the idea (of the few who see it, most dislike or ignore it), including at EA, for reasons I don’t understand well enough.
I think one reason most people are not interested is that they don’t feel concerned by the idea. I don’t feel concerned by it. It feels it could work for public intellectuals, but everybody else has no use for it (maybe they’re wrong, but it doesn’t feel like it). And public intellectuals are a hard to reach public.
It’s also not obvious what the benefits of the idea would be. I understand there are benefits, but there’s no visible result you can see for them, which makes it less attractive. And even if there were debates following this policy, it’s not guaranteed this would change the state of the debate: many papers have been shown as non-replicable, but they are still widely cited since the rebuttals have not publicized as much.
I get that this would be really useful if many prominent experts used that—because you could reach to them and they’d have to answer.
I think I’m going to have to quit writing anything substantive at EA due to the license change, so if you want to keep discussing with me I think you’ll have to join my forum. That sucks but I don’t see a better option.
Ok—I subscribed to the forum but I don’t know how to answer to the comment you linked to.
I’ll answer here.
Why should anyone believe me about the quality or importance of anything I say, or be interested to keep going past reading one or two things? Because they can’t point out any errors so far.
Interesting, but I don’t know if this is the right criteria. One thing is, I can’t point out to an error you made because I can’t evaluate your claims. Our discussion was on abstract points of methodology, not facts or stuff you can verify—so of course I can’t point out to an error, because there is no real result to check.
Now I know I should keep an open mind, which I do, especially since I can’t point to errors in the reasoning itself. But it’s hard to believe things I can’t verify and see by myself.
Which is why I keep asking for stuff like examples and concrete things. It’s easier to grasp these and to verify them.
If you get ideas from public intellectuals who are doing rationality wrong, then you are in trouble too, not just them. You need to do rationality things right yourself and/or find thought leaders who are doing things right. So it is each individual’s problem even if they aren’t a public intellectual.
It’s really not obvious to anyone that “not having a debate policy” is “doing rationality wrong”. Especially when the concept itself is so uncommon. If this is the criteria I really don’t know who is doing rationality right (but then again, I don’t really know who is doing rationality right). Then again, most people do not get challenged into debates. Even EAs. So it makes sense that they think such a concept is not for them.
Just to test, you’ll be happy to know I adopted a debate policy ! We’ll see what results that provides in 10 years.
I’m more interested in enabling someone to become a great thinker by a large effort, not in offering some quick wins.
Ah, ok. I see where we differ here.
I try to have the most impact I can in the world, so I judge what I do by “what positive impact did this have?” As such, quick wins that can target a larger public have a larger impact, and a higher chance of changing things, so I decided on that. Which is why this seems more important to me.
But it appears that you have a different goal in mind—you seek high-level discussions with like-minded individuals. I can understand that.
Same for the CC BY license. I know I’d have less impact if I left the forum, and what I write is there with the goal of being shared anyway, so I don’t really care about that.
Same for the CC BY license. I know I’d have less impact if I left the forum, and what I write is there with the goal of being shared anyway, so I don’t really care about that.
I have more drafts to go through so there will be more posts soon.
If you or anyone else thinks that any of them should be on the EA forum, you can post them at EA as link posts. In general, I don’t plan to link post my own stuff at EA going forward, for several reasons, but if even one person thinks it would add much value to EA, they are welcome to do it.
Ok—I subscribed to the forum but I don’t know how to answer to the comment you linked to.
To post on my forum, you have to pay $20 (once, not recurring). I know the communication on this isn’t amazing (Discourse has limited options) though there should be a banner and some info about it in a few places, but I know sometimes people still don’t see it. There’s a subscribe button on the home page but it’s in a menu on mobile instead of directly visible. It takes you to https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/s and then the payment flow is with a standard plugin that uses Stripe.
If it’s a financial burden for you, I can give you free access.
If you can afford it, then I’ll have to ask you to pay, because my general policy is if people value a discussion with me less than $20 then I shouldn’t talk with them. I skip that policy when I go participate at other communities, but I’m quitting the EA forum now.
Ok—I though the $20 were for making posts, I didn’t think it was for answering.
I don’t think I will pay $20 because all the money I earn beyond my basic needs is going to charities.
I can understand the CC BY issue, if you’ve had problems with it in the past. If you think you can have more impact by retaining property over what you write, then this is what you should do.
I don’t think I will pay $20 because all the money I earn beyond my basic needs is going to charities.
If $20 got you even a 1% chance to find out that much of your money and effort is going to the wrong charities and causes, wouldn’t that be a good deal? Error correction is high value.
I think what EA is doing by getting people to donate that much (all above basic needs) is extremely harmful to people like you. I’d believe that even if I didn’t also believe that the majority of EA causes and efforts were counter-productive.
There’s something really problematic about thinking a cause is so important that you’ll make large personal sacrifices for it, but not being willing to do much to pursue potential error correction. EA has a lot of people who will go to great lengths to help their causes – they just are so sure they’re right(?) that they don’t seem to think debating critics is very important. It’s weird. If you think every dollar you donate is a big deal, you should also think every tiny bit of risk reduction and error correction is a big deal. Those things are scarcer than dollars and can easily have larger impacts. But I come here and say I think EA is wrong about important issues, and I want to debate, and I ask if EA has any organized debate methods or even just individuals who’d be happy to debate much. And the answer was no and also no one seems to think that’s very bad or risky. That shows a widespread lack of respect for the risk of being wrong about causes that people are investing all their money above basic needs in, and a disinterest in criticism.
Anyway, if you find my ideas implausible and not worth pursuing or debating, or still don’t really value my time more than the time of the next guy you could talk with instead, then we should part ways.
Sorry—I exagerated a bit. I do not donate everything above my basic needs—still quite a good chunk but not everything.
I try to spend quite some time on error correction (and sometimes buy books instead of getting them from a library) - but in this realm I am still weighting that against, say, the impact I could obtain by donating to an animal charity instead. But I’m ready to do some spending if I feel there’s a good chance to know more and improve.
The problem here is rather that I am not sure subscribing to this forum will really allow me to improve.
I absolutely agree to your claim that EA has a lack of organized debate method, and could improve on fighting against bias. I could probably improve on that too, I think. I can agree with the “lacking methodology”.
However, to actually improve, I need practical advice on how to improve. Or an example: for instance, seeing a debate where I see that a specific claim very important in EA is not impactful (for instance, that donating to charities that do corporate outreach in factory farming), and seeing the methodology that led to this claim.
I want to point out that criticism of what exists currently is important but not enough—the way I personally work is that I need to see something better in order to update correctly. Then I can be inspired by that better approach.
For instance, I read your criticism of The Scout Mindset—it’s interesting, there are good points, for instance that the examples she gives could be really biased. But what would add even more value to your post is recommending a book which does the same thing but better (so basically, a book about how to get better at updating how we view the world, written in a clear, streamlined way, with examples and practical advice—just more rigorous).
I really like to improve. But I need practical stuff for that—and I asked for it and still feel you didn’t answer that (besides taking up a debate policy—you also made a list of actions but with no links to go deeper).
I fear it could prove difficult for you to spread your ideas even further without a greater focus on that part.
But I come here and say I think EA is wrong about important issues
By the way, have you issued claims about EA being wrong on its list of priorities ? You have done so on methodology—which is important, but not the most engaging topic, so few people interacted with it (which is too bad). But have tried to make more specific claims, like “EA is wrong about putting effort on factory farming” ?
Oh, I had wrote a full answer in your curi.us debate space, but it says I need an account (it’s weird that the “post public answer” box appears if it doesn’t even if I don’t have an account).
I think I’ll take up your offer to have an access to the forum just for a few months, please.
Oh, and thanks for the concern you’re showing me, that’s kind :)
OK, I gave CF forum posting access to your account.
You’re right that I should make the curi.us comment section clearer than the current small-print note. If you lost the text of what you wrote, I should be able to retrieve it for you from logs.
Not gonna debate this right now (unless maybe you wanted to focus on this topic instead of others) but I wanted to clarify: When I said it’s learnable, I meant learnable in a way that you like it, don’t have motivation problems, aren’t bored, it isn’t sluggish, everything works well. Those things you talk about are serious problems – they mean something (fixable) is going wrong. That’s what I think.
Thanks. I appreciate work people do that facilitates me getting along with more EAs better, so that I can better share potentially valuable ideas with EA.
Yeah I don’t expect anyone to trust that or to look through tens of thousands of pages of discussion history (which is publicly available FWIW). And I don’t know of any way to summarize past debates that will be very persuasive. Instead, all I really want, is that at least one person from EA is willing to debate, and if I get a good outcome, then a second person should become willing to debate, and so on. And e.g. if I get to 5 good debate outcomes with EA people then a lot more people ought to start paying some attention, considering my ideas, etc. It should be possible to get attention from EA people by a series of debates without doing marketing, making friends, or other social climbing. And starting with one at a time is fine but I shouldn’t have to go through hundreds of debates one at a time to persuade hundreds of EAs.
I think that’s a reasonable thing to ask for even if I had no past debate history. But I don’t know of any communities (besides my own) that actually offer it. I think that’s one of the major problems with the world which matters more than a lot of the causes EA works on. Imagine how much more easily EA could do huge amounts of good if just 10% of the charities and large companies were open to debate, and EAs could go win debates with them and then they’d actually change stuff.
I don’t have any quick win for that. Just a potential very very long debate involving learning a ton of ideas which could potentially lead to EAs changing their mind about some of these beliefs. I have long, complicated arguments regarding other EA topics too, such as AI alignment (which again depends significantly on epistemology, so Popper is relevant). I’ve been interested in talking about AI alignment for years but I don’t know any way to get anyone on the other side of the AI alignment debate to engage with me seriously.
I often get results that I consider better, but which other people would evaluate differently, or wouldn’t know how to evaluate, or wouldn’t be able to replicate without learning a lot of the background knowledge I have. When people have different ideas, it often means the way of evaluating outcomes itself has to be debated/discussed – which partly means talking about concepts, abstractions, philosophy, etc. And then the specific evaluations can require a lot of discussion and debate too. So you can’t just show an outcome – there has to be substantial discussion for people to understand.
I’m highly confident that EAers broadly disagree with me on that topic, which is why I wrote that article. It’s not obvious. It’s controversial. And I believe it’s an ongoing, major problem on the forum that is not being solved.
It’s related to another article I’m considering writing, which would claim basically that raising intellectual standards would significantly improve EA’s effectiveness. Widespread misquoting, plus widespread not really caring about or minding misquotes, is one example of EA having intellectual standards that are too low. Low intellectual standards have negative consequences for having accurate views about the world and figuring out the right conclusions about various causes. And they also makes it extremely hard to have productive debates about hard issues, especially when there’s significant culture clash or even unfriendliness.
In general, you need either friendliness or high standards to have a productive discussion or debate. It’s super hard with neither. And friendliness towards critics with significant outsider/heresy ideas is rare in general. I think EA has more of that friendliness than typical but not nearly enough to replace high intellectual standards when dealing major differences in ideas.
I know that I often antagonize people by accident. I’m not going to deny that or feel defensive about it. It’s a topic I’m happy to talk about openly, but IME other people often don’t want to. I have sometimes been accused of being mean, at which point I ask for quotes, at which point they usually don’t want to provide any quotes, or occasionally provide a quote they don’t want to analyze. Anyway it’s a difficult problem which I have worked on.
I don’t have a plan that I particularly expect to work, but I have a few things to try. One plan is getting people to debate or, failing that, to talk about issues like why debating matters. Another plan is to get a handful of people to take an interest, discuss stuff at length, learn more about my ideas, and then help change things. Another plan (that I’ve already been working on for 20 years) is to write good stuff – at EA or even just at my own websites – and maybe something good will happen as a result.
I think I’m aware of a bunch of problems and difficulties that you aren’t familiar with, which make the problem even harder. For example, I have objections to a lot of the psychology and marketing stuff you mention. But anyway, to summarize, I know something about debating issues rationally but less about getting anyone to like me or listen. One of the main problems is social hierarchies, and in very short I think any plan involving social climbing is the wrong plan. Eliezer Yudkowsky also has a lot of negative things to say about social hierarchies but unfortunately I don’t see that reflected in the EA or LW communities – I fear that no one figured out much about how to turn criticism of social hierarchies into action to actually create different types of communities.
Also, when you have conclusions that rely on different background knowledge than your audience has, it’s very hard to explain them in short ways, which are how people want and expect information, while also making it rationally persuasive (which requires explaining a lot of things people don’t already know, or else they should not find it persuasive without debating, discussing or studying it first to find out more).
On these few other points:
I think something that could help (maybe) is making the other person feel understood. Showing that you understand where they come from, that what the other says really makes sense for them, but that you have found some other way of seeing things that also makes sense.
Direct accusations of doing stuff poorly rarely works, and comes off as judgemental. It’s better if you want to let people (have you read How to make friends by Dale Carnegie? Not perfect but gives some valuable insight).
(Not sure I’m doing that with you, but you don’t seem to need it ^^)
Still, 22 minutes is way too long. I read it for 5 minutes and did not feel this as a valuable use of my time—most of it was on the analogy with “deadnaming” but I think this derailed from the topic. This also greatly needed a structure like an executive summary style. Or a structure like 1) here’s an example of a misquote leading to a bad outcome 2) Miquoting in general poses problems 3) The EA forums needs to enfore rules against misquotes (and here’s how).
Wow, this means you could have an entire class of people, including ones who have trouble with maths (with like say complex equations), and you ’d be able to teach them to do maths in ways they like ? That would be very impressive! I’d like to learn more, do you have sources on that ?
I have multiple types of writing (and videos) related to this:
educational and skill-building materials (e.g. grammar trees, text analysis or tutoring videos)
writing about how learning works (e.g. practice and mastery)
writing about epistemology – key philosophical concepts behind the other stuff
writing about why some opposing views (like genetic IQ) are mistaken
I’ve been developing and debating these ideas for many years, and I don’t know of any refutations or counter-examples to my claims, but I’m not popular/influential and have not gotten very many people to try my ideas much.
In terms of the subject matter itself, math is one of the better starting points. However, people often have some other stuff that gets in the way like issues with procrastination, motivation, project management, sleep schedule, “laziness”, planning ahead, time preference, resource budgeting (including mental energy), self-awareness, emotions, drug use (including caffeine, alcohol or nicotine), or clashes between their conscious ideas and intuitions/subconscious ideas. These things can be disruptive to math learning, so they may need to be addressed first. In other words, if one is conflicted about learning math – if part of them wants to and part doesn’t – then they may need to deal with that before studying math. There are also a lot of people who are mentally tired most of the time and they need to improve that situation rather than undertake a new project involving lots of thinking.
Also most current educational materials for math, like most topics, are not very good. It takes significant skill or help to deal with that.
There is an issue where, basically, most people don’t believe me that I have important knowledge and won’t listen. Initial skepticism is totally reasonable but I think what should happen next, from at least a few people, is a truth seeking process like a debate using rational methods instead of just ignoring something, on the assumption it’s probably wrong, with no attempt to identify any error. That way people can find errors in my ideas, or not, and either way someone can learn something.
Sounds like quite the challenge to learn maths ! I can understand why “you need to be really motivated and allocate a lot of time and resources and to avoid coffee and alcohol and cigarettes and to solve your problems of sleep and procrastination and emotions in order to learn maths” leads to not many people really learning maths !
I wouldn’t count on many people learning these skills in such a context.
And I though the issue was only because the educational material was poor.
Ok, then I’m not sure learning maths is the most valuable use of my time right now. Especially since I mostly aggregate the work of other experts and I let them do the research and the maths in my stead.
(Although I’d still be interested by the links in case that proves necessary for my research at some point in the future. Maybe the “how learning works” material could be of interest too)
Each individual thing is a solvable problem. But, yes, I don’t expect many people to solve a long list of problems. But I still claim it is possible.
Here’s some of the info https://criticalfallibilism.com/practice-and-mastery/
Thanks !
Ok, all of this is interesting. Sorry for the late answer—I got caught watching the FTX debacle where I lost an ongoing project.
I’m going to focus on that here.
This is related to why I was so late in answering: the longer the exchange is, the most you have to reply to. This means that the cost of answering, in time and brain resources, gets higher, lowering the proability of an answer. I think this is a reason why many people stop debating at some point.
A useful thing I try to keep in mind is that the brain tries to save energy. It can save energy by automating tasks (habits), by using shortcuts (heuristics), and by avoiding strong conclusions that would lead to a large reorganization in the way it currently does things (for instance, changing core beliefs and methods of reasoning). This avoidance can take the form of finding rationalizations to stuff it already does, or denial.
Of course, it’s not just about energy, since the brain can change its structure if there is a good reason. Motivation is a crucial part of people discussing anything—but for motivation you need a reason to keep motivated. But it’s really not obvious what the motivation is when discussing abstract methodology. What would that reason be?
Most of the time, the reason is direct feedback that it’s doing things wrong, and negative consequences if it doesn’t change. But we don’t have this feedback during an abstract discussion on methodology and epistemics.
There is no examples of feedback of the style “wow, the way that guy does things really looks better”, as you said.
Social validation doesn’t go our way either here.
You’re not at the top of a social hierachy
Plus, we’re not between friends and we’re remote in time and space (the point you made about debates being more conclusive where there is friendliness or high standards was really good, by the way).
Now, getting better and feeling right about something can be motivating to some people (like us). But if there appears to be no good pathway for me to get better, I’ll give up on the conversation, since my brain will see other stuff to do as more appealing (not right now of course. But at some point).
To prevent that, for me, the reward would be a concrete way to improve how I do things. I can agree with you that we (I) don’t have high enough standards for high-quality discourse, but that doesn’t tell me what to do. My brain cannot change if you don’t point to something specific I can apply (like a method or a rule you can enforce). Debate policies may be a start, but they won’t do if I have no idea what they look like.
We usually don’t learn by having more theoretical knowledge, althought that’s often necessary—but most of the time theoretical knowledge doesn’t necessarily influence action (think of “treat others as you would treat yourself”). But the kind of knowledge that really sticks and influences action comes from practice—by trying stuff and seeing by yourself how that works. Having these methological skills you talked about worked for you, so now you try to push them forward. This makes sense. But I can do the same only by trying and testing.
So, what could you provide your debate partners that would be attractive enough to keep them in the debate? I’m afraid that having extremely long discussions about theoretical stuff with no clear reward may be too much to expect.
Now I’m interested. Do you have data that would refute what I said or that you think would work better ?
I don’t mind switching to saying one short thing at a time if you prefer. I find people often don’t prefer it, e.g. b/c dozens of short messages seems like too much. In my experience, people tend to stop discussing after a limited number of back-and-forths regardless of how long they are.
Ok, I understand—so if lenght isn’t the biggest problem, I guess what might cause more of an issue is that the topic is about “theoretical stuff with no clear reward”.
So I guess the main challenge is about solving that. Questions like: How can I show that this theoretical stuff can be useful in the real world ? What is the reason people might have to be interested in engaging with me ? If I can only have a limited number of replies, how do I make the most of that time, and what are the most valuables ideas, practices and concept that I can push for ?
I have answers to this and various other things, but I don’t have short, convincing answers that work with pre-existing shared premises with most people. The difficulty is too much background knowledge is different. My ideas make more sense and can be explained in shorter ways if someone knows a lot about Karl Popper’s ideas. My Popperian background and perspective clashes with the Bayesian perspectives here and it’s not mainstream either. (There are no large Popperian communities comparable to LW or EA to go talk to instead.)
The lack of enough shared premises is also, in my experience, one of the main reasons people don’t like to debate with me. People usually don’t want to rethink fundamental issues and actually don’t know how to. If you go to a chemist and say “I disagree with the physics premises that all your chemistry ideas are based on”, they maybe won’t know how to, or want to, debate physics with you. People mostly want to talk about stuff within their field that they know about, not talk about premises that some other type of person would know about. The obvious solution to this is talk to philosophers, but unfortunately philosophy is one of the worst and most broken fields and there’s basically no one reasonable to talk to and almost no one doing reasonable work. Because philosophy is so broken, people should stop trusting it and getting premises from it. Everything else is downstream of philosophy, so it’s hurting EA and everything else. But this is a rather abstract issue which, so far, I haven’t been able to get many people to care much about.
I could phrase it using more specifics but then people will disagree with me. E.g. “induction is wrong so...” will get denials that induction is wrong. (Induction is one of the main things Popper criticized. I don’t think any philosopher has ever given a reasonable rebuttal to defend induction. I’ve gone through a lot of literature on that issue and asked a lot of people.) The people who deny induction is wrong consistently want to take next steps that I think are the wrong approach, such as debating induction without using literature references or ignoring the issue. Whereas I think the next step should basically be to review the literature instead of making ad hoc arguments. But that’s work. I’ve done that work but people don’t want to trust my results (which is fine) and also don’t want to do the work themselves, which leaves it difficult to make progress.
Hmm, this is complicated indeed.
Have you tried putting stuff in a visual way ? Like breaking down the steps of your (different) reasoning in a diagram , in order to show why you have a different conclusion on a specific topic EA is doing.
For instance, let’s say one conclusion you have is “EAs interested in animal welfare should do X”. You could present stuff this way : [Argument A] + [Argument B] → [I use my way of estimating things] → [Conlusion X].
Maybe this could help.
Huhu can’t say I disagree, I really have problems seeing what I can get from the field of philosophy most of the time, in terms of practical advice on how to improve that works, not just ideas. (although saying “there’s no one reasonable to talk to in the field XXX” would flag you as a judgemental person nobody should talk to, so be careful issuing judgements around like that)
But it’s very hard to say “this is bad” about something without proposing something people better can turn to instead. And despite exchanging with you, I still don’t picture that “better” thing to turn to.
For instance, one of the (many) reasons the anti-capitalism movement is absolutely failing is not because capitalism is good (it’s pretty clear it’s leading us to environmental destruction) or because people support it (there have been surveys in France showing that a majority of people think we need to get out of the myth of infinite growth). It has a lot to do with how hard it is to actually picture alternatives to this system, how hard it is to put forward these alternatives, and how hard it is to implement them. Nothing can change if I can’t picture ways of doing things differently.
The alternatives are things like:
raise intellectual standards
have debate policies
use rational debate to reject lots of bad ideas
judge public intellectuals by how they handle debate, and judge ideas by the current objective state of the debate
read and engage with some other philosophers (e.g. Popper, Goldratt and myself)
actually write down what’s wrong with the bad philosophers in a clear way instead of just disliking them (this will facilitate debating and reaching conclusions about which ones are actually good)
investigate what philosophical premises you hold, and their sources, and reconsider them
There are sub-steps, e.g. to raise intellectual standards people need to improve their ability to read, write and analyze text, and practice that until a significantly higher skill level and effectiveness is intuitive/easy. That can be broken down into smaller steps such as learning grammar, learning to make sentence tree diagrams, learning to make paragraph tree diagrams, learning to make multi-paragraph tree diagrams, etc.
I have a forum people can join and plenty of writing and videos which include actionable suggestions about steps to take. I’ve also have proposed things that I think people can picture, like that all arguments are addressed in truth-seeking and time-efficient ways instead of ignored. If that was universal, it would have consequences such as it being possible to go to a charity or company and telling them some ideas and making some arguments and then, if you’re right, they probably change. If 10% of charities were open to changing due to rational argument, it’d enable a lot of resources to be used more effectively.
BTW, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have much confidence in your political opinions (or spend much time or effort on them) without doing those other kinds of activities first.
Ah, this is more like it: a list of stuff to do. Good !
Now that I see it in that format, maybe an interesting EA forum post would be to use the list above, and provide links for each of them. You could redirect each item to the best source you have found or produced on this topic. I feel it would be easier to convince people to adopt better rationality practices if they have a list of how to do that.
Well maybe not everyone, but I am drawing conclusions from my personal case: you seem to have some interesting techniques in store, but personally right now I just don’t see how acquire them—so the best links you have for that could help greatly.
This would centralize the information in one spot (that you can redirect people to in future debates and works).
An unrelated note: I liked your post on the damage big companies were doing on your forum. I don’t really understand why you think the damage they do is not compatible with capitalism—I don’t see anything in the definition of capitalism that would preclude such an outcome. But it was an interesting post.
I’m a bit more skeptical on your post about how to judge the ability of experts, however. If having a debate policy were a common practice, and it was notorious that people who refuse them have something to hide, then it would work. But right now such an advice doesn’t seem that useful, because very few people have such a debate policy—so you can’t distinguish between people who have something to hide and people who would be ok with the concept if they had heard about it. I don’t see such a practice becoming mainstream for the next few decades.
So in the absence of that, how can I really judge which experts are reliable ?
I’d like to judge by openness in debates, but it’s not clear to me how to get this information quickly. Especially when I’m seeing an expert for the first time.
For instance, let’s take someone like Nate Hagens. How would you go to judge his reliability?
I have tried many centralizing or organizing things. Here’s an example of one which has gotten almost no response or interest: https://www.elliottemple.com/reason-and-morality/
Anyway, I have plenty more things I could try. I have plenty to say. And I know there’s plenty of room for improvement in my stuff including regarding organization. I will keep posting things at EA for now. Even if I stop, I’ll keep posting at my own sites. Even if no one listens, it doesn’t matter so much; I like figuring out and writing about these things; it’s my favorite activity.
FYI, it’s hard for me to know what post you mean without a link or title because I have thousands of posts, and I often have multiple posts about the same topic.
The definition of capitalism involves a free market where the initiation of force (including fraud) is prohibited. Today, fraud is pretty widespread at large companies. Also, many versions of capitalism allow the government to use force, but they do not allow the government to meddle in the economy and give advantages to some companies over others which are derived from the government’s use of force (so some companies are, indirectly via the government, using force against competitors). Those are just two examples (of many).
(I may not reply further about capitalism or anything political, but I thought that would be short and maybe helpful.)
You can tell them about the debate policy concept and see how they react. You can also look at whether they respond to criticisms of their work. You can also make a tree of the field and look at whether that expert is contributing important nodes to it or not.
I think it could become important, widespread and influential in a few years if it had a few thousand initial supporters. I think getting even 100 initial supporters is the biggest obstacle, then turning that into a bigger group is second. Then once you have a bigger group that can be vocal enough in online discussions, they can get noticed by popular intellectuals and bring up debate policies to them and get responses of some kinds. Then you just need one famous guy to like the idea and it can get a lot more attention and it will then be possible to say “X has a debate policy; why don’t you?” And I can imagine tons of fans bringing that up in comment sections persistently for many of the popular online intellectuals. It’s easy to imagine fans of e.g. Jordan Peterson bugging him about it endlessly until he does it.
I think the reason that doesn’t happen is that most people don’t actually seem to want it, like it or care, so getting to even 100 supporters of the idea is very hard. The issue IMO is the masses resisting, rejecting or not caring about the idea (of the few who see it, most dislike or ignore it), including at EA, for reasons I don’t understand well enough.
I glanced at the table of contents and saw mention of Malthus. That’s a topic I know about, so I could read that section and be in a pretty good position to evaluate it or catch errors. Finding a section where I have expertise and checking that is a useful technique.
There’s a fairly common thing where people read the newspaper talking about their field and they are like “wow it’s so bad. this is so amateurish and full of obvious errors”. Then they read the newspaper on any other topic and believe the quality is decent. It isn’t. You should expect the correctness of the parts you know less about to probably be similar to the part you know a lot about.
At a glance at the Malthus section, the book seems to be on the same side as Malthus, which I disagree with. So a specific thing I’d look for is whether the book brings up and tries to address some of the arguments on my side that I regard as important. If it ignores the side of the debate I favor, and doesn’t have any criticisms of anything I believe, that’d be bad. I did a text search for “Godwin” and there are no results. (Godwin is a classical liberal political philosopher from the same time period as Malthus who I like a lot. He wrote a book about why Malthus was wrong.) There are also no results for “Burke” and no mention of Adam Smith (nor turgot, bastiat, condorcet, mises, rothbard, hayek). I see it as a potentially bad sign to look at old thinkers/writers only to bring up one who is on your side without talking about other ideas from the time period including disagreements and competing viewpoints. It can indicate bias to cherry pick one past thinker to bring up.
That’s inconclusive. Maybe it gives fair summaries of rival viewpoints and criticizes them; I didn’t look enough to actually know. I don’t want to spend more time and energy on this right now (also I dislike the format and would want to download a copy of the book to read it more). I think it gives you some idea about ways to approach this – methods – even though I didn’t actually do much. Also, in my experience, the majority of books like this will fail at fact checking at least once if you check five random cites, so that would be worth checking if you care about whether the facts in the book are trustworthy.
Ok—however, while this is better, this list is still very long, and quite daunting. It’s good as an index, but not as a “here’s the top priority stuff”.
I think a question you should ask yourself is “If I can only have a limited number of exchanges with people, and they have a limited time, what do I want them to learn?”. And then just mention a few things that are the best/most useful stuff you have in store.
This way people get a sample of what you can offer, and then they may be like “oh ok this might be useful, maybe I’ll dig more into that”.
Mentioning “read the entire work of this guy” or “check my entire forum” is probably not something people will readily use- because from the outside I have no way of knowing if this is a good use of my time. It would take too much effort just to check. So I need a sample that tells me “hey, that’s interesting” that pushes me to go onward.
So having a list of 1) Actionable advice 2) with the list with the best stuff to redirect people too would be useful.
Same question—how do I check that ? There’s no under “answer section” under scientific papers or books, except some are ones. They could have answered the criticism in the - how do I check that quickly ?
For instance, from what I read, Nate Hagens did take into account the classic points put forward against the claims of Malthus (although he didn’t really quote many names). But it’s all over the book—so there’s no quick way of checking that.
I think one reason most people are not interested is that they don’t feel concerned by the idea. I don’t feel concerned by it. It feels it could work for public intellectuals, but everybody else has no use for it (maybe they’re wrong, but it doesn’t feel like it). And public intellectuals are a hard to reach public.
It’s also not obvious what the benefits of the idea would be. I understand there are benefits, but there’s no visible result you can see for them, which makes it less attractive. And even if there were debates following this policy, it’s not guaranteed this would change the state of the debate: many papers have been shown as non-replicable, but they are still widely cited since the rebuttals have not publicized as much.
I get that this would be really useful if many prominent experts used that—because you could reach to them and they’d have to answer.
I replied but I deleted it after finding out about the new CC BY license requirement. You can read my reply where I’d mirrored it at https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/rational-debate-methodology-at-effective-altruism/1510/40?u=elliot
I think I’m going to have to quit writing anything substantive at EA due to the license change, so if you want to keep discussing with me I think you’ll have to join my forum. That sucks but I don’t see a better option.
Ok—I subscribed to the forum but I don’t know how to answer to the comment you linked to.
I’ll answer here.
Interesting, but I don’t know if this is the right criteria. One thing is, I can’t point out to an error you made because I can’t evaluate your claims. Our discussion was on abstract points of methodology, not facts or stuff you can verify—so of course I can’t point out to an error, because there is no real result to check.
Now I know I should keep an open mind, which I do, especially since I can’t point to errors in the reasoning itself. But it’s hard to believe things I can’t verify and see by myself.
Which is why I keep asking for stuff like examples and concrete things. It’s easier to grasp these and to verify them.
It’s really not obvious to anyone that “not having a debate policy” is “doing rationality wrong”. Especially when the concept itself is so uncommon. If this is the criteria I really don’t know who is doing rationality right (but then again, I don’t really know who is doing rationality right).
Then again, most people do not get challenged into debates. Even EAs. So it makes sense that they think such a concept is not for them.
Just to test, you’ll be happy to know I adopted a debate policy ! We’ll see what results that provides in 10 years.
Ah, ok. I see where we differ here.
I try to have the most impact I can in the world, so I judge what I do by “what positive impact did this have?” As such, quick wins that can target a larger public have a larger impact, and a higher chance of changing things, so I decided on that. Which is why this seems more important to me.
But it appears that you have a different goal in mind—you seek high-level discussions with like-minded individuals. I can understand that.
Same for the CC BY license. I know I’d have less impact if I left the forum, and what I write is there with the goal of being shared anyway, so I don’t really care about that.
I just put up 7 more EA-related articles at https://curi.us The best way to find all my EA related articles is https://curi.us/2529-effective-altruism-related-articles
I have more drafts to go through so there will be more posts soon.
If you or anyone else thinks that any of them should be on the EA forum, you can post them at EA as link posts. In general, I don’t plan to link post my own stuff at EA going forward, for several reasons, but if even one person thinks it would add much value to EA, they are welcome to do it.
To post on my forum, you have to pay $20 (once, not recurring). I know the communication on this isn’t amazing (Discourse has limited options) though there should be a banner and some info about it in a few places, but I know sometimes people still don’t see it. There’s a subscribe button on the home page but it’s in a menu on mobile instead of directly visible. It takes you to https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/s and then the payment flow is with a standard plugin that uses Stripe.
If it’s a financial burden for you, I can give you free access.
If you can afford it, then I’ll have to ask you to pay, because my general policy is if people value a discussion with me less than $20 then I shouldn’t talk with them. I skip that policy when I go participate at other communities, but I’m quitting the EA forum now.
I also just wrote more about my issues with the CC BY license at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WEAXu8yTt5XbKq4wJ/ignoring-small-errors?commentId=Z7Nh36x3brvzC3Jpm
Ok—I though the $20 were for making posts, I didn’t think it was for answering.
I don’t think I will pay $20 because all the money I earn beyond my basic needs is going to charities.
I can understand the CC BY issue, if you’ve had problems with it in the past. If you think you can have more impact by retaining property over what you write, then this is what you should do.
If $20 got you even a 1% chance to find out that much of your money and effort is going to the wrong charities and causes, wouldn’t that be a good deal? Error correction is high value.
I think what EA is doing by getting people to donate that much (all above basic needs) is extremely harmful to people like you. I’d believe that even if I didn’t also believe that the majority of EA causes and efforts were counter-productive.
There’s something really problematic about thinking a cause is so important that you’ll make large personal sacrifices for it, but not being willing to do much to pursue potential error correction. EA has a lot of people who will go to great lengths to help their causes – they just are so sure they’re right(?) that they don’t seem to think debating critics is very important. It’s weird. If you think every dollar you donate is a big deal, you should also think every tiny bit of risk reduction and error correction is a big deal. Those things are scarcer than dollars and can easily have larger impacts. But I come here and say I think EA is wrong about important issues, and I want to debate, and I ask if EA has any organized debate methods or even just individuals who’d be happy to debate much. And the answer was no and also no one seems to think that’s very bad or risky. That shows a widespread lack of respect for the risk of being wrong about causes that people are investing all their money above basic needs in, and a disinterest in criticism.
Anyway, if you find my ideas implausible and not worth pursuing or debating, or still don’t really value my time more than the time of the next guy you could talk with instead, then we should part ways.
Sorry—I exagerated a bit. I do not donate everything above my basic needs—still quite a good chunk but not everything.
I try to spend quite some time on error correction (and sometimes buy books instead of getting them from a library) - but in this realm I am still weighting that against, say, the impact I could obtain by donating to an animal charity instead. But I’m ready to do some spending if I feel there’s a good chance to know more and improve.
The problem here is rather that I am not sure subscribing to this forum will really allow me to improve.
I absolutely agree to your claim that EA has a lack of organized debate method, and could improve on fighting against bias. I could probably improve on that too, I think. I can agree with the “lacking methodology”.
However, to actually improve, I need practical advice on how to improve. Or an example: for instance, seeing a debate where I see that a specific claim very important in EA is not impactful (for instance, that donating to charities that do corporate outreach in factory farming), and seeing the methodology that led to this claim.
I want to point out that criticism of what exists currently is important but not enough—the way I personally work is that I need to see something better in order to update correctly. Then I can be inspired by that better approach.
For instance, I read your criticism of The Scout Mindset—it’s interesting, there are good points, for instance that the examples she gives could be really biased. But what would add even more value to your post is recommending a book which does the same thing but better (so basically, a book about how to get better at updating how we view the world, written in a clear, streamlined way, with examples and practical advice—just more rigorous).
I really like to improve. But I need practical stuff for that—and I asked for it and still feel you didn’t answer that (besides taking up a debate policy—you also made a list of actions but with no links to go deeper).
I fear it could prove difficult for you to spread your ideas even further without a greater focus on that part.
By the way, have you issued claims about EA being wrong on its list of priorities ? You have done so on methodology—which is important, but not the most engaging topic, so few people interacted with it (which is too bad). But have tried to make more specific claims, like “EA is wrong about putting effort on factory farming” ?
I don’t want to CC BY license my replies, so here are links. I don’t want to reply this way in general and may not do it again.
https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/elliot-temple-and-corentin-biteau-discussion/1543/5?u=elliot
https://discuss.criticalfallibilism.com/t/elliot-temple-and-corentin-biteau-discussion/1543/6?u=elliot
Oh, I had wrote a full answer in your curi.us debate space, but it says I need an account (it’s weird that the “post public answer” box appears if it doesn’t even if I don’t have an account).
I think I’ll take up your offer to have an access to the forum just for a few months, please.
Oh, and thanks for the concern you’re showing me, that’s kind :)
OK, I gave CF forum posting access to your account.
You’re right that I should make the curi.us comment section clearer than the current small-print note. If you lost the text of what you wrote, I should be able to retrieve it for you from logs.
Also regarding evaluating a book, I just did 4 demonstrations for EA at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yKd7Co5LznH4BE54t/game-i-find-three-errors-in-your-favorite-text and 3 of them include a screen recording of my whole process.