Last fall I hosted a discussion group with friends on three different occasions. I pitched it as “get interesting people together and intentionally have an interesting conversation” and was not a rationalist discussion group. One thing that I noticed was that whenever I wanted to really fixate on and solve a problem we identified, it felt wrong, like it would break some implicit rule I never remembered setting.
Later I pin pointed the following as the culprit. I personally can’t consistantly produce quality clear thinking at “conversational speeds” on things I haven’t thought about before (I’d be interested in knowing what the distribution on this ability is). In this case, buckling down and solving the problem would mean having a long pause in the conversation while I and others think.
It also happens that such a pause is generally very uncomfortable for a casual group unless you have very particular norms/rules sanctioning it.
Actionable thought: if you want people to actually try to solve a problem in a group setting, you probably want to make it super okay/normal/acceptable to have long pauses where you turn of your “conversation mind” and go into “serious thought” mode.
Last fall I hosted a discussion group with friends on three different occasions. I pitched it as “get interesting people together and intentionally have an interesting conversation” and was not a rationalist discussion group. One thing that I noticed was that whenever I wanted to really fixate on and solve a problem we identified, it felt wrong, like it would break some implicit rule I never remembered setting.
Later I pin pointed the following as the culprit. I personally can’t consistantly produce quality clear thinking at “conversational speeds” on things I haven’t thought about before (I’d be interested in knowing what the distribution on this ability is). In this case, buckling down and solving the problem would mean having a long pause in the conversation while I and others think.
It also happens that such a pause is generally very uncomfortable for a casual group unless you have very particular norms/rules sanctioning it.
Actionable thought: if you want people to actually try to solve a problem in a group setting, you probably want to make it super okay/normal/acceptable to have long pauses where you turn of your “conversation mind” and go into “serious thought” mode.
Dunno how easy this is to implement in random non-rationalist group settings, but
a) if you’re the one who brought the group together, you can set rules. (See Archipelego model of community standards)
b) In NYC (in an admittedly rationalist setting), I had success implementing the 12-second rule of think-before-speaking