Karate Kid and Realistic Expectations for Disagreement Resolution

I disagree with the karate kid essay. People have a really hard time with interventions often because they literally do not have a functioning causal model of the thing in question. People who apply deliberate practice to a working causal model often level up astonishingly quickly. Don't know if you have the appropriate causal model? Well, when you apply deliberate practice do you not get better? You're pulling on fake levers.

People have cognitive dissonance about this because a bunch of their life UI is fake levers, and acknowledging one would lead to acknowledging others.

I propose an alternative model. People don't resolve disagreements because there are no incentives to resolve them. In fact the incentives often cut the other way. The pretense of shared intent and avoidance of conflicting intents is short term workable, long term calcifying. Conflict resolutions that would need to be about intents often disguise themselves as conflicts about strategies or implementations instead, because bike shedding, and people not even being aware of their own inconsistencies in this regard.

Maybe the total process only takes 30 hours but you have to actually do the 30 hours, and people rarely dedicate more than 4 at a time, and then don't prioritize finishing it that highly

And even worse, our beliefs are elastic, so between this session and the next one the damage to the wounded beliefs heals, and one has to start almost from scratch again.

I'm glad this post was written, but I don't think it's true in the sense that things have to be this way, even without new software to augment our abilities.

It's true that 99% of people cannot resolve disagreements in any real sense, but it's a mistake to assume that because Yudkowsky couldn't resolve a months long debate with Hanson and the LessWrong team can't resolve their disagreements that they're inherently intractable.

If the Yud vs Hanson debate was basically Eliezer making solid arguments and Hanson responding with interesting contrarian points because he sees being an interesting contrarian as the purpose of debating, then their inability to resolve their debate tells you little about how easy the agreement would be to resolve.

If the LessWrong team is made up entirely of conflict-avoidant people who don't ground their beliefs in falsifiable predictions (this is my impression, having spoken to all of them individually), then the fact that their disagreements don't resolve after a year of discussion shouldn't be all that surprising.

The bottleneck is the dysfunctional resolution process, not the absolute difficulty of resolving the disagreement.

The original motivating example for this post doesn't actually quite fit into the lens the post oriented around. The post focuses on "disagreements between particular people". But there's a different set of issues surrounding "disagreements in a zeitgeist."

Groups update slower than individuals. So if you write a brilliant essay saying "this core assumption or frame of your movement is wrong", you may not only have to wait for individual people to go "oh, I see, that makes sense", but even longer for that to become common knowledge, enough that so that you won't reliably see group members acting under the old assumptions.

(Again, this is an observation about the status quo, not about what is necessarily possible if we grabbed all the low hanging fruit. But in the case of groups I'm more pessimistic about things improving as much, unless the group has strong barriers to entry and strong requirements of "actually committing serious practice to disagreement resolution.")

Somewhat replying to both romeo and bendini elsethread:

Bendini:

Disagreements aren't always trivial to resolve, but you've been actively debating an issue for a month and zero progress has been made, either the resolution process is broken or someone is doing something besides putting maximum effort into resolving the disagreement. 

Romeo:

I propose an alternative model. People don't resolve disagreements because there are no incentives to resolve them. In fact the incentives often cut the other way.

I definitely have a sense that rationalists by default aren't that great at disagreeing for all the usual reasons (not incentivized to, don't actually practice the mental moves necessary to do so productively), and kinda the whole point of this sequence is to go "Yo, guys, it seems like we should actually be able to be good at this?"

And the problem in part is that that this requires multiple actors – my sense is that a single person trying their best to listen/learn/update can only get halfway there, or less.[1]

[1] The exact nature of "what you can accomplish with only one person trying to productively-disagree depends on the situation." It may be that that particular person can come to whatever the truest-nearby-beliefs reasonably well, but if you need agreement, or if the other person is the final decision maker, "one-person-coming-to-correct-beliefs" may not solve the problem. 

Coming to Correct Beliefs vs Political Debate

I think one of the things going on is that it takes a bit of vulnerability to switch from "adversarial political mode" (a common default) to "actually be open to changing your mind." There is a risk that if you try earnestly to look at the evidence and change your mind, but your partner is just pushing their agenda, and you don't have some skills re: "resilience to social pressure", then you may be sort of just ceding ground in a political fight without even successfully improving truthseeking.

(sometimes, this is a legitimate fear, and sometimes it's not but it feels like it is, and noticing that in the moment is an important skill)

I've been on both sides of this, I think. Sometimes I've found myself feeling really frustrated that it feels like my discussion partner isn't listening or willing to update, and I find myself sort of leaning into an aggressive voice to try and force them to listen to me. And then they're like 'Dude, you don't sound like you're actually willing to listen to me or update" and then I was sheepishly like... "oh, yeah you're right."

It seems like having some kind of mutally-trustable-procedure for mutual "disarmament" would be helpful.

About the idea inoculation bit. It doesn't even require an idiot or two to be the first to explain an idea. (Although maybe I'm thinking about a different thing.)

It so happens that in the course of biology instruction in highschool and college where I live, the tradition is to open several courses with the same topic. Specifically, The Structure of the Cell. (Another motif, for botanists, is The General Life Cycle of Plants. I'm sure other specialties have their own Foundations.) And it's an important topic, but after the third time you just feel... dumber... when the teacher begins to talk about it. As if you try to find something new and exciting or in any case something to think about, and there's nothing there.

I would say it is the "keeping the abstraction level constant" that does it. I felt like I've got to actively work to avoid stupor and a desire to "just see it die in peace".

In the case of Karate, one can see that it is at least possible to become an expert. What does being a black belt at debate even mean? It probably doesn't mean being able to conclude any argument, since it is not clear that achieving resolution ofcontentious issues is possible in general.

Issues that are sufficiently deep, or which cut across cultural boundaries run into a problem where, not only do parties disagree about the object level issue, they also disagree about underlying questions of what constitutes truth, proof, evidence, etc. "Satan created the fossils to mislead people" is an example of one side rejecting the other sides evidence as even being evidence . Its a silly example, but there are much more robust ones. Can't you just agree on an epistemology, and then resolve the object level issue? No, because it takes an epistemology to come to conclusions about epistemology. Two parties with epistemological differences at the object level will also have them at the meta level.

Once this problem, sometimes called "the epistemological circle" or "the Munchausen Trilemma", is understood, it will be seen that the ability to agree or settle issues is the exception, not the norm