On different discussion traditions

post by Eugene Shcherbinin (eugene-shcherbinin-1) · 2025-04-07T23:00:36.132Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

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Effective Altruism and Rationality communities aspire to be open to criticism. But oftentimes when you give it, the criticism is appreciated but not acted upon. In particular, if you only express an argument, it won’t be taken into account unless you explain your whole model from the first principles and how the criticism-taker can marginally adjust their worldview to accept the criticism. More broadly, this is the discussion tradition common in English culture. While there are many merits to it, it leads to misunderstandings and underappreciation of certain “controversial” thinkers.

Nassim Taleb is a perfect example: catchy, provocative, and often self-contradictory, he is avoided by the mainstream academia and public because of his communication style. In my opinion, this leads to neglect of his insights.

There is an alternative tradition based on Hegel’s dialectic. At its core is the process of development through the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model. In the Taleb example, the thesis is the mainstream experts' approach to forecasting, and antithesis — Taleb’s criticism of it. The third step would be the synthesis that would reconcile the two points, getting both the experts’ insights and Taleb’s systems' antifragility.

In this paradigm, antithesis (Taleb’s general view) doesn’t have to be balanced and uncontradictory. It is enough for his points to be valuable and criticisms true. Furthermore, Taleb doesn’t have to make sure all his views are correct, since the synthesis will be (hopefully) done by others who will select what is true and what is not in his views.

Other examples in our society? Trump’s administration's actions that are an antithesis to Biden’s, not a self-sufficient political force and vision.

The two approaches have different merits, but my impression is that the former is better at marginal improvement, while the latter is at systemic, deep change. And in our disruptive times, we need the latter more. Octavio Paz in Labyrinths of Solitude said very well about it:

"When I arrived to the United States, I was surprised above all by the self-assurance and confidence of people, by their apparent happiness and apparent adjustment to the world around them. This satisfaction does not stifle criticism, however, and the criticism is valuable and forthright, of a sort not often heard in the countries to the south, where long periods of dictatorship have made us more cautious about expressing our points of view. But it is a criticism that respects the existing system and never touches the roots. I thought of Ortega Gasset's distinction between uses and abuses, in his definition of the "revolutionary spirit". The revolutionary is always a radical, that is, he is trying to correct the uses themselves rather than the mere abuses of them. Almost all the criticisms I heard from the lips of North Americans were of the reformist variety: they left the social or cultural structures intact and we're only intended to limit or improve this or that procedure. It seemed to me then, and it still does, that the United States is a society that wants to realize its ideals, has no wish to exchange them for others, and is confident of surviving, no matter how dark the future may appear..." Taleb explicitly tries to fight uses, not abuses, since the abuses (failures of systems after black swans) follow directly from uses of systems (creating fragile systems, using assumptions like normal distribution)

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