What is the lowest cost way for someone to learn “real doublecruxing” at this point? For someone who can’t do that, does it make sense to pay attention to these doublecruxing-related posts?
Strong Claim: the fastest way for two people to resolve disagreements is to focus directly on what would change their mind, without regard for legibility to anyone else, or PR, or whatnot.
This seems to imply that doublecruxing isn’t optimized for being observed by an audience. Does this mean that maybe people who are trying to resolve a disagreement in front of and for the benefit of an audience (like the AI safety ones I saw) should do something else instead?
This seems to imply that doublecruxing isn’t optimized for being observed by an audience. Does this mean that maybe people who are trying to resolve a disagreement in front of and for the benefit of an audience (like the AI safety ones I saw) should do something else instead?
Well, there are two different concerns – what’s the optimal way to doublecrux, and what’s the optimal way to do a public disagreement. I think optimal public disagreements are still better if they’re more doublecrux-esque, although I think it might be better not to call them “doublecruxes” unless it’s expected for the primary interaction to be the core doublecrux loop of “check for what my cruxes are.”
(In general public disagreements are locally worse for the two people’s ability to update than private disagreements, but you sometimes want public disagreement anyway to get common knowledge of their positions)
What is the lowest cost way for someone to learn “real doublecruxing” at this point? For someone who can’t do that, does it make sense to pay attention to these doublecruxing-related posts?
The point of the first few posts in this sequence is to build common knowledge (or at least mutual knowledge) of when and why doublecrux is useful. My hope is that then,
people will actually use it more when it’s appropriate,
by having a sense of when/why it’s appropriate, people will have a better shared understanding of how to practice during less-important/lower-stakes situations.
also maybe people will stop calling things ‘doublecrux’ when they’re not (to reduce confusion)
The next few posts in this sequence will delve into “how to doublecrux on things that are deeply, confusingly hard to doublecrux about.” I think this requires some background knowledge, but if you’ve never doublecruxed before it’ll probably still be useful to read them.
Then you probably have most of what you need to practice, and the core thing is just a) actually having someone you disagree with where the disagreement matters, b) remembering the core habits of ‘operationalize’ and ‘what would actually change my mind’?
(There’s a doublecrux format where you have a moderator who’s only job is to say, after each exchange “okay, cool, but is that a crux? What would actually change your mind? How would you operationalize this?” because people tend to default to explaining why they’re right rather than figuring out why they’d change their mind.)
I do think you can practice asking ‘what would actually change my mind?’ on your own without a partner, whenever you notice yourself believing something strongly.
While reading through your links (BTW the fourth link doesn’t go where it’s supposed to go), I came across this comment by Duncan Sabien:
But what I, at least, meant to convey was something like “so, there are all these really good epistemic norms that are hard to lodge in your S1, and hard to operationalize in the moment. If you do this other thing, where you talk about cruxes and search for overlap, somehow magically that causes you to cleave closer to those epistemic norms, in practice.”
[...] But I claim that we’re basically saying “Do X” because of a borne-out-in-practice prediction that it will result in people doing Y, where Y are the good norms you’ve identified as seemingly unrelated to the double crux framework.
Is this something you’d endorse? If so, it seems like someone who already has these good epistemic norms might not get much out of double crux. Do you agree with that, and if so do you agree with G Gordon Worley III that I’m such a person?
I do think you can practice asking ‘what would actually change my mind?’ on your own without a partner, whenever you notice yourself believing something strongly.
I feel like my answer to that question would usually be “an argument that I haven’t heard yet, or have heard but forgot, or have heard but haven’t understood yet”. My preferred mode of “doing disagreement” is usually to exchange arguments, counter-arguments, counter-counter-arguments, …, questions and explanations of such arguments, etc., similar to a traditional adversarial debate, but with a goal of finding the truth for myself, the other person, and the audience, instead of trying to convince the other person or the audience of my position. E.g., I want to figure out if there’s any important arguments that I don’t yet know or understand, any flaws in my arguments that the other person can point out, and similarly if there’s any important arguments/flaws that I can point out to the other person or to the audience.
If your answer to my question above is “no” (i.e., there’s still something I can get out of learning “real doublecrux”) I’d be interested in further explanation of that. For example, are there any posts that compare the pros/cons of double crux with my way of “doing disagreement”?
Short answer is “if you don’t feel like you’re running into intractable disagreements that are important, and that something about your current conversational style is insufficient, I wouldn’t worry about doublecrux.”
In particular, I suspect in your case it’d be more valuable to spend marginal effort doing distillation work (summarizing conversations), then on doing conversations better.
I *do* [weakly] expect doublecrux to also be relevant to AI Alignment debates, and think there might be things going on there that make it an improvement over “good faith adversarial debate.” (Once we’re not so behind on distillation, this might make sense to prioritize)
As noted earlier, doublecrux usually starts with model sharing, and I think “good faith adversarial debate” is a pretty fine format for model sharing. The main advantage of doublecrux over adversarial debate is
a) focusing on the parts that’d actually change your mind (i.e. if you detect someone posing a series of arguments that you predict won’t be persuasive to you, say ‘hey, my crux is more like this’ and switch to another topic entirely)
b) after you’ve completed the model sharing and all the relevant considerations, if you find yourselves staring at each other saying ’but obviously these considerations add up to position X” vs “obviously position Y”, then it becomes more important to focus on cruxes.
Thanks, this is really helpful for me to understand what doublecrux is for.
In particular, I suspect in your case it’d be more valuable to spend marginal effort doing distillation work (summarizing conversations), then on doing conversations better.
I can’t think off the top of my head what conversations would be valuable to summarize. Do you have any specific suggestions?
(More directly addressing the Duncan Sabien quote: I roughly agree with the quote in terms of the immediate value of doublecrux. This sequence of posts was born from 2 years of arguing with LessWrong team members who had _something_ like ‘good faith’ and even ‘understanding of doublecrux in particular’, who nonetheless managed to disagree for months/years on deep intractable issues. And yes I think there’s something directly valuable about the doublecrux framework, when you find yourself in that situation)
What is the lowest cost way for someone to learn “real doublecruxing” at this point? For someone who can’t do that, does it make sense to pay attention to these doublecruxing-related posts?
This seems to imply that doublecruxing isn’t optimized for being observed by an audience. Does this mean that maybe people who are trying to resolve a disagreement in front of and for the benefit of an audience (like the AI safety ones I saw) should do something else instead?
Well, there are two different concerns – what’s the optimal way to doublecrux, and what’s the optimal way to do a public disagreement. I think optimal public disagreements are still better if they’re more doublecrux-esque, although I think it might be better not to call them “doublecruxes” unless it’s expected for the primary interaction to be the core doublecrux loop of “check for what my cruxes are.”
(In general public disagreements are locally worse for the two people’s ability to update than private disagreements, but you sometimes want public disagreement anyway to get common knowledge of their positions)
The point of the first few posts in this sequence is to build common knowledge (or at least mutual knowledge) of when and why doublecrux is useful. My hope is that then,
people will actually use it more when it’s appropriate,
by having a sense of when/why it’s appropriate, people will have a better shared understanding of how to practice during less-important/lower-stakes situations.
also maybe people will stop calling things ‘doublecrux’ when they’re not (to reduce confusion)
The next few posts in this sequence will delve into “how to doublecrux on things that are deeply, confusingly hard to doublecrux about.” I think this requires some background knowledge, but if you’ve never doublecruxed before it’ll probably still be useful to read them.
I think if you’ve read following:
Original Doublecrux post
Musings on Doublecrux (by me)
This comment by Eli Tyre
This demonstration of me/gjm doublecruxing about HPMOR on the LessWrong frontpage
Then you probably have most of what you need to practice, and the core thing is just a) actually having someone you disagree with where the disagreement matters, b) remembering the core habits of ‘operationalize’ and ‘what would actually change my mind’?
(There’s a doublecrux format where you have a moderator who’s only job is to say, after each exchange “okay, cool, but is that a crux? What would actually change your mind? How would you operationalize this?” because people tend to default to explaining why they’re right rather than figuring out why they’d change their mind.)
I do think you can practice asking ‘what would actually change my mind?’ on your own without a partner, whenever you notice yourself believing something strongly.
While reading through your links (BTW the fourth link doesn’t go where it’s supposed to go), I came across this comment by Duncan Sabien:
Is this something you’d endorse? If so, it seems like someone who already has these good epistemic norms might not get much out of double crux. Do you agree with that, and if so do you agree with G Gordon Worley III that I’m such a person?
I feel like my answer to that question would usually be “an argument that I haven’t heard yet, or have heard but forgot, or have heard but haven’t understood yet”. My preferred mode of “doing disagreement” is usually to exchange arguments, counter-arguments, counter-counter-arguments, …, questions and explanations of such arguments, etc., similar to a traditional adversarial debate, but with a goal of finding the truth for myself, the other person, and the audience, instead of trying to convince the other person or the audience of my position. E.g., I want to figure out if there’s any important arguments that I don’t yet know or understand, any flaws in my arguments that the other person can point out, and similarly if there’s any important arguments/flaws that I can point out to the other person or to the audience.
If your answer to my question above is “no” (i.e., there’s still something I can get out of learning “real doublecrux”) I’d be interested in further explanation of that. For example, are there any posts that compare the pros/cons of double crux with my way of “doing disagreement”?
Short answer is “if you don’t feel like you’re running into intractable disagreements that are important, and that something about your current conversational style is insufficient, I wouldn’t worry about doublecrux.”
In particular, I suspect in your case it’d be more valuable to spend marginal effort doing distillation work (summarizing conversations), then on doing conversations better.
I *do* [weakly] expect doublecrux to also be relevant to AI Alignment debates, and think there might be things going on there that make it an improvement over “good faith adversarial debate.” (Once we’re not so behind on distillation, this might make sense to prioritize)
As noted earlier, doublecrux usually starts with model sharing, and I think “good faith adversarial debate” is a pretty fine format for model sharing. The main advantage of doublecrux over adversarial debate is
a) focusing on the parts that’d actually change your mind (i.e. if you detect someone posing a series of arguments that you predict won’t be persuasive to you, say ‘hey, my crux is more like this’ and switch to another topic entirely)
b) after you’ve completed the model sharing and all the relevant considerations, if you find yourselves staring at each other saying ’but obviously these considerations add up to position X” vs “obviously position Y”, then it becomes more important to focus on cruxes.
Thanks, this is really helpful for me to understand what doublecrux is for.
I can’t think off the top of my head what conversations would be valuable to summarize. Do you have any specific suggestions?
(More directly addressing the Duncan Sabien quote: I roughly agree with the quote in terms of the immediate value of doublecrux. This sequence of posts was born from 2 years of arguing with LessWrong team members who had _something_ like ‘good faith’ and even ‘understanding of doublecrux in particular’, who nonetheless managed to disagree for months/years on deep intractable issues. And yes I think there’s something directly valuable about the doublecrux framework, when you find yourself in that situation)