A report of my own recent experience taking a conversation to private chat:
As proposed in this subthread, zulupineapple and I took to a private chat (IRC via my private webchat server) to continue our recent argument about utility functions.
We chatted continuously for just under 3 hours. We attempted to cover all or most of the points brought up in the LW thread where the disagreement occurred, and did indeed touch on most of them. Our conversation was fairly civil, and I did not experience it as heated or emotional at any point, nor did it seem like zulupineapple did either (he can post his own evaluation as a response, of course).
Unfortunately, I can’t say that we resolved any of our disagreements. As far as I can tell, we made minimal progress in reaching any true understanding of each other’s points (which is to say, I started out believing zulupineapple to be wrong and/or confused in certain specific ways, and I still believe him to be wrong and/or confused in basically all of those ways; presumably he has a symmetric opinion of my views). Nor does it seem like we reached any agreement on any of the claims on which we disagreed. Neither of us was able to convince the other of anything.
On the object level of our actual disagreement, this exercise can only be called a failure. (I have some meta-level thoughts, which I may post about separately at some point.)
(As a side note, from a technical perspective, taking the conversation to private chat was quite easy, thanks to the aforesaid private webchat server which I already had in place. The only logistical difficulty was in scheduling a time that worked for both of us, as we are in very different time zones; however, we found a mutually acceptable block of time without too much difficulty.)
A report of my own recent experience taking a conversation to private chat:
As proposed in this subthread, zulupineapple and I took to a private chat (IRC via my private webchat server) to continue our recent argument about utility functions.
We chatted continuously for just under 3 hours. We attempted to cover all or most of the points brought up in the LW thread where the disagreement occurred, and did indeed touch on most of them. Our conversation was fairly civil, and I did not experience it as heated or emotional at any point, nor did it seem like zulupineapple did either (he can post his own evaluation as a response, of course).
Unfortunately, I can’t say that we resolved any of our disagreements. As far as I can tell, we made minimal progress in reaching any true understanding of each other’s points (which is to say, I started out believing zulupineapple to be wrong and/or confused in certain specific ways, and I still believe him to be wrong and/or confused in basically all of those ways; presumably he has a symmetric opinion of my views). Nor does it seem like we reached any agreement on any of the claims on which we disagreed. Neither of us was able to convince the other of anything.
On the object level of our actual disagreement, this exercise can only be called a failure. (I have some meta-level thoughts, which I may post about separately at some point.)
(As a side note, from a technical perspective, taking the conversation to private chat was quite easy, thanks to the aforesaid private webchat server which I already had in place. The only logistical difficulty was in scheduling a time that worked for both of us, as we are in very different time zones; however, we found a mutually acceptable block of time without too much difficulty.)
Thanks a lot for writing that down. Concrete empirical results like this are precious and rare.