When I was in Sales, we called this “finding their true objection.”
Basically, if someone says “Well, I don’t want it unless it has X!” You say “What if I could provide you with X?”
So if someone says “Come back when you have a PhD!” You say “What if I could provide you with PhDs who believe the same idea?” If they then say “There are tons of PhDs who believe crazy things!” then you say “Then what else would I need to convince you?”
Usually, between them dismissing their own criteria and the amount of ideas they can bring forward, you can bring it down to about three things. I’ve seen 5, but that was a hard case. Those aren’t hard and fast rules: the rule is make sure you get them ALL, and make it specific, something like:
“So, if I can get you a published book by a PhD, respected in a field relevant to X, AND I can provide you with a for-profit organization that is working to accomplish goals relevant to X, AND I can make a flower appear out of my ear (or whatever)” THEN you will admit you were wrong and change your view?
And if you’re REALLY invested, you should have been taking notes, and get them to ‘initial’ (not sign, people hate signing but will often initial: it feels like a smaller pain) the list. Consistency bias is also your friend here: if they say it aloud, they will probably also initial it.
And then, if you hand it all to them on a silver platter, with the right presentation you can get a “you were right, I was wrong” out of them. (If you screw it up, you can get begrudging acceptance. Occasionally hostility if you really botch it. But that’s life in the interpersonal world.)
It sounds like a lot, but oddly, it isn’t usually very hard to get people to change their minds this way. It takes some time, so you’d better be invested in making that change. If you know what to expect, handing it all early helps. But if you really want it to happen, this way works.
“Come back when you have a PhD” typically doesn’t mean “if you have a PhD, I’ll believe you”, it means “if you have a PhD, I’ll assign a high enough probability to you having something worthwhile to say that it’s worth even listening to you and doing the work to figure out where you might be wrong”.
Also, it can’t be answered by “I could show you some PhDs who agree with me”. As there are a lot of PhDs in the world, finding one out of that large number who agrees with you doesn’t update the probability of being right by much compared to combining PhD and agreement in a specific person named in advance (such as yourself).
Furthermore, human beings are neither unsafe genies nor stupid AIs, and nobody will take kindly to you trying to act like one by giving someone something that matches their literal request but any human being with common sense can figure out isn’t what they meant.
My request would probably be something like “come back when you have a PhD and get your observations published in a peer-reviewed journal”.
When I was in Sales, we called this “finding their true objection.”
Basically, if someone says “Well, I don’t want it unless it has X!” You say “What if I could provide you with X?”
So if someone says “Come back when you have a PhD!” You say “What if I could provide you with PhDs who believe the same idea?” If they then say “There are tons of PhDs who believe crazy things!” then you say “Then what else would I need to convince you?”
Usually, between them dismissing their own criteria and the amount of ideas they can bring forward, you can bring it down to about three things. I’ve seen 5, but that was a hard case. Those aren’t hard and fast rules: the rule is make sure you get them ALL, and make it specific, something like:
“So, if I can get you a published book by a PhD, respected in a field relevant to X, AND I can provide you with a for-profit organization that is working to accomplish goals relevant to X, AND I can make a flower appear out of my ear (or whatever)” THEN you will admit you were wrong and change your view?
And if you’re REALLY invested, you should have been taking notes, and get them to ‘initial’ (not sign, people hate signing but will often initial: it feels like a smaller pain) the list. Consistency bias is also your friend here: if they say it aloud, they will probably also initial it.
And then, if you hand it all to them on a silver platter, with the right presentation you can get a “you were right, I was wrong” out of them. (If you screw it up, you can get begrudging acceptance. Occasionally hostility if you really botch it. But that’s life in the interpersonal world.)
It sounds like a lot, but oddly, it isn’t usually very hard to get people to change their minds this way. It takes some time, so you’d better be invested in making that change. If you know what to expect, handing it all early helps. But if you really want it to happen, this way works.
“Come back when you have a PhD” typically doesn’t mean “if you have a PhD, I’ll believe you”, it means “if you have a PhD, I’ll assign a high enough probability to you having something worthwhile to say that it’s worth even listening to you and doing the work to figure out where you might be wrong”.
Also, it can’t be answered by “I could show you some PhDs who agree with me”. As there are a lot of PhDs in the world, finding one out of that large number who agrees with you doesn’t update the probability of being right by much compared to combining PhD and agreement in a specific person named in advance (such as yourself).
Furthermore, human beings are neither unsafe genies nor stupid AIs, and nobody will take kindly to you trying to act like one by giving someone something that matches their literal request but any human being with common sense can figure out isn’t what they meant.
My request would probably be something like “come back when you have a PhD and get your observations published in a peer-reviewed journal”.
It would be awesome to see a transcript of a back and forth between Eliezer and Robin, or any two people denating, where they both provided this info!