Flowsheet Logic and Notecard Logic

pockets of intelligent discussion always exist and a genuinely curious person would do better to find them

Maybe I don't qualify as a sufficiently curious person (I tend to give up easily), but before LessWrong I couldn't find a reasonable debate. Reasonable individuals, yes. But never a group, a community where rationality would be norm. Not even online community.

Also, many highly intelligent people around me did things that I now see as obviously irrational (things like mentioned in this article), and used them as a signal for high intelligence. I suspected that something was wrong, but wasn't able to pinpoint the problem, so my explanations were something like "I'm sorry, but this way of reasoning feels intuitively wrong", which of course was only taken as an evidence of my insufficient intelligence. (I admit that being able to describe the problem precisely would be more impressive, but not even noticing the problem is less impressive. But again, this is my opinion; my friends would prefer having all opinions explicit, even if it would mean they ignore some part of reality. The same problem, on a meta level.)

Why spend your time trying to fix stupid discussions?

I admit I do not know how much the "desire to think and act rationally" is a long-term character trait, and how much it depends on the environment. Is the preference for "win debates, instead of reflecting reality" something we start to aesthetically prefer in the childhood, and once that happens, the person is forever locked in this mode, because when they hear about rationality afterwards, they will only approach it as "yet another verbal tool that may help me win some debate in future"? And analogically, is the preference for "reflecting reality" an aesthetic preference formed in childhood that will make the person feel disgusted by all clever debate-winning techniques? Or is this all mostly about learning and copying our friends?

If rationality has a strong long-term-character-trait component, we cannot fix stupid discussions. We can only drop hints for all the "rationality preferring" people that another kind of debate is possible, and where to find it.

If rationality is about learning and copying, then we could improve some less stupid discussions by showing them how to do it correctly.

If I would have to make a bet, I think I would bet on the long-term-character-trait model. I do not remember seeing a person become more rationality-loving in result of exposure to rationality materials. I have only seen already rationality-loving people become more confident that their approach is correct; and debate-winning people add a few new keywords to their toolsets.

I guess I agree. In fact, if I mentally register that my interlocutor seems to be employing one of these algorithms, it mainly just triggers a little "aha, I don't need to waste more time arguing with this person, they are operating under counterproductive assumptions of how arguments work."

The best debaters who I knew personally really identified themselves with debate. Two of them went on to coach debate in college. The better you are at debate, the better you think you are at arguing. For them, believing that policy debate and real logical argumentation are substantially different things would imply that the thing they're good at is a mere game, rather than a pragmatic generalizable skill. Psychologically there's a powerful motivation to want policy debate to be more real.

So I think it's harmful to the degree that the debater doesn't keep in mind the artificiality of the format.

All that said, it's fun, it teaches you to think and speak on your feet, you get to socialize with other likeminded people, and you learn a thousand times more about politics and history than you would learn in any other class.

I think you've misunderstood my intended usage of Notecard Logic. It is actually almost the exact opposite of what you have said. Notecard Logic would be believing that you are proven/justified in believing something because you have a citation, regardless of the trustworthiness of that citation. Of course you should be able to find good sources backing up facts you believe.

You ... also seem to have completely inverted my intent regarding Flowsheet Logic. Casting a barrage of small, petty, irrelevant arguments and believing that "winning" consists of getting your opponent to give up on refuting them would be Flowsheet Logic. I'm not sure if I'm parsing this sentence correctly: "Avoiding re-raising a point in order to score "points" in an imaginary contest". How would avoiding re-raising an argument score any points even if you believed in Flowsheet Logic?

edit: Also, I think we may have reached Peak Fallacy Fallacy. At what point are we allowed to start critiquing the logic of argumentation again without being accused of this?

I have not participated in such a debate, and I think that generally, the flowsheet/notecard logic can be useful to prepare a single volley of argumentation at the preparative stage. For example, I want to discuss X in an article; I pull up my references (notecards) and sew them onto my own points, trying to include both pro and contra, and then send the document to a friend, with an understanding that he might outright condemn such organisation. The main thing seems to be the judge and not a debater when you evaluate your own work, and to judge consistency, fullness and conciseness.

I think the point of notecard logic that someone using it doesn't care whether the argument was addressed appropriately. And the point of flowsheet logic is that someone using it doesn't care why an argument was unaddressed. I claim that this is a thing that happens and is very common; and is pretty difficult to confuse with legitimate desire to understand and discuss.

However, I think that fixing notecard logic doesn't get you that much closer to good epistemology. Even if your refutations are sound, if you miss the overall logical structure then you can refute anything you want. I think this is a frustrating problem here and in other online communities. Basically too many people are stuck in Stage 2.