It's not immediately obvious when it is best to request a specific thing, and when it is best to foster an agreement about the general principles that informed your need for the thing. Both have their place, and it's good to mentally check in each particular situation which seems like a better option, instead of sticking to one pattern without thinking.

The question is, who counts as terrible? What sorts of lapses in rigorous thinking are just normal human fallibility and which make a person seriously untrustworthy?

If at all possible you need to look at the person's actual track record. Everyone has views you will find incredible stupid or immoral. Even the very wise make mistakes that look obvious to us. In addition its possible that the person engaging in 'obvious folly' actually has a better understanding of the situation than we do. You need to look at a representiive sample and weigh their successes and failures in a systematic way. If you cannot access their history you still need to get an actual sample. If you were judging programmers something like a triplebyte interview is a reasonable way to get info. Trying to weigh the stupid things they have said about programming is a very bad method. Without a real sample you are making a character judgement under huge uncertainty.

Of course we are Bayesians. If forced to come up with an estimate despite uncertainty we can do it. But its important to do the updating correctly. Say a person's stupidest belief, that you know about, is X. The relevant odds ratio is not:

P(beleives X| trustworthy)/P(beleives X|untrustorthy)

Instead you have to look at:

P(stupidest belief I learn about is at least as stupid as X| trustworthy)/P(stupidest beleif I learn about is at least as stupid as X|untrustowrthy)

You can try to estimate similar odds ratios for collections of stupid beleifs. This method isnt as good as trying to conditioning on both unusually wise and unusually stupid beliefs. But if you are going to judge based on stupid beliefs you have to do it correctly. Keep in mind that the more 'open' a person is the more likely you are to learn their stupid beleifs. So you need to facor in an estimate of their openness towards you.

The difference between getting what you want and sorting out a topic in the long term is also about social norms and habits of thought. It's often easier to get what you want by asking, but then you'll only get what you want and maybe become less effective at changing the underlying reasoning that caused you to want this thing or prevented others from giving it to you.

I worry that if I'm being a little bit more specific, I'm aligning with the norm of following directions rather than own understanding, shifting priority away from developing this understanding in myself and others. Of course any advice has an equal and opposite counteradvice, but my guess is that the popular inclination is to treat the symptoms.

I wonder why people have the instinct to "debate around" rather than just asking for what they want. I get the sense that understanding the why will really help to get ourselves to stop doing it.

1.

Maybe because our instinct is to think, "Well, if they don't agree with me in the more theoretical sense, why would they do the thing I want?" Eg. if your husband doesn't agree with you about the value of home-cooked family dinners, why would he agree to your request to have them?

Well, perhaps he doesn't mind having home-cooked family dinners. Or perhaps he just senses that your preferences are larger than his, and wants to make you happy. In either case, his thinking is roughly, "Sure, we can do that. I don't agree with you about why, but it's not a big deal to me and I don't mind doing it at all."

I sense that enough positive reinforcement could address this. Eg. "I make requests of people to do things even though they disagree with me all the time, and many times it works!"

2.

Or maybe it has to do with our tendency to get dragged in to arguments. Eg. you start off mentioning that you think home-cooked family dinners are valuable, with the intention to follow up by asking if you can have them more often. But your husband disagrees, and your instinct is to explain why you disagree with his disagreement. Which leads to a rabbit hole. Which perhaps leads you to forget to ask, "well could we just do this even though you don't agree". Or perhaps it feels uncomfortable to make the request after he clearly disagrees.

I guess one way to address this is to try to establish some sort of TAP of "Disagreement --> This might be a rabbit hole. Do I have any concrete requests to make before we get going?"

Was veto power over reports your terminal goal, or was it a means to prevent information you viewed as inaccurate going out to customers?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cVqBm84AY-2yU9ejWAtM4H4C_deRaBxlZuTreYOoHPc/edit?usp=sharing

Drafting edits. I trust that you can see past the basic "I'm being attacked" feeling and can recognise the effort and time that has gone into the comments.

Great technique. I'm confused about why you wrote the article in your old style of "debate around" instead of your new style of "say it like it is". Since that's what you want to promote. What would this article look like in the new style?

Tactical vs. Strategic Cooperation

How important is local & tactical vs. global & ​strategic cooperation? Is it more important to get alignment with people on fundamental beliefs, epistemology, and world-models? Or is it more important to get cooperate on a local task in the present?

Company domain

From the outside, a “company” is an example of a group of people cooperating on a local task. They don’t have to see eye-to-eye about everything in the world, so long as they can work out their disagreements about the task at hand.

From the inside of a company - it’s standard advice in company culture, to note that the most successful teams are more likely to have shared idealistic visions and to get along with each other as friends outside of work. Purely transactional, working-for-a-paycheck, arrangements don’t tend to inspire excellent work.

Work domain

I expect getting to alignment on principles to be really hard, expensive, and unlikely to work for me, (It would be valuable to ask myself why that is, but not right now). I expect to get a lot of mileage out of relatively transactional or local cooperation. For example donors to my organisation who don’t buy into all of my ideals, but are willing to donate anyway.

I used to approach my interpersonal “wants”, by “debating around” the issue.

For example I might have said:

• “If we don’t do what I want, horrible things A, B, and C will happen!”

This degenerates into a miserable argument over how likely A, B, and C are, or a referendum on how neurotic or pessimistic I am.

• “You’re such an awful person for not having done [thing I want]!”

This degenerates into a miserable argument about each other’s general worth.)

• “Authority Figure Bob will disapprove if we don’t do [thing I want]!”

This degenerates into a miserable argument about whether we should respect Bob’s authority.

Back at MetaMed, I had a coworker who believed in alternative medicine. I didn’t, and I was very frustrated. I didn’t want any harm to come to patients from misinformation, and I couldn’t see how I could prevent harm. This caused a lot of conflict, both spoken and unspoken. There were global values issues on debate; reason vs. emotion, logic vs. social charisma, who’s perspective on life was good or bad. I’m aware now and embarrassed to say I came across rude and inappropriate. I was coming from a well-meaning place. I didn’t want any harm to come to patients from misinformation, and I was very frustrated, because I didn’t see how I could prevent that outcome.

Finally, at my wit’s end, I blurted out what I wanted: I wanted to have veto power over information we sent to patients, to make sure it didn’t contain any factual inaccuracies.

She agreed instantly.

Turns out, people respond better if I just say, “I really want [thing I want] Can we do that?”

This phrase doesn’t guarantee I’ll get my way. It does mean that when I do get into a negotiation, that discussion stays targeted to the decision I disagree about, not the justification points.

I was aiming for global alignment on local issues when I should have aimed for simple agreement.

Personal domain

Narrowing the scope of the request and being clear about what I want, resolves debates with my husband too. If I watch myself quoting an expert nutritionist to argue that we should have home-cooked family dinners, my motivation feels like it’s not curiosity about the long-term health dangers of not eating as a family, rather that I want family dinners and I’m throwing spaghetti at a wall hoping some pro-dinner argument will work. The “empirical” or “intellectual” debate is rhetorical window dressing for my underlying request to fulfil my need. When I notice that is going on, it’s better to redirect to the actual underlying desire.

Then I can get to the actual negotiation. What makes family dinners undesirable to you? How could we balance those needs? What alternatives would work for both of us?

Alternative strategy

My friend Michael Vassar prefers getting to alignment with people on fundamentals first. Epistemics, beliefs, values. He believes there’s a lot more value to be gained from someone who keeps actively pursuing goals aligned with yours, even when they’re far away and you haven’t spoken in a long time, than from someone you can persuade to do a specific action you want right now, but who will need further persuading in the future.

----------

Assuming humans divide into two rough categories, “the great people who have value alignment with me” and “the terrible people who don’t have value alignment with me”, I think both Michael and myself would agree it’s unwise to benefit in the short term from allying with terrible people. The question is, who counts as terrible? Which value misalignments are acceptable human fallibility and which lapses in rigorous thinking make a human seriously untrustworthy?

I’d be interested to read some discussion about when and how much it makes sense to prioritise long and short term alliance.