Hi! Thank you for writing this comment. I understand it can be a bit worrying to feel like your points might not be understood, but I’ll give it a try nonetheless. I really genuinely want to fix any serious flaw in my approach.
However, I find myself in a slightly strange situation. Part of your feedback is very valuable. But I also believe that you misunderstood part of what I was saying. I could apply the skills I described in the post on your comment as a performative example, but I’m sensing that you could see it as a form of implied sarcasm, and it’d be unethical, so I’ll refrain from doing that. There is a last part of me that just feels like your point is “part of this post is poorly written”. I’ve made some minor edits in the hope that it accomodates your criticism.
Agree, I’ve added the detail on “genuinely asking your interlocutor if this is what they mean, and if not, feel free to offer a correction” (e.g. “If I got you right, and feel free to correct me if I didn’t.… ”). I think that this form makes it almost always a pleasant experience and I somehow forgot this important detail.
Your suggestion for attacking personal experience [...]
You’re referring to point 4, not 5, right ? If yes, I think this is extrapolating beliefs I don’t actually have. I admit however I didn’t choose a good example, you can refer to the Street Epistemology video above for a better one.
I’ll replace the example soonish. In the mean time, please note that I do not suggest to “attack” personal experiences. I suggest to ask “What helps us distinguish reliable personal experiences from unreliable ones ?”. This is a valid question to ask, in my view. For a bunch of reasons, this question has more chances to bounce off, so I prefer to ask “How do you distinguish personal experiences from [delusions]?”, where “[delusions]” is a term that has been deliberately imported by the conversation partner. I think most interlocutors will be tempted to answer something in the lines of intersubjectivity, repeatability or empirical experiments. But I agree this is a delicate example and I’d better off pointing to something else.
Stories need to actually be short, clear, and to the point or they just confuse the matter more.
This was part of the details I was omitting. I’ll add it.
Caring about their underlying values is useful, but it needs to be preceeded by curiousity about and understanding of, or it does no good.
Agree. This was implied in several parts of the post, i.e “Be genuinely truth-seeking” in the ethical caveats. But I don’t think it is that hard.
A working definition may or may not be better than a theoretical one.
Please note that I’m talking about conversations that happen between rationalists and non-rationalists on entry-level arguments. E.g. “We can’t lose control of AI because it’s made of silicon”, not “Davidad has a promising alignment plan” (please note that I’m not making the argument to apply these techniques to AI Safety Outreach and Advocacy, this is just an example). I think we really should not spend 15 minutes with someone not acquainted with LessWrong or even AI to define “losing control” in a way that is close to mathematically formal. I think that “What do you mean with losing control? Do you mean that, if we ask to do something specific, then it won’t do it? Or do you mean something else?” is a good enough question. I’d rather discuss the details when the said person is more acquainted with the topic.
There will, of course, be situations where this isn’t true. Law of equal and opposite advice applies. But in most entry-level arguments, I’d rather have people spend less time problematizing definitions as opposed to asking to their interlocutor what are their reasons.
People don’t generally use Bayes rule!
Of course. I’m not suggesting to mention Bayes’ Rule out loud. Nor am I suggesting people actually use Baye’s Rule in their everyday life. I’m noting that techniques I think are more robust are the ones that lead people to apply an approximation thereoff, usually by contrasting one piece of evidence under two different hypotheses. The reference to ‘Bayes’ comes from Bayesian psychology of reasoning, my model is closest to the one described in The Erotetic Theory of reasoning (https://web-risc.ens.fr/~smascarenhas/docs/koralus-mascarenhas12_erotetic_theory_of_reasoning.pdf)
Something said in point 8 seems like the key.
It is the key, I thought I hade made it clear with “Yet the mindset itself is the key”. However I don’t want to make a post on it without explaining the ways in which it manifests, because healing myself made no sense, up until I started analyzing the habits of healed people. Some people who were already healed didn’t want to “give the secrets away” or scoughed at my attempts. They came up to me as snob and preventing me to actually learn, I actually really got a lot out of noting down recurrent patterns in their conversations, if only because it allowed me to do Deliberate Practice.
Finally, please remember that this post is an MVP. It is not meant to be exhaustive and cover all the nuances of the techniques -it’s just that I’d rather write a post than nothing at all, and the entire sequence will take time before publication.
If you feel like I completely misunderstood your points, and are open to have my skills applied to our very conversation, feel free to DM me a calendly link and we can sort it out live. I’d describe myself as a good conversation partner and I would put quite low the probability for the exchange to go awry.
PS: It would help me out if you could quote the [first sentence of the] parts you are reacting to, in order to make clear what you are talking about. I hope I’m right in understanding what parts of the post you are reacting to.
Hi! Thank you for writing this comment. I understand it can be a bit worrying to feel like your points might not be understood, but I’ll give it a try nonetheless. I really genuinely want to fix any serious flaw in my approach.
However, I find myself in a slightly strange situation. Part of your feedback is very valuable. But I also believe that you misunderstood part of what I was saying. I could apply the skills I described in the post on your comment as a performative example, but I’m sensing that you could see it as a form of implied sarcasm, and it’d be unethical, so I’ll refrain from doing that. There is a last part of me that just feels like your point is “part of this post is poorly written”. I’ve made some minor edits in the hope that it accomodates your criticism.
My suggestion would be for you to watch real-life examples of the techniques I promote (say https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2WdbXsqj0M and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tdjtFRdbAo ) then comment on those examples instead.
Alternatively, you can just read my answers:
Agree, I’ve added the detail on “genuinely asking your interlocutor if this is what they mean, and if not, feel free to offer a correction” (e.g. “If I got you right, and feel free to correct me if I didn’t.… ”). I think that this form makes it almost always a pleasant experience and I somehow forgot this important detail.
You’re referring to point 4, not 5, right ?
If yes, I think this is extrapolating beliefs I don’t actually have. I admit however I didn’t choose a good example, you can refer to the Street Epistemology video above for a better one.
I’ll replace the example soonish. In the mean time, please note that I do not suggest to “attack” personal experiences. I suggest to ask “What helps us distinguish reliable personal experiences from unreliable ones ?”. This is a valid question to ask, in my view. For a bunch of reasons, this question has more chances to bounce off, so I prefer to ask “How do you distinguish personal experiences from [delusions]?”, where “[delusions]” is a term that has been deliberately imported by the conversation partner. I think most interlocutors will be tempted to answer something in the lines of intersubjectivity, repeatability or empirical experiments. But I agree this is a delicate example and I’d better off pointing to something else.
This was part of the details I was omitting. I’ll add it.
Agree. This was implied in several parts of the post, i.e “Be genuinely truth-seeking” in the ethical caveats. But I don’t think it is that hard.
Please note that I’m talking about conversations that happen between rationalists and non-rationalists on entry-level arguments. E.g. “We can’t lose control of AI because it’s made of silicon”, not “Davidad has a promising alignment plan” (please note that I’m not making the argument to apply these techniques to AI Safety Outreach and Advocacy, this is just an example). I think we really should not spend 15 minutes with someone not acquainted with LessWrong or even AI to define “losing control” in a way that is close to mathematically formal. I think that “What do you mean with losing control? Do you mean that, if we ask to do something specific, then it won’t do it? Or do you mean something else?” is a good enough question. I’d rather discuss the details when the said person is more acquainted with the topic.
There will, of course, be situations where this isn’t true. Law of equal and opposite advice applies. But in most entry-level arguments, I’d rather have people spend less time problematizing definitions as opposed to asking to their interlocutor what are their reasons.
Of course. I’m not suggesting to mention Bayes’ Rule out loud. Nor am I suggesting people actually use Baye’s Rule in their everyday life. I’m noting that techniques I think are more robust are the ones that lead people to apply an approximation thereoff, usually by contrasting one piece of evidence under two different hypotheses. The reference to ‘Bayes’ comes from Bayesian psychology of reasoning, my model is closest to the one described in The Erotetic Theory of reasoning (https://web-risc.ens.fr/~smascarenhas/docs/koralus-mascarenhas12_erotetic_theory_of_reasoning.pdf)
It is the key, I thought I hade made it clear with “Yet the mindset itself is the key”.
However I don’t want to make a post on it without explaining the ways in which it manifests, because healing myself made no sense, up until I started analyzing the habits of healed people. Some people who were already healed didn’t want to “give the secrets away” or scoughed at my attempts. They came up to me as snob and preventing me to actually learn, I actually really got a lot out of noting down recurrent patterns in their conversations, if only because it allowed me to do Deliberate Practice.
Finally, please remember that this post is an MVP. It is not meant to be exhaustive and cover all the nuances of the techniques -it’s just that I’d rather write a post than nothing at all, and the entire sequence will take time before publication.
If you feel like I completely misunderstood your points, and are open to have my skills applied to our very conversation, feel free to DM me a calendly link and we can sort it out live. I’d describe myself as a good conversation partner and I would put quite low the probability for the exchange to go awry.
PS: It would help me out if you could quote the [first sentence of the] parts you are reacting to, in order to make clear what you are talking about. I hope I’m right in understanding what parts of the post you are reacting to.