Increasing day to day conversational rationality

post by Hazard · 2017-11-16T21:18:37.424Z · LW · GW · 11 comments

Contents

  Defending against Inferential Inoculation
None
11 comments

One of the things that rationality has given me is a greater appreciation for the variety of ways one can be wrong. It often seems like people who haven’t given this topic much thought have a model of “being wrong” as one-dimensional quality someone can have with varying levels of intensity. You can be completely wrong, sort of wrong, or 0% wrong, but assigning a value to one’s wrongness is all the nuance this model gives.

Given such a model, there are very few failure points in a system of two people disagreeing about something. One of them is wrong and the other is right. Or maybe they’re both sort of right. Having a one-dimensional model of being wrong makes it harder to see other failure points. What if the question is wrong? What if there isn’t actually a disagreement between you and it’s all a misunderstanding? What if you aren’t actually arguing about what you are arguing about? What if you disagree because the other person's reasoning process is setting off your alarm bells?

Because of the weirdness of words, not every english sentence can be directly translated into a formal logic proposition. Thus one needs a more nuanced understanding of being wrong in order to have more fruitful conversations and arguments.

Often in conversations, I want to address some of these issues, but I feel very clunky when bringing them in. Sometimes I’m about to bring up an idea that is common in the LW cannon, but then think, “Oh, for this to make sense to them, I’d first have to explain this, and for that to make sense I’d have to explain-- ” and by then I’ve lost the thread of the conversation and just abort the idea and try to catch up. Sometimes I do bring up the previously mentioned point, but I fail to do it in a way that communicates the essence of my point, or worse, the person I’m arguing with still feels like they’re in fight mode and reflexively begins attacking my point.

It would be incredibly useful to have worked out some “personhood interface” respecting scripts that I could call whenever I noticed a particular problem that was stymying the conversation. It’s hard enough to be rational when you can slowly think things through, and a real time conversation only makes it harder. I have a hunch that there is some decent low hanging fruit in the realm of operationalizing some scripts of the above nature.

Below I’ve worked out the particulars of one script, and have thoughts on other ones that would be useful.

Defending against Inferential Inoculation

“I’m getting the sense that we have fundamentally different perspectives/understandings of X, and that continuing to casually arguing about it is just going to trick us into thinking we understand each other when we don’t. I suggest we either step up our game and really try to explore each others beliefs carefully, or we postpone this discussion to when we have more attention and time to do so.”

Key points

• Acknowledge the gap
• Acknowledge that this should be approached carefully
• Create the possibility of continuing with renewed vigour, or for deferring.
• For this script to be truly complete, one would need to have mechanisms in place for continuing conversations with people.

Other scripts that would be useful to have

• Having a reset button where you drop whatever the current thread is, take a breath, and both recenter on what your central thesis are.
• I often realize halfway through a conversation that I’ve ended up arguing for a position that I don’t care about/support, and it’s very hard to recenter from there in a way that isn’t incredibly jarring to the discussion.
• Beginning a tangent to explain a related point, concept, or argument, while making it very clear you are momentarily introducing a tangent and that you are both on the same page about what the current focus is.
• Make sure the other person understands you intend to return to the main argument and that this isn't a diversionary tactic.
• Starting a double crux
• Pointing out that you think you have different ideas in mind when using the word X, and asking them to explain theirs.
• Be sure to do so in a way that doesn’t turn into “How should we define X?” but instead becomes “What are you thinking?”
• Letting them now that what they said set off alarms bells somewhere in your head, but you aren’t sure why, and you want to take a moment to think you so don’t give them a made up reason for your disagreement.
• “I think I might understand your intent, but the words you said confused me. Could you rephrase that?”

Note that some of these are pretty easy to implement (beginning a tangent argument and then returning), yet you could probably still benefit from giving explicit attention to how to implement them with maximum smoothness.

###################

Discussion Prompt

• Comment with any scripts that you use to smoothly introduce non-typical ideas/conversational dynamics/etc.
• What are the most common things you wish you had a well flushed out script for?

11 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.