[errant thought pointing a direction, low-confidence musing, likely retreading old ground]
There’s a disagreement that crops up in conversations about changing people’s minds. Sides are roughly:
You should explain things by walking someone through your entire thought process, as it actually unfolded. Changing minds is best done by offering an account of how your own mind was changed.
You should explain things by back-chaining the most viable (valid) argument, from your conclusions, with respect to your specific audience.
This first strategy invites framing your argument around the question “How did I come to change my mind?”, and this second invites framing your argument around the question “How might I change my audience’s mind?”. I am sometimes characterized as advocating for approach 2, and have never actually taken that to be my position.I think there’s a third approach here, which will look to advocates of approach 1 as if it were approach 2, and look to advocates of approach 2 as if it were approach 1. That is, you should frame the strategy around the question “How might my audience come to change their mind?”, and then not even try to change it yourself.
This third strategy is about giving people handles and mechanisms that empower them to update based on evidence they will encounter in the natural course of their lives, rather than trying to do all of the work upfront. Don’t frame your own position as some competing argument in the market place of ideas; hand your interlocutor a tool, tell them what they might expect, and let their experience confirm your predictions.I think this approach has a few major differences over the other two approaches, from the perspective of its impact:
It requires much less authority. (Strength!)
It can be executed in a targeted, light-weight fashion. (Strength!)
It’s less likely to slip into deception than option 2, and less confrontational than option 1. (Strength!)
Even if it works, they won’t end up thinking exactly what you think (Weakness?)
….but they’ll be better equipped to make sense of new evidence (Strength!)
Plausibly more mimetically fit than option 1 or 2 (a failure mode of 1 is that your interlocutor won’t be empowered to stand up to criticism while spreading the ideas, even to people very much like themselves, and for option 2 it’s that they will ONLY be successful in spreading the idea to people who are like themselves, since they only know the argument that works on them).
I think Eliezer has talked about some version of this in the past, and this is part of why people like predictions in general, but I think pasting a prediction at the end of an argument built around strategy 1 or 2 isn’t actually Doing The Thing I mean here.
Friends report Logan’s writing strongly has this property.
[errant thought pointing a direction, low-confidence musing, likely retreading old ground]
There’s a disagreement that crops up in conversations about changing people’s minds. Sides are roughly:
You should explain things by walking someone through your entire thought process, as it actually unfolded. Changing minds is best done by offering an account of how your own mind was changed.
You should explain things by back-chaining the most viable (valid) argument, from your conclusions, with respect to your specific audience.
This first strategy invites framing your argument around the question “How did I come to change my mind?”, and this second invites framing your argument around the question “How might I change my audience’s mind?”. I am sometimes characterized as advocating for approach 2, and have never actually taken that to be my position.I think there’s a third approach here, which will look to advocates of approach 1 as if it were approach 2, and look to advocates of approach 2 as if it were approach 1. That is, you should frame the strategy around the question “How might my audience come to change their mind?”, and then not even try to change it yourself.
This third strategy is about giving people handles and mechanisms that empower them to update based on evidence they will encounter in the natural course of their lives, rather than trying to do all of the work upfront. Don’t frame your own position as some competing argument in the market place of ideas; hand your interlocutor a tool, tell them what they might expect, and let their experience confirm your predictions.I think this approach has a few major differences over the other two approaches, from the perspective of its impact:
It requires much less authority. (Strength!)
It can be executed in a targeted, light-weight fashion. (Strength!)
It’s less likely to slip into deception than option 2, and less confrontational than option 1. (Strength!)
Even if it works, they won’t end up thinking exactly what you think (Weakness?)
….but they’ll be better equipped to make sense of new evidence (Strength!)
Plausibly more mimetically fit than option 1 or 2 (a failure mode of 1 is that your interlocutor won’t be empowered to stand up to criticism while spreading the ideas, even to people very much like themselves, and for option 2 it’s that they will ONLY be successful in spreading the idea to people who are like themselves, since they only know the argument that works on them).
I think Eliezer has talked about some version of this in the past, and this is part of why people like predictions in general, but I think pasting a prediction at the end of an argument built around strategy 1 or 2 isn’t actually Doing The Thing I mean here.
Friends report Logan’s writing strongly has this property.