The Basic Double Crux pattern

For context, Mark participated in a session I ran via Zoom last weekend, that covered this pattern.

For what its worth, that particular conversation is the main thing that caused me to add a paragraph about distillation (even just as a bookmark), to the OP. I'm not super confident what would have most helped there, though.

Seems like there's a big difference between:

• the thing which originally caused me to believe X was learning Y
• because I believe X, I ended up convinced of Y
•  things which caused me to believe X also caused me to believe Y

... and in all three cases, Y might be a "crux", since changing my belief about Y would also lead me to change my belief about X as the update propagates. Yet the cases are really quite different:

• first case: if I changed my belief about Y, then my original reason for believing X would be gone, so it would make sense to change my belief about X
• second case: if the falsehood of Y is really strong evidence for the falsehood of X, then changing my mind on Y could make me change my mind on X, but I'd also end up really confused because whatever evidence which originally made me believe X would still be there.
• third case: falsehood of Y is evidence that my underlying beliefs are somehow wrong, but I still have no idea where the mistake is.

In my experience, where Double Crux is easiest is also where it's the least interesting to resolve a disagreement because usually such disagreements are already fairly easily resolved or the disagreement is just uninteresting.

An inconveniently large portion of the time disagreements are so complex that the effort required to drill down to the real crux is just...exhausting. By "complex" I don't necessarily mean the disagreements are based upon some super advanced model of the world, but just that the real cruxes are hidden under so much human baggage.

So I broadly agree with this.

When I facilitate "real conversations", including those in the Double Crux framework, I ussually prefer to schedule at least a 4 hour block, and most of that time is spent navigating the psychological threads that arise (things like triggeredness, defensiveness, subtle bucket errors [LW · GW], and compulsions to stand up for something important) and/or iteratively parsing what one person is saying well enough to translate it into the other person's ontology, as opposed to finding cruxes.

in many of the most interesting and important cases it usually requires a lot of effort to get people on the same page and the number of times where all participants in a conversation are willing to put in that effort seems vanishingly small.

Seems right. I will say that people are often more inclined to put in 4+ hours if they have reference experiences of that actually working.

But, yep.

In other words, double crux is most useful when all participants are equally interested in seeking truth.

I'll add a caveat to this though: the spirit of Double Crux is one of trying to learn and change your own mind, not trying to persuade others. And you can do almost all components of a Double Crux conversation (paraphrasing, operationalizing, checking if things are cruxes for you and noting if they are, ect) unilaterally. And people are very often interested in spending a lot of time being listened to sincerely, even if they are not very interested in getting to the truth themselves.

That said, I don't think that you can easily apply this pattern, in particular, unilaterally.

This makes me feel like whenever I “take a stance”, it’s an athletic stance with knees bent.

Hell yeah.

I might steal this metaphor.

"Community" is a bit strong for these early stages, but I'm running small training sessions via Zoom, with an eye towards scaling them up.

If you're interested, put down your details on this google form.

Also, this is a little bit afield, but there are online NonViolent Communication communities. Bay NVC, for instance, does a weekly dojo, now online due to the pandemic. NVC is very distinctly not Double Crux, but they do have a number of overlapping sub-skills. And in general, I think that the most the of conflicts that most people have in "real life" are better served by NVC than DC.

Gar. I thought I finally got images to work on a post of mine.

First of all, yep, the kind of map territory distinction that enables one to even do the crux-checking move at all is reasonably sophisticated. And I suspect that some people, for all practical purposes, just can't do it.

Second, even for those of us who can execute that move, in principle, it gets harder, to the point of impossibility, as the conversation becomes more heated, or the person become more triggered.

Third, when a person is in a public, low-nuance context, or is used to thinking in public, low-nuance context, a person is likely to have resistance to acknowledging that [x] is a crux for [y], because that can sound like an endorsement of [x] to a casual observer.

So there are some real difficulties here.

However, I think there are strategies that help in light of these difficulties.

In terms of doing this move yourself...

You can just practice this until it becomes habitual. In Double Crux sessions, I sometimes include an exercise that involves just doing crux-checking: taking a bunch of statement, isolating the the [A] because [B] structure, and thin checking if [B] is a crux for [A], for you.

And certainly there are people around (me) who will habitually respond to some claim with "that would be a crux for me" / "that wouldn't be a crux for me."

In terms of helping your conversational partner do this move...

First of all, it goes a long way to have a spirit of open curiosity, where you are actually trying to understand where they are coming from. If a person expects that you're going to jump on them and exploit any "misstep" they make, they're not going to be relaxed enough to consider counterfactual-from-their-view hypotheticals. Sincerely offering your own cruxes often helps as a sign of good faith, but keep in mind that there is no substitute for just actually wanting to understand, instead of trying to persuade.

Furthermore, when a person is resistant to do the crux-checking this is often because there is some bucket error or conflation happening, and if you step back and help them untangle it this goes a long way. You should actively go out of your way to help your partner avoid accidentally gas lighting themselves.

For instance, I was having a conversation with someone, this week, about culture war related topics.

A few hours into the discussion I asked,

Suppose that the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement (not the "rank and file") had a seriously flawed impact model, such that all of the energy going into this area didn't actually resolve any of these terrible problems. In that case, would you have a different felling about the movement?"

(In fact, I asked a somewhat more pointed question: "If that was the case, would you feel more inclined to push a button to 'roll back' the recent flourishing of activity of around BLM?")

I asked this question, and the person said some things in response, and then the conversation drifted away. I brought us back, and asked it again, and again we kind of "slid off."

So I (gently) pointed this out,

We've asked this question twice now, and both times we've sort of drifted away. This suggests to me that maybe there's some bucket error or false dichotomy in play, and I imagine the some part of you is trying to protect something, or making sure that something doesn't slip in sideways. How do you feel about trying to focus on and articulate that thing, directly?

We went into that, and together, we drew out that there were two things at stake, and two (not incompatible) ways that you could view the situation:

• On the one hand BLM, and the recent protests, and other things in that space, are a strategic social change movement, which has some goals, and is trying to achieve them.
• But also, it is an expression of rage and frustration at the pain that black people in the United States, as a group, have had to endure for decades and decades. And separately from the question of "will these actions result in the social change that they're aiming for?", there's just something bad about telling those people to shut up, and something important about this kind of emotional expression on the societal level.

(Which, to translate a little, is to say "no, the leaders having the wrong impact model, on its own, wouldn't be a crux, because that is only part of the story.")

Now, if we hadn't drawn this out explicitly, my conversational partner might have been in danger of making a bucket error, gaslighting themselves into believing that it they think that it is correct or morally permissible to tell people or groups that they should repress their pain, or that they shouldn't be allowed to express it.

And for my part, this was itself a productive exploration, because, while it seems sort of obvious in retrospect (as these things often do), I had only been thinking of "all these things" as strategic societal reform movements, and not mass expressions of frustration. But, actually, that seems like a sort of crucial thing to be tracking if I want to understand what is happening the world, and/or I want to try and plot a path to actual solutions. For instance, I had already been importing my models of social change and intervention-targeting, but now I'm also importing my models of trauma and emotional healing.

(To be clear, I've very unsure how my individual-level models of trauma apply at the societal level. I do think it can be dangerous to assume a one-to-one correspondence between people and groups of people. But also, I've learned how to do Double Crux from doing IDC, and vis versa, and I think modeling groups of people as individuals writ large is often a very good starting point for analysis.)

So overall we went from a place of "this person seems kind of unwilling to consider the question" to "we found some insights that have changed my sense of the situation."

Granted, this was with a rationalist-y person, who I already knew pretty well and with whom I had mutual trust, who was familiar with the concept of bucket errors, and had experience with Focusing and introspection in general.

So on the one hand, this was easy mode.

But on the other hand, one takeaway from this is "with sufficient skill between the two people, you can get past this kind of problem."

I think you're selling people way short. 

I agree there's a depressingly huge majority out there that at the way you describe, but, like, the whole point of having a rationalist community is to train ourselves to deal with that fact, and I think the people I interact with regularly basically have the skill of at least making a serious attempt at confronting deeply held beliefs.

(I certainly think many people in LW circles still struggle with it, especially in domains that are different from the domains they were training on. But, I've seen people do at least a half-passable job at it pretty frequently)