The original motivating example for this post doesn’t actually quite fit into the lens the post oriented around. The post focuses on “disagreements between particular people”. But there’s a different set of issues surrounding “disagreements in a zeitgeist.”
Groups update slower than individuals. So if you write a brilliant essay saying “this core assumption or frame of your movement is wrong”, you may not only have to wait for individual people to go “oh, I see, that makes sense”, but even longer for that to become common knowledge, enough that so that you won’t reliably see group members acting under the old assumptions.
(Again, this is an observation about the status quo, not about what is necessarily possible if we grabbed all the low hanging fruit. But in the case of groups I’m more pessimistic about things improving as much, unless the group has strong barriers to entry and strong requirements of “actually committing serious practice to disagreement resolution.”)
The original motivating example for this post doesn’t actually quite fit into the lens the post oriented around. The post focuses on “disagreements between particular people”. But there’s a different set of issues surrounding “disagreements in a zeitgeist.”
Groups update slower than individuals. So if you write a brilliant essay saying “this core assumption or frame of your movement is wrong”, you may not only have to wait for individual people to go “oh, I see, that makes sense”, but even longer for that to become common knowledge, enough that so that you won’t reliably see group members acting under the old assumptions.
(Again, this is an observation about the status quo, not about what is necessarily possible if we grabbed all the low hanging fruit. But in the case of groups I’m more pessimistic about things improving as much, unless the group has strong barriers to entry and strong requirements of “actually committing serious practice to disagreement resolution.”)