Better Disagreement

DH7 should be kept internal, at least at first. Being misinterpreted as trying to construct a straw man when you've been trying to do the opposite can derail a conversation. To actually believe that you've made a steel man, not a straw man, the person you're arguing with would have to admit that you've created a stronger argument for their own position than they could.

It's probably best to practice up to DH7 internally, and only up to DH6 vocally.

If we imagine arguments as soldiers, as they tend to be, the problem becomes even clearer:

(A and B are about to fight.)

A. Ah! My worthy opponent! I shall send my greatest soldier to crush you... GOLIATH! ATTACK!

B. His sword's a little wimpy. Let me give him a bazooka.

If I were A, I wouldn't trust that bazooka on B's word alone, I'd be annoyed at the slight against my blacksmiths, and, even if it turned out to be a totally legitimate bazooka, I would, at the very least, consider B a tactless grandstander.

(Though if the bazooka did work, I'd use it, obviously. I just wouldn't like using it.)

If the goal is intellectual progress, those who disagree should aim not for name-calling but for honest counterargument.

and

DH7: Improve the Argument, then Refute Its Central Point...if you're interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents' arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you [also] must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse."

I would add that the goal of intellectual progress sometimes extends beyond you-the-rationalist, to the (potentially less than rational) person you're arguing with. The goal is not just to "produce" the truth, or to recognize the truth with your own two eyes. The goal is to both locate the truth and convince the other person that it is in fact the truth.

Often, I find myself in the following scenario: Someone says, "X and Y, therefore Z!" And off the bat, I have a good idea of what they're thinking and where the logic goes bad. But in point of fact, they are being loose with semantics, and there exist definitions of X and Y consistent with their original (loose) statements which would imply Z. I could ask them clarifying questions and get them to pin down their position further...but alternatively, I am free to say, "Surely you don't mean this one thing [which they really do mean] because here's how that would go bad. Perhaps you really meant this other thing? Am I understanding you correctly?"

This makes it much easier for people to "back down" from their original position without losing face, because they are framed as not having ever committed to that position in the first place. The reality is that we often have a choice between nailing someone in place and offering them up as a sacrifice to the logic gods -- in which case we don't really win since the logic gods can't actually touch people who don't submit to their power -- or deliberately leaving them untethered, so that they will more willingly adjust to new evidence.

Here it's not so much that I'm constructing the best argument from the corpse of their fully formed argument and striking it down. It's more like encouraging the growth of an adolescent argument in a direction that does not require it to be struck down, in the process striking down the bad argument that the original argument would have grown into, and trying to ensure that my "opponent" doesn't end up getting slain along with the bad argument.

This would be out of place in the above post, but I thought it was worthy of a discussion on Better Disagreement. Because I used to think the way to win was to pin people into logical corners, but if you're goal is partly to convince people, and those people are like most people, then in my (limited) experience, this way works So. Much. Better.

There's a valuable difference between two different kinds of counterarguments (that I encountered in Drescher's Good and Real, but I presume it's widely known):

To correct someone, it is not sufficient to offer an argument for the opposite conclusion. At that point you merely have an apparent paradox - two arguments for opposite conclusions. You must also point out where in their argument they went wrong.

If everyone followed this policy, it could break certain circular or repetitious disputes which are trapped in a cycle of: A offers argument for X, B offers argument for not-X, A repeats their argument more clearly or more loudly, B repeats their argument in turn, and so on.

Interesting hierarchy, but it lacks one important point which is often fundamental in some debates, like the theism/atheism one, or even many political one : the difference between "belief" and "belief in belief". For many theists nowadays, the core of their belief in God is not really due to deep reasons that God has to exist - they believe that Adam and Eve, Noah's Ark and most of the Bible are philosophical tales, not that they really happened, they believe in evolution, when they are sick they go see a doctor, not to Lourdes... but they still believe in God, because if they feel that if they don't, life has no meaning, ethics will crumble, and the horror of death will become unbearable without the hope of afterlife.

When someone is thinking like that, no DH5, DH6 or DH7 level disagreeing on the existence of God will do much. But building a line of retreat could. While under your hierarchy, attacking those belief in belief, building a line of retreat, would be only a DH1, while it can (in some cases, obviously not in all of them) be the most efficient way to disagree : point to the core reason behind a disagreement.

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress. - Gandhi

Source? I can't find any that look reliable.

I like this post, even though it doesn't add much to Paul Graham's original essay. I mean, I wouldn't have seen this content if it were not posted on Less Wrong.

For all of my life until this year, I've been confounded by DH2 arguments against myself. Why are my opponents ignoring what I say because I said it angrily, or sadly, or confrontationally, or in passing, or whatever? Well, I don't like when people do that, but it doesn't change the fact that people do it, so I've started to adopt a more pleasant, acceptable tone.

I still don't like it. I don't like that I have to adopt a certain style to be taken seriously. But oh well.

Edit, 4/04/12:

I've started to adopt a more pleasant, acceptable tone.

I was deluded when I said this.

I really like this article a lot, and want to adopt these terms into more general usage. An important step to accomplishing this is to stop referring to the items by number, and use their gloss descriptions. "False positive" is a lot easier to remember than "type I error" (or is it type II....)

The first few levels of the hierarchy, DH0, DH1, DH2, DH3, are not useless, if you're concerned with getting to the truth efficiently. Pointing out that the author has no credentials in the area they are speaking in would allow people to limit their attention to credentialed speakers (due to bounded rationality). The senator example is similar - if you can't listen to everything and have to prune someone, choosing to forgo listening to obviously biased speakers might be a reasonable choice.

DH2 and DH3 are sometimes valuable as well, because we can do some inference about the world, taking a piece of communication as evidence. For example, we may infer something about the author's personality or beliefs from their tone; and then (bounded rationality again) decide whether to read further based on this (limited, probabilistic) estimate of the author.

Contradiction works similarly; it's a performance, putting the reputation of the speaker behind the negated claim. If a third party hears a college freshman make a point, and the professor flatly contradicts it, then the third party may be able to decide who to believe, shortcutting detailed analysis (scarce processing again). In some cases, this kind of contradiction argument can even be supported solely on tone, without leaning on reputation. A scholarly-sounding contradiction to a casual claim may be sufficient to sway me in some situations - perhaps the stakes are low.

Good post.

I wonder if it'd be out of place for us on LW to start explicitely noticing these argument levels in disputes here. Though it'd probably be a better norm to use this positively (point out "good DH7 argument there") rather than negatively, which... come to think of it, would just be something of a DH2 argument in itself, harmful ammo for the sophisticated arguer.

Do I understand right, that the difference between DH4 and 5 is that DH4 doesn't directly engage the previous person's argument? And if only DH6 is "refuting the central point", then Dh5 means "nitpicking"? So it seems to me a solid DH4 could tower above DH5.

If a senator says we should raise the salary of senators, you might reply: "Of course he’d say that; he’s a senator." That might be relevant, but it doesn’t refute the original claim: "If there’s something wrong with the senator’s argument, you should say what it is; and if there isn’t, what difference does it make that he’s a senator?"

This is true but still, I'm inclined to think an ad hominem argument has some place in honest debate. If the real reason someone is advocating something is an unstated one, to do with their vested interests or psychological makeup or whatever else might invite an ad hominem argument, then if you defeat their stated argument, you'll get nowhere. They'll just come up with another one. Then another one, if that is defeated again. That's hacking at leaves rather than striking at a root. Exposing the real reason might help with actually getting somewhere.

Then again, little is more annoying when someone, instead of engaging your argument, starts judging your psychological makeup...

So what's optimal to do here? I'm not sure. Perhaps hacking off a few leaves first creates an opening for an attack at the root. At this point you've given the other person the courtesy of engaging their stated arguments for a while, and gathered some evidence in the process: "look, I defeated your last three arguments, and you ignore that and keep coming up with new ones, clearly we're dancing around the real issue here".

This is not a statement of disagreement, but merely a stylistic concern. I understand that prefacing one's work with a quotation from a respected figure is often good form. However, if it does not interfere with our purposes too much, could we not make a habit of it at Lesswrong?

The reference to Wielenberg's argument as an example of DH7 is an interesting one. This anlysis might be a bit off-topic, but the poster mentioned it so here goes.

Wielenberg is saying a couple of things in the article:

1. Dawkins' central argument won't work if God is conceived as a necessary being, rather than a contingent being.
2. Also, it won't work if God is conceived of (or just defined as) a simple being rather than a complex being.

Now on point 1, to be fair to Dawkins, he probably has not met real theists who have wanted to seriously defend (in an open debate, with a straight face) the idea that God is a necessary being. This is because the claim is rhetorically very vulnerable to a couple of simple counter-arguments:

"What? If you're going to insist that God exists necessarily then you're just being dogmatic, and shutting off all reasonable discussion on the subject. I could just as easily claim that an anti-God (such as the most evil being possible) exists necessarily. Or that the universe exists necessarily without being created. So now we're at a stalemate. To get past the stalemate, we need to concede the possibility that we each are wrong. I'm quite prepared to do that. Will you?"

Or this:

"What? There is no such thing as a necessary being. It seems quite possible to me, and to anyone listening with an open mind that there could have been nothing in existence at all. We all understand the question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' and we are puzzled by it precisely because we understand that there could have been nothing. But, in that case there cannot be any being which exists necessarily. So if you're going to define God as existing necessarily, then you've just defined a contradiction in terms. When writing my book, I was assuming that you'd have the good sense to define God as something possible, rather than something contradictory."

Notice that either of these should convince anyone who's not already been sucked into the Plantinga-inspired black hole of modal theism. In that black hole, you just deny as possible various inconvenient states of affairs which any normal human being would judge to be possible (including the overwhelming majority of actual theists). And, better still, you don't have to give any real proof that the denied state of affairs really is impossible (in the same way as proving that there is no largest prime number). That would be too hard. Instead you just have to assert it, and claim that you are within your epistemic rights to assert it.

As I said, this black hole is not rhetorically very effective... And it is certainly not rational as LW would understand the term.

On point 2, Dawkins does actually address this simplicity reply in The God Delusion: he is just mystified by it. The reason is that he is really convinced of his proposition that any designer of a complex being is itself a complex being.. So in his mind, defining God to be simple (when he has already shown it to be complex) is again just defining a contradictory being.

Now I think a legitimate criticism of Dawkins is that he doesn't provide a detailed argument for the principle that a designer of a complex being must itself be complex. So to that extent his argument has a hole, though there are a number of approaches to patch the hole. If Wielenberg were really trying DH7, he would have tried such patches.

For example, we could collate inductive evidence from lots of designers we know about like humans, chimpanzees and CAD tools (they are all complex) or from lots of simple things we know about like quarks, electrons and atoms (they are not designers). Or we could try to use formal complexity definitions (such as logical depth, which seems the closest analogue of physical and biological complexity as Dawkins describes it).

Notice that If the hole does get closed, or looks like getting closed, the theist is in trouble. And then it won't do to present a "simple" God as a counter example to Dawkins' principle, since this will be like presenting "phlogiston" as a counter example to the principle that objects gain mass when burned. Or worse, presenting a "squircle" (defined as a square circle) as a counterexample to the principle that all squares have straight sides...

Again sorry if off-topic.

These are 7 useful rules of thumb but the "Art of Controversy" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right) is always going to be slippery. The tract by Schopenhauer is useful to read to see how more subtle moves can be played out. It is recommended not as a handbook but to be better armed against the spectrum of ploys that an opponent may play.

If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents' arguments. But if you're interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents' arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you [also] must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse.

This is amazing! I will def incorporate this into my daily arguments.

I came up with something like DH7 out of a rather irrational reason: that is, I hate disagreeing with people, and I used to especially hate criticizing people, but I also get (perhaps understandably) annoyed by people being wrong about things. So my typical strategy has been to point out the things that they are right about to them, and look for a version of their central argument which is right, whether because its claim is weaker and its area of interest is narrower, or because there was a logical flaw which was simple to fix.

I know there's at least one person who found my discussion style really irritating and started trying to make me argue 'against myself' and then point that fact out. But I don't get especially attached to most of the ideas or points I argue about, so I remember thinking it was kind of pointless that he did that.

An application of this hierarchy:

Jack the Scarecrow. My crystal healing pills will give you eternal life. For $50.00 each, you need never die, suckers.

--

DH0: "I'm not interested for myself, but can I buy you a border collie and give her some? If you're going to live forever, you're going to need a smart friend to make the really tricky decisions."

DH1: What, exactly, is your profit margin on these crystal healing pills? If we don't live forever, would you still make money off of them?

DH2: Any post that ends in the word "suckers" directed at the readers is difficult to read charitably.

DH3: > My crystal healing pills will give you eternal life.
WRONG.

According to this hierarchy, D3 is arguing on a higher level than DH0, DH1, and DH2. And, well, maybe that's correct. "Higher" doesn't necessarily mean "more subtle." But in the absence of this hierarchy, I'd have been tempted to order the arguments from low- to high-level as 0 < 3 < 2 < 1.

(EDITED to remove potential applause light; EDITED again to better hit the idea of DH2)

Even DH7 presumes that the argument is wrong to begin with, which is not overly rational.

How about:

DH8, Clarifying When the Central Point is Indeed Valid. E.g. "A model of a supernatural entity as an ancestral simulator can be derived from the Simulation Argument framework. The validity of this framework and its approach to the question of Origin is now examined..."

or even

DH9, Update Your Model Based on Opposing Views. E.g. Given the , which appears to be valid provided the hold, I have updated my priors to account for the Universe as described by . The next order of business is to jointly examine our priors and come up with a more reliable model.

I really like DH7s.

When I'm reading through LW posts, they're pretty much the only arguments I'll update on. Otherwise, I'll reserve the possibility that the initial argument wasn't argued well. Especially when a position is just dismissed as 'silly', I'll assume that the inferential distance was too large between that person's point of view and ours. For example, here.

those who disagree should aim not for name-calling but for honest counterargument.

I agree that people can use the scale to sort among their arguments and filter out the lower ones, thus raising the level of discourse. But that is not the primary way I use the list. (I think I saw it on your site originally.)

People already subconsciously have a decent handle on what you explicated. What needs the most help is consciously understanding how good the various forms of argument are.

I say that people subconsciously understand these things because when pressed to rationalize, justify, or explain a position, they tend to give the available argument highest on the scale. This is counterbalanced by unique advantages name calling has, such as taking fewer words and lowering the status of the opposing arguers directly. But at least from D2 to D6, people basically get it.

That people are poor at comparing lists of evidence, one for and one against a proposition, does not mean that within each list, they are poor at sorting arguments from best to worst (although such a ranking will include already factored in for each sub-argument how likely it is to be wrong). The scale is most useful for testing the conclusions of entities by seeing where on the scale their best arguments fall, and how many such they have, in addition to checking the quality of them (i.e. how well they prove the sub-conclusions they are claimed to prove). "Entities" includes other people and one's inner voice.

On Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3165794

I would switch the order of DH1 and DH2. A tone argument is very rarely relevant to the substantive dispute. In most cases, the tone of an article shouldn't lead you to update your belief in the conclusion. An ad hominem argument, on the other hand, is often substantively relevant, especially given the power of motivated reasoning. It is entirely reasonable to lower your credence in the conclusion of an article arguing that senators are underpaid once you discover that the author of an article is a senator. Of course, if you have already evaluated the argument itself, and are fairly confident in your evaluation, then learning the identity of the author shouldn't significantly impact your belief in the conclusion (kind of like argument screens off authority), but that is true of tone arguments as well.

The justfication for placing tone above ad hominem in the hierarchy is that the former at least responds to the writing, not the writer. But surely this isn't adequate justification. One might respond to the writing in many ways that are entirely irrelevant to the disagreement, e.g. by reproducing the written piece in reverse order. The question should be, which of these responses is more often relevant to a proper assessment of the truth of the conclusion.

I'm not certain whether DH-central-point (DH6) is so much different from DH-improve-then-disagree (DH7).

If DH5 is nitpicking (I'll call it DH-nitpicking), then DH-central-point is not. So DH-central-point would mean attacking what the author really wanted to say. But then, what's DH-improve-then-disagree? It can't really be filling the holes in the arguments of the author because then we'd arrive at DH-central-point, wouldn't we? Are there examples that clarify the proposed distinction between DH-central-point and DH-improve-then-refute?

• DH8 - Find the truth you didn't know in the other guy's argument.

• DH9 - Find out where you're wrong.

• If you're intent on serving a meme, you're looking to spread your meme, and squash competing memes.

• If you're intent on social work, you're looking to fix the other guy's head.
• If you're intent looking on getting value for yourself, you're looking to add truths and remove falsehoods from your own head.

That's a lot of big talking from me, as I have other memes that kick me in the butt, call me bitch, and send me out whoring, but I try to pay attention to these memes instead, which take better care of me.

Love the memes that love you back.