Ok, this is a very good claim. I find that a very useful insight. Since it’s “no one’s job”, everything is decentralized, it means it’s hard for useful feedback to reach the ones that could use it. And there is no negative consequences for being wrong on some stuff, so it keeps going.
I really have trouble seeing how to fix that, however (are there some movements out there where this is the case?).
I haven’t read the rest yet and might not get to it today, but I’ll give a comment on this.
I think the solution is that anyone (who cares a lot) can take personal, individual responsibility for addressing criticism. I do that with my own tiny movement. There is no need to divide up responsibility. Multiple people can separately do this at once.
Isn’t that too much work? To the extent that anyone else does something useful, it’s less work. If the movement is tiny, then it’s a ton of work. If the movement is pretty big, and a lot of people do useful tasks, then it’s less work.
If you take responsibility, you don’t have to do everything yourself. You can delegate to anyone willing to do stuff. You just have to monitor their work. If you endorse it and it’s wrong, you were wrong. If it’s partly wrong and partly useful, you can endorse just part of it and specify which part.
You also don’t even have to delegate everything. People may do stuff without you asking them to. You can take responsibility even if you’re not seen as a leader and have zero people who will do tasks at your request. What you do is figure out what usable, endorsable essays and other materials the movement has, and figure out what’s missing, and fill in whatever’s missing to your satisfaction. With a larger movement, many people’s opinion would be that nothing crucial is missing, so their initial workload is merely reviewing what exists, learning about it, getting a kind of organized overview of it figured out, and being satisfied.
When critics come along and want to debate, maybe someone will answer them in a way you consider satisfactory. Or maybe not. If you take responsibility for these ideas and think they’re true, then you should monitor to see that critics get answered in ways you’re content with. If there are any gaps where debate or answers aren’t happening to your satisfaction, then you need to fill in that gap (or, in the alternative, admit there is a gap, and say unfortunately you’re too busy to deal with the whole gap, so not all criticism has been answered and debated yet, so you aren’t confident you’re right).
To fill in a gap where some critic is raising an issue, there are two basic scenarios, the easy and hard one:
easy scenario: the issue is addressed somewhere. the critic just needs to be provided with a link or cite. sometimes a little bit of extra text is needed to explain how the generic information in the article answers the specific information the critic brings up. i’ve called this bridging material. it’s a type of personalization or customization. there are a lot of cases where a paragraph of customization can add a lot to a cite/link. you also may need to specify which part of a link/cite is relevant rather than the whole thing, and may need to give disclaimers/exclusions to go with the link/cite.
all of that is pretty fast and a pretty low amount of work. and it’s something that people can contribute to a movement without being geniuses or great essay writers or anything like that. people who just read and liked a lot of a movement’s materials can help by sharing the right links in the right places. if a movement has a lot of literature, then this will probably address over 80% of criticism.
hard scenario: the issue is not already addressed somewhere. new ideas/arguments/literature are needed. this is more work. if this comes up a bunch and it’s too much work for you, and others won’t help enough, then the movement isn’t really fully fleshed out and you shouldn’t be confident about being right.
this is how i do stuff with my own tiny philosophy movement. i monitor for issues that should be addressed but no one else addresses. i have some fans who will sometimes provide links to existing essays so i don’t have to. I occasionally delegate something though not very often. since my movement is tiny i don’t expect a ton of help, but on the other hand i can refer to the writing of dead authors to answer a lot of issues. i try to learn from and build on some authors i found that i think did good work. it’d be really problematic to try to do everything myself from scratch. if i tried to reinvent the wheel, i’d almost certainly come up with worse ideas than already exist. instead i try to find and understand the best existing ideas and then add some extra insights, changes and reorganization.
and i have a debate policy so if a critic will neither use nor criticize my debate policy (and someone has linked him to it), then i don’t think i need to answer his criticism (unless i actually think he has a good point, in which case i’d want to that point even if it has no advocates who are smart, reasonable or willing to debate). i have a forum where critics can come and talk about my philosophy. EA has a forum too which is one of the main reasons I’m talking to EA at all. not enough movements, groups or individuals even have forums (which IMO is a major problem with the world).
(I do not count facebook groups, subreddits, twitter, discords, or slacks as forums. social media and chatrooms are different than forums. comment sections on blogs, substacks, news articles, etc., also aren’t proper forums. having an actual forum matters IMO. Examples of forum software include Discourse, phpbb and google groups. I view forums as a bit of a remnant of the old internet that has lost a ton of popularity to social media. i think LW/EA partly have forums because the community started before smartphones got so popular.)
Ok, very well. I’m not sure it’s reasonable to expect everyone to take responsibility for changing on a topic—but changing requires efforts and time, and it’s not realistic to expect every people to do all of that.
In an ideal world we’d look for everything by ourselves, but in reality we just don’t have time to dig into everything.But this links to motivation that’s the topic of the other response.
Ok, very well. I’m not sure it’s reasonable to expect everyone to take responsibility for changing on a topic—but changing requires efforts and time, and it’s not realistic to expect every people to do all of that.
I don’t expect everyone to do it. I expect more than zero people to do it.
Or, if it is zero people, then I expect people to acknowledge a serious, urgent problem, and to appreciate me pointing it out, and to stop assuming their group/side is right about things which no one on in their group/side (including themselves) will take responsibility for the correctness of.
Skimming and other ways of reducing reading can work well and I’ve been interested in them for a long time. Getting better at reading helps too (I’ve read over 400,000 words in a day, so 10,000 doesn’t seem like such a daunting journey to me). But ignoring arguments, when no one on your side has identified any error, is problematic. So I suggest people should often reply to the first error (if no one else already did that in a way you find acceptable). That makes progress possible in ways that silence doesn’t.
If you think the length and organization of writing is itself an error that is making engaging unreasonably burdensome, then that is the first error that you’ve identified, and you could say that instead of saying nothing. At that point there are ways for problem solving and progress to happen, e.g. the author (or anyone who agrees with him) could give a counter-argument, a rewrite, or a summary (particularly if you identify a specific area of interest – then they could summarize just the part you care about).
I recently posted about replying to the first error:
It’s particularly important to do this with stuff which criticizes your ideas – which claims you’re wrong about something important and impactful – so it’s highly relevant to you.
If you think the length and organization of writing is itself an error that is making engaging unreasonably burdensome, then that is the first error that you’ve identified, and you could say that instead of saying nothing.
This is a good point -I just think that most people are not even aware that this is an option (admitting you didn’t read everything but still want to engage isn’t obivous in our way of doing things).
I recently posted about replying to the first error:
I read your post on long articles—it provides some really useful insights, so thanks for that. I still think it could be a bit more attractive to readers (summary, bullet points, more titles and sections, bolding, exemples, maybe 3 minutes shorter), but it was worth reading. The fact you said “don’t stop reading unless you spotted an error” helped too ^^
Attracting readers is a different activity than truth seeking. Articles should be evaluated primarily by whether people can refute what the article says or not. If I avoid errors that anyone knows about, then I’ve done a great job. A rational forum should be able to notice that, value it and engage with it, without me doing anything extra to get attention.
Truth seeking and attracting typical readers are different skills. People usually aren’t great at both. A community that emphasizes and rewards attracting will tend to get issues wrong and alienate rational people.
I got to a major, motivating point (“a bias where long criticism is frequently ignored”) in the third sentence. If someone is unable to recognize that as something to care about, or gets bored before getting that far, then I don’t think they’re the right audience for me. They could also find out about “Method: Reply to the First Important Error” by reading the bullet point outline.
I read far worse writing all the time. It’s not a big deal. Readers should be flexible and tolerant, learn to skim as desired, etc. They should also pick up on less prominent quality signals like clarity.
Any time I spend on polishing means less writing and research. I write or edit daily. I used to edit/polish less and publish more, and I still think that might have been better. There are tradeoffs. I now have a few hundred thousand unpublished words awaiting editing, including over 30,000 words in EA-related drafts since I started posting here.
I’m also more concerned with attracting especially smart, knowledgeable, high-effort readers than attracting a large number of readers. Put another way, the things you’re asking for are not how I decide what articles or authors to read.
Anyway, I appreciate the feedback. I intentionally added some summary to some articles recently, which I viewed as similar to an abstract from an academic paper. I’m not necessarily against that kind of thing, but I do have concerns to take into account.
I must admit that I am trying to aim for a different approach: writing stuff adapted to human psychology.
I don’t go from postulates like “Articles should be evaluated primarily by whether people can refute what the article says or not” or “Readers should be flexible and tolerant, learn to skim as desired, etc.” 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 didn’t really evolve for doing stuff like that, so I don’t 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 there’s 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 it—with a serious probability.
I guess that’s one reason people tend to ignore what science says: it’s boring. It has a “reader-deterring style” 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 “mind-sized”. 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. There’s a much better chance that people read things that the brain can process easily—and it’s useful even for your readers that are able to read dry stuff.
I think you’re mistaken about evolutionary psychology and brains, but I don’t 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 I’d 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 didn’t 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. You’re not really saying anything new to me, which is fine, but FYI I already know about additional difficulties which it’s harder to find answers for.
The brain is better at processing stuff that is concrete. Visual stuff like pictures.
I’m personally not a very visual thinker and I’m 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. It’s not that big a deal – I’m used to ignoring comments that assume I don’t exist or make general statements about what people are like which do not apply to me. I’m not going to get offended and stop talking to you over it. But I thought it was relevant enough to mention.
I think you’re mistaken about evolutionary psychology and brains, but I don’t know how to correct you (and many other people similar to you) because your approach is not optimized for debate
I’m actually interested in that—if you have found sources and documents that provide a better picture of how brains work, I’d 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 I’ll use it.
I’m personally not a very visual thinker and I’m good at abstract thinking. This reads to me as denying my lived experience or forgetting that other types of people exist.
Ok, I didn’t 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’m actually interested in that—if you have found sources and documents that provide a better picture of how brains work, I’d 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 I’ll 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 doesn’t 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 “small” errors instead of thinking errors merit post mortems), lack of persistence, quitting mid-discussion without explanation (often due to bias against claims you’re 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 I’ve 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 people’s disinterest in those issues and resistance to dealing with them is a sign of irrationality and bias – it’s part of the problem.
So I don’t want to attempt to discuss evolutionary psychology with you because I don’t think it will work well due to those other issues. I don’t 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 you’ll make an inductivist or justificationist argument, and then I’ll mention that Popper refuted that, and then to resolve the issue we’ll 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 it’s 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 they’re 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/or prevented correction of those errors. I tried using an initial discussion as a demonstration that the meta problems actually exist, that the debate won’t 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 “fix” 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 you’re speaking to. It’s a well known stereotype of how to do fake apologies. If you picked up this speech pattern by accident because it’s a common pattern that you’ve heard a lot, and you don’t realize what it means, then I wanted to warn you because you’ll have a high chance of offending people by apologizing this way. I think maybe it’s an accident here because I didn’t get a hostile vibe from you in the rest; this one sentence doesn’t fit well. It’s also an inaccurate sentence since I didn’t 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. It’s entirely possible that yours are better—you spent a lot of time on this. But I just don’t have the motivation to do the many, many prerequisites you asked for, unless I’ve seen from experience that they provide better results.
This is the show don’t tell problem: you’ve told me you’ve got better conclusions (which is possible). But you’ve 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 we’re 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 you’re speaking to.
True. It was a mistake on my part. It’s just that the sentence “I’m used to ignoring comments that assume I don’t exist” felt a bit passive-agressive, so I got passive-agressive as well on that.
It’s not very rational. I shouldn’t have done that, you’re right.
How about challenging my conclusion that energy depletion is a problem neglected by many, and that we’re 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/ideas have you read that disagree with you, and what did you do to address them and conclude that they’re wrong?
First, most of what I’m 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 I’m already familiar with the counter-arguments usually put forward against to energy depletion:
We’ve heard about it earlier and didn’t “run out”
Prices will increase gradually
Technology will improve and solve the problem
We can have a bigger economy and less energy
We’ll 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 won’t solve the problem (and I’m 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 I’ve seen limits to the reasoning. For instance, what was said againt the Limits to growth report (turns out most criticism didn’t adress the core points of the report).
I’m 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 didn’t 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.
I haven’t read the rest yet and might not get to it today, but I’ll give a comment on this.
I think the solution is that anyone (who cares a lot) can take personal, individual responsibility for addressing criticism. I do that with my own tiny movement. There is no need to divide up responsibility. Multiple people can separately do this at once.
Isn’t that too much work? To the extent that anyone else does something useful, it’s less work. If the movement is tiny, then it’s a ton of work. If the movement is pretty big, and a lot of people do useful tasks, then it’s less work.
If you take responsibility, you don’t have to do everything yourself. You can delegate to anyone willing to do stuff. You just have to monitor their work. If you endorse it and it’s wrong, you were wrong. If it’s partly wrong and partly useful, you can endorse just part of it and specify which part.
You also don’t even have to delegate everything. People may do stuff without you asking them to. You can take responsibility even if you’re not seen as a leader and have zero people who will do tasks at your request. What you do is figure out what usable, endorsable essays and other materials the movement has, and figure out what’s missing, and fill in whatever’s missing to your satisfaction. With a larger movement, many people’s opinion would be that nothing crucial is missing, so their initial workload is merely reviewing what exists, learning about it, getting a kind of organized overview of it figured out, and being satisfied.
When critics come along and want to debate, maybe someone will answer them in a way you consider satisfactory. Or maybe not. If you take responsibility for these ideas and think they’re true, then you should monitor to see that critics get answered in ways you’re content with. If there are any gaps where debate or answers aren’t happening to your satisfaction, then you need to fill in that gap (or, in the alternative, admit there is a gap, and say unfortunately you’re too busy to deal with the whole gap, so not all criticism has been answered and debated yet, so you aren’t confident you’re right).
To fill in a gap where some critic is raising an issue, there are two basic scenarios, the easy and hard one:
easy scenario: the issue is addressed somewhere. the critic just needs to be provided with a link or cite. sometimes a little bit of extra text is needed to explain how the generic information in the article answers the specific information the critic brings up. i’ve called this bridging material. it’s a type of personalization or customization. there are a lot of cases where a paragraph of customization can add a lot to a cite/link. you also may need to specify which part of a link/cite is relevant rather than the whole thing, and may need to give disclaimers/exclusions to go with the link/cite.
all of that is pretty fast and a pretty low amount of work. and it’s something that people can contribute to a movement without being geniuses or great essay writers or anything like that. people who just read and liked a lot of a movement’s materials can help by sharing the right links in the right places. if a movement has a lot of literature, then this will probably address over 80% of criticism.
hard scenario: the issue is not already addressed somewhere. new ideas/arguments/literature are needed. this is more work. if this comes up a bunch and it’s too much work for you, and others won’t help enough, then the movement isn’t really fully fleshed out and you shouldn’t be confident about being right.
this is how i do stuff with my own tiny philosophy movement. i monitor for issues that should be addressed but no one else addresses. i have some fans who will sometimes provide links to existing essays so i don’t have to. I occasionally delegate something though not very often. since my movement is tiny i don’t expect a ton of help, but on the other hand i can refer to the writing of dead authors to answer a lot of issues. i try to learn from and build on some authors i found that i think did good work. it’d be really problematic to try to do everything myself from scratch. if i tried to reinvent the wheel, i’d almost certainly come up with worse ideas than already exist. instead i try to find and understand the best existing ideas and then add some extra insights, changes and reorganization.
and i have a debate policy so if a critic will neither use nor criticize my debate policy (and someone has linked him to it), then i don’t think i need to answer his criticism (unless i actually think he has a good point, in which case i’d want to that point even if it has no advocates who are smart, reasonable or willing to debate). i have a forum where critics can come and talk about my philosophy. EA has a forum too which is one of the main reasons I’m talking to EA at all. not enough movements, groups or individuals even have forums (which IMO is a major problem with the world).
(I do not count facebook groups, subreddits, twitter, discords, or slacks as forums. social media and chatrooms are different than forums. comment sections on blogs, substacks, news articles, etc., also aren’t proper forums. having an actual forum matters IMO. Examples of forum software include Discourse, phpbb and google groups. I view forums as a bit of a remnant of the old internet that has lost a ton of popularity to social media. i think LW/EA partly have forums because the community started before smartphones got so popular.)
Ok, very well. I’m not sure it’s reasonable to expect everyone to take responsibility for changing on a topic—but changing requires efforts and time, and it’s not realistic to expect every people to do all of that.
In an ideal world we’d look for everything by ourselves, but in reality we just don’t have time to dig into everything.But this links to motivation that’s the topic of the other response.
On a related note, have you read that post ? It may be interesting: https://www.cold-takes.com/honesty-about-reading/
I don’t expect everyone to do it. I expect more than zero people to do it.
Or, if it is zero people, then I expect people to acknowledge a serious, urgent problem, and to appreciate me pointing it out, and to stop assuming their group/side is right about things which no one on in their group/side (including themselves) will take responsibility for the correctness of.
Skimming and other ways of reducing reading can work well and I’ve been interested in them for a long time. Getting better at reading helps too (I’ve read over 400,000 words in a day, so 10,000 doesn’t seem like such a daunting journey to me). But ignoring arguments, when no one on your side has identified any error, is problematic. So I suggest people should often reply to the first error (if no one else already did that in a way you find acceptable). That makes progress possible in ways that silence doesn’t.
If you think the length and organization of writing is itself an error that is making engaging unreasonably burdensome, then that is the first error that you’ve identified, and you could say that instead of saying nothing. At that point there are ways for problem solving and progress to happen, e.g. the author (or anyone who agrees with him) could give a counter-argument, a rewrite, or a summary (particularly if you identify a specific area of interest – then they could summarize just the part you care about).
I recently posted about replying to the first error:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/iBXdjXR9cwur8qpwc/critically-engaging-with-long-articles
It’s particularly important to do this with stuff which criticizes your ideas – which claims you’re wrong about something important and impactful – so it’s highly relevant to you.
This is a good point -I just think that most people are not even aware that this is an option (admitting you didn’t read everything but still want to engage isn’t obivous in our way of doing things).
I read your post on long articles—it provides some really useful insights, so thanks for that. I still think it could be a bit more attractive to readers (summary, bullet points, more titles and sections, bolding, exemples, maybe 3 minutes shorter), but it was worth reading. The fact you said “don’t stop reading unless you spotted an error” helped too ^^
Attracting readers is a different activity than truth seeking. Articles should be evaluated primarily by whether people can refute what the article says or not. If I avoid errors that anyone knows about, then I’ve done a great job. A rational forum should be able to notice that, value it and engage with it, without me doing anything extra to get attention.
Truth seeking and attracting typical readers are different skills. People usually aren’t great at both. A community that emphasizes and rewards attracting will tend to get issues wrong and alienate rational people.
I got to a major, motivating point (“a bias where long criticism is frequently ignored”) in the third sentence. If someone is unable to recognize that as something to care about, or gets bored before getting that far, then I don’t think they’re the right audience for me. They could also find out about “Method: Reply to the First Important Error” by reading the bullet point outline.
I read far worse writing all the time. It’s not a big deal. Readers should be flexible and tolerant, learn to skim as desired, etc. They should also pick up on less prominent quality signals like clarity.
Any time I spend on polishing means less writing and research. I write or edit daily. I used to edit/polish less and publish more, and I still think that might have been better. There are tradeoffs. I now have a few hundred thousand unpublished words awaiting editing, including over 30,000 words in EA-related drafts since I started posting here.
I’m also more concerned with attracting especially smart, knowledgeable, high-effort readers than attracting a large number of readers. Put another way, the things you’re asking for are not how I decide what articles or authors to read.
Anyway, I appreciate the feedback. I intentionally added some summary to some articles recently, which I viewed as similar to an abstract from an academic paper. I’m not necessarily against that kind of thing, but I do have concerns to take into account.
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 don’t go from postulates like “Articles should be evaluated primarily by whether people can refute what the article says or not” or “Readers should be flexible and tolerant, learn to skim as desired, etc.” 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 didn’t really evolve for doing stuff like that, so I don’t 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 there’s 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 it—with a serious probability.
I guess that’s one reason people tend to ignore what science says: it’s boring. It has a “reader-deterring style” 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. There’s a much better chance that people read things that the brain can process easily—and it’s useful even for your readers that are able to read dry stuff.
I think you’re mistaken about evolutionary psychology and brains, but I don’t 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 I’d 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 didn’t 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. You’re not really saying anything new to me, which is fine, but FYI I already know about additional difficulties which it’s harder to find answers for.
I’m personally not a very visual thinker and I’m 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. It’s not that big a deal – I’m used to ignoring comments that assume I don’t exist or make general statements about what people are like which do not apply to me. I’m not going to get offended and stop talking to you over it. But I thought it was relevant enough to mention.
I’m actually interested in that—if you have found sources and documents that provide a better picture of how brains work, I’d 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 I’ll use it.
Ok, I didn’t 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 doesn’t 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 “small” errors instead of thinking errors merit post mortems), lack of persistence, quitting mid-discussion without explanation (often due to bias against claims you’re 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 I’ve 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 people’s disinterest in those issues and resistance to dealing with them is a sign of irrationality and bias – it’s part of the problem.
So I don’t want to attempt to discuss evolutionary psychology with you because I don’t think it will work well due to those other issues. I don’t 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 you’ll make an inductivist or justificationist argument, and then I’ll mention that Popper refuted that, and then to resolve the issue we’ll 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 it’s 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 they’re 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/or prevented correction of those errors. I tried using an initial discussion as a demonstration that the meta problems actually exist, that the debate won’t 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 “fix” 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 you’re speaking to. It’s a well known stereotype of how to do fake apologies. If you picked up this speech pattern by accident because it’s a common pattern that you’ve heard a lot, and you don’t realize what it means, then I wanted to warn you because you’ll have a high chance of offending people by apologizing this way. I think maybe it’s an accident here because I didn’t get a hostile vibe from you in the rest; this one sentence doesn’t fit well. It’s also an inaccurate sentence since I didn’t 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. It’s entirely possible that yours are better—you spent a lot of time on this. But I just don’t have the motivation to do the many, many prerequisites you asked for, unless I’ve seen from experience that they provide better results.
This is the show don’t tell problem: you’ve told me you’ve got better conclusions (which is possible). But you’ve 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 we’re 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. It’s just that the sentence “I’m used to ignoring comments that assume I don’t exist” felt a bit passive-agressive, so I got passive-agressive as well on that.
It’s not very rational. I shouldn’t have done that, you’re 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/ideas have you read that disagree with you, and what did you do to address them and conclude that they’re wrong?
Ok, interesting question.
First, most of what I’m 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 I’m already familiar with the counter-arguments usually put forward against to energy depletion:
We’ve heard about it earlier and didn’t “run out”
Prices will increase gradually
Technology will improve and solve the problem
We can have a bigger economy and less energy
We’ll 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 won’t solve the problem (and I’m 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 I’ve seen limits to the reasoning. For instance, what was said againt the Limits to growth report (turns out most criticism didn’t adress the core points of the report).
I’m 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 didn’t 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.