I observed some doublecruxes on AI safety topics that were about an hour long, and they didn’t seem very different from ordinary attempts to resolve disagreement or seem to produce a higher than normal amount of progress towards resolving disagreement. I wonder if the participants didn’t do them optimally, and whether there are recorded examples of doublecruxing I should watch instead.
My guess is that two things were going on (this is based in part on observing some recent doublecruxes at the Intellectual Internet Infrastructure Retreat, where I had a similar sense of “This doesn’t seem especially different or more effective from ‘just talking.’”)
Deep disagreements take way more than an hour. An hour is when both parties share most of the same ontologies and worldviews, there’s just one subset of their model that’s different.
Related to the pet-peeve I commented on my previous post: people colloquially use the term ‘doublecrux’ to refer to the entire disagreement process. But the process usually starts with something I’d describe as ‘model sharing’, which is basically regular conversation that gets people up to speed on how they’re thinking about the problem. Only after that’s finished does it make sense to do “official doublecrux moves.” This is particularly confusing when people set up recorded one-hour doublecruxes for disagreements that are realistically more like 12 hours, the first 3 of which are just model sharing.
(this is a particular challenge for educating people about doublecrux. “Real” doublecrux just doesn’t lend itself to clean examples that work well pedagogically)
The main observation that I’d use to distinguish ‘doublecrux’ from ‘disagreement’ is whether the participants are saying things like ‘hmm. would that actually change my mind?’, and whether they’re talking about events they could imagine observing. (if both participants are skilled at doublecrux, this might be going on under-the-hood rather than spoken aloud, but you should at least hear them say words about observations that might shift their perspective)
When I say “doublecrux is the fastest way for two people to resolve disagreement”, I’m making a strong-confidence claim, a medium claim, and a weak claim:
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.
Medium claim: The most robust way to keep this aligned with truth, rather than accidentally aligned with ‘who is more socially dominant or authoritative or has a more compelling narrative or something’, is to focus on empirical observations.
Weak claim: the particular operationalization of doublecrux (looking for cruxes, looking for common cruxes, and then looking for empirical tests to run) is the best way to formalize this.
I believe all three claims. Perhaps ironically (and maybe this should be a red flag that makes me reconsider?), I believe the first claim the strongest for first-principles reasons. It just seems like “well, obviously if two people want to resolve their disagreement the fastest, they’ll want to focus on what would actually change their mind.′ I can imagine it turning out to be that people’s psychological is weird and confusing such that this isn’t true, but it’d be very surprising to me.
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)
There is a trivial way how to get a really fast disagreement resolving. Just agree to the other person. One line disagreement resolving. But it seems there are other interesting constraints to addhere to such as having beliefs that are effective for manipulating the worlds etc. If you readily agree to falsehoods you are technically faster.
I mean, the sort of “resolve” I mean here is “the people change their minds”, not “the people say they agree”. (The previous post in the sequence goes into “you can resolve decisions with ‘the boss says so’, but this doesn’t necessarily solve the relevant problem”)
I am meaning the more radical version. If you genuinely are 100% suggestionable to adopt the viewpoint of others you would be superior in speed in conflict resolution. This seems like it has obvious other problems. But it reveals that the interestign challeneg is to keep within the unstated presuppositions. Presumably making the presumtions explicit would allow for a more detailed analysis how much cornercutting is still possible. “fastest possible” is really empty if we don’t specify what things are allowed or not allowed.
I think it’s worth pointing out that there’s nothing all that special about double crux if you’re used to having discussions with people on the order of being professional philosophers; double crux is just a fancy name for what I would have previously called arguing in good faith. It is special though in that many people are neither naturally shaped such that they naturally disagree with others that way or have no been trained in the method, so giving it a special name and teaching it as a technique seems worthwhile since the alternative is you know there is a “right” way to argue that converges towards truth and a “wrong” way that doesn’t and teaching people to do the move where they find the beliefs their ideas hinge on and analyze that hinge in a way that might alter it and thus the entire belief network is hard if you can’t precisely describe how to do it.
I feel quite confident that you already know the skill being called double crux based on the conversations I’ve seen you participate in LW, though I also understand how it can look like there is some “magic” in the technique you’re not getting because it feels pretty magical if you learn it late in life and are then like “oh, that’s why all my disagreements never go anywhere”.
Something I’m unsure about (not having spent extensive time among professional philosophers) is whether they specifically do the thing where you try to change your own mind (contrasted with debate, where you try to change each other’s mind, good-faith-or-no). I’m not sure this is officially what doublecrux is supposed to be, but it’s how I’ve personally been conceiving of “Strong Form Doublecrux”.
I have some skepticism because it seems like philosophy as a field hasn’t converged on positions much so they can’t be that good at it.
I think philosophers who are good at philosophy do change their own minds and do seek out ways to change their own minds to match what they know and reason (they, if nothing else, strive for reflective equilibrium). This is of course not what everyone does, and academic philosophy is, in my opinion, suffering from the disease of scholasticism, but I do think philosophers on the whole are good at the weaker form of double crux that takes two people and that they remain open to having their mind changed by the other person.
Philosophy mmight not have the goal of converging. It can be more valuable to generate all the possible options and to preserve solution prototypes. If everybody was using the same framework you would have effectively cut the growth space for new frameworks to zero. I philosopher is much happier that you have thought throught the problem rather than that you have come to the right conclusion.
Part of the reason why phisophy makes use of doublke cruching is precisely the presence of multiple frameworks. What passes as proof in one framework does not in the other. Another is accceptance of interest in forms of arguments whose strength is unknown. It’s perfectly reasonable to explore what kind of arguments we can make if we accept ad hominem as a valid argument even if we don’t know whether that is a good standard or even if we know that is a bad standard. Thus reading a philosphical literature it’s likely that somebody in the discussion shares your starting point which makes their processing relevant to your private one. And if you change principles and lose interest in one author it’s likely that another one is closer to your new position.
One relevant option is that philosophers think in terms of worldviews. Since single discusser have relatively random viewpoints what is socially established on what kinds of arguments fly with what kinds of groups. thus a working argument is one that is compliant to the groups axioms.
I’m not necessarily arguing doublecrux is better than whatever philosophers are doing for the purposes philosophers are doing it. Just, it seems (probably?) like it’s actually different to me.
[note that in the next few posts in this sequence I’ll be going into how to use doublecrux when in different worldviews, based on my experience so far. Which Vanilla Doublecrux doesn’t obviously handle, but I think the extension is relatively straightforward, and also important]
I observed some doublecruxes on AI safety topics that were about an hour long, and they didn’t seem very different from ordinary attempts to resolve disagreement or seem to produce a higher than normal amount of progress towards resolving disagreement. I wonder if the participants didn’t do them optimally, and whether there are recorded examples of doublecruxing I should watch instead.
My guess is that two things were going on (this is based in part on observing some recent doublecruxes at the Intellectual Internet Infrastructure Retreat, where I had a similar sense of “This doesn’t seem especially different or more effective from ‘just talking.’”)
Deep disagreements take way more than an hour. An hour is when both parties share most of the same ontologies and worldviews, there’s just one subset of their model that’s different.
Related to the pet-peeve I commented on my previous post: people colloquially use the term ‘doublecrux’ to refer to the entire disagreement process. But the process usually starts with something I’d describe as ‘model sharing’, which is basically regular conversation that gets people up to speed on how they’re thinking about the problem. Only after that’s finished does it make sense to do “official doublecrux moves.” This is particularly confusing when people set up recorded one-hour doublecruxes for disagreements that are realistically more like 12 hours, the first 3 of which are just model sharing.
(this is a particular challenge for educating people about doublecrux. “Real” doublecrux just doesn’t lend itself to clean examples that work well pedagogically)
The main observation that I’d use to distinguish ‘doublecrux’ from ‘disagreement’ is whether the participants are saying things like ‘hmm. would that actually change my mind?’, and whether they’re talking about events they could imagine observing. (if both participants are skilled at doublecrux, this might be going on under-the-hood rather than spoken aloud, but you should at least hear them say words about observations that might shift their perspective)
When I say “doublecrux is the fastest way for two people to resolve disagreement”, I’m making a strong-confidence claim, a medium claim, and a weak claim:
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.
Medium claim: The most robust way to keep this aligned with truth, rather than accidentally aligned with ‘who is more socially dominant or authoritative or has a more compelling narrative or something’, is to focus on empirical observations.
Weak claim: the particular operationalization of doublecrux (looking for cruxes, looking for common cruxes, and then looking for empirical tests to run) is the best way to formalize this.
I believe all three claims. Perhaps ironically (and maybe this should be a red flag that makes me reconsider?), I believe the first claim the strongest for first-principles reasons. It just seems like “well, obviously if two people want to resolve their disagreement the fastest, they’ll want to focus on what would actually change their mind.′ I can imagine it turning out to be that people’s psychological is weird and confusing such that this isn’t true, but it’d be very surprising to me.
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)
There is a trivial way how to get a really fast disagreement resolving. Just agree to the other person. One line disagreement resolving. But it seems there are other interesting constraints to addhere to such as having beliefs that are effective for manipulating the worlds etc. If you readily agree to falsehoods you are technically faster.
I mean, the sort of “resolve” I mean here is “the people change their minds”, not “the people say they agree”. (The previous post in the sequence goes into “you can resolve decisions with ‘the boss says so’, but this doesn’t necessarily solve the relevant problem”)
I am meaning the more radical version. If you genuinely are 100% suggestionable to adopt the viewpoint of others you would be superior in speed in conflict resolution. This seems like it has obvious other problems. But it reveals that the interestign challeneg is to keep within the unstated presuppositions. Presumably making the presumtions explicit would allow for a more detailed analysis how much cornercutting is still possible. “fastest possible” is really empty if we don’t specify what things are allowed or not allowed.
The restrictions are something like “real humans who generally want to be effective should want to use the method”.
I think it’s worth pointing out that there’s nothing all that special about double crux if you’re used to having discussions with people on the order of being professional philosophers; double crux is just a fancy name for what I would have previously called arguing in good faith. It is special though in that many people are neither naturally shaped such that they naturally disagree with others that way or have no been trained in the method, so giving it a special name and teaching it as a technique seems worthwhile since the alternative is you know there is a “right” way to argue that converges towards truth and a “wrong” way that doesn’t and teaching people to do the move where they find the beliefs their ideas hinge on and analyze that hinge in a way that might alter it and thus the entire belief network is hard if you can’t precisely describe how to do it.
I feel quite confident that you already know the skill being called double crux based on the conversations I’ve seen you participate in LW, though I also understand how it can look like there is some “magic” in the technique you’re not getting because it feels pretty magical if you learn it late in life and are then like “oh, that’s why all my disagreements never go anywhere”.
Something I’m unsure about (not having spent extensive time among professional philosophers) is whether they specifically do the thing where you try to change your own mind (contrasted with debate, where you try to change each other’s mind, good-faith-or-no). I’m not sure this is officially what doublecrux is supposed to be, but it’s how I’ve personally been conceiving of “Strong Form Doublecrux”.
I have some skepticism because it seems like philosophy as a field hasn’t converged on positions much so they can’t be that good at it.
I think philosophers who are good at philosophy do change their own minds and do seek out ways to change their own minds to match what they know and reason (they, if nothing else, strive for reflective equilibrium). This is of course not what everyone does, and academic philosophy is, in my opinion, suffering from the disease of scholasticism, but I do think philosophers on the whole are good at the weaker form of double crux that takes two people and that they remain open to having their mind changed by the other person.
What percentage of professors of philosophy do you consider to be good at philosophy?
Philosophy mmight not have the goal of converging. It can be more valuable to generate all the possible options and to preserve solution prototypes. If everybody was using the same framework you would have effectively cut the growth space for new frameworks to zero. I philosopher is much happier that you have thought throught the problem rather than that you have come to the right conclusion.
Part of the reason why phisophy makes use of doublke cruching is precisely the presence of multiple frameworks. What passes as proof in one framework does not in the other. Another is accceptance of interest in forms of arguments whose strength is unknown. It’s perfectly reasonable to explore what kind of arguments we can make if we accept ad hominem as a valid argument even if we don’t know whether that is a good standard or even if we know that is a bad standard. Thus reading a philosphical literature it’s likely that somebody in the discussion shares your starting point which makes their processing relevant to your private one. And if you change principles and lose interest in one author it’s likely that another one is closer to your new position.
One relevant option is that philosophers think in terms of worldviews. Since single discusser have relatively random viewpoints what is socially established on what kinds of arguments fly with what kinds of groups. thus a working argument is one that is compliant to the groups axioms.
I’m not necessarily arguing doublecrux is better than whatever philosophers are doing for the purposes philosophers are doing it. Just, it seems (probably?) like it’s actually different to me.
[note that in the next few posts in this sequence I’ll be going into how to use doublecrux when in different worldviews, based on my experience so far. Which Vanilla Doublecrux doesn’t obviously handle, but I think the extension is relatively straightforward, and also important]