a) that you don’t think disagreements take a long time for the reasons discussed in the post
Disagreements aren’t always trivial to resolve, but you’ve been actively debating an issue for a month and zero progress has been made, either the resolution process is broken or someone is doing something besides putting maximum effort into resolving the disagreement.
b) that rationalists should easily be able to avoid the traps of disagreements being lengthy and difficult if only they “did it right”.
Maybe people who call themselves rationalists “should” be able to, but that doesn’t seem to be what happens in practice. Then again, if you’ve ever watched a group of them spend 30 minutes debating something that can be googled, you have to wonder what else they might be missing.
I’m concerned you’ll be missing ways to actually solve disagreements in more cases by dismissing the problem as other people’s fault.
It’s true that if you are quick to blame others, you can fail to diagnose the real source of the problem. However, the reverse is also true. If the problem is that you or others aren’t putting in enough effort, but you’ve already ruled it out on principle, you will also fail to diagnose it.
Something about this comment feels slightly off.
I’m not surprised that the comment feels off, it felt off to write it. Saying something that’s outside the Overton window that doesn’t sound like clever contrarianism feels wrong. (Which may also explains why people rarely leave comments like that in good faith.)
Disagreements aren’t always trivial to resolve, but you’ve been actively debating an issue for a month and zero progress has been made, either the resolution process is broken or someone is doing something besides putting maximum effort into resolving the disagreement.
Maybe people who call themselves rationalists “should” be able to, but that doesn’t seem to be what happens in practice. Then again, if you’ve ever watched a group of them spend 30 minutes debating something that can be googled, you have to wonder what else they might be missing.
It’s true that if you are quick to blame others, you can fail to diagnose the real source of the problem. However, the reverse is also true. If the problem is that you or others aren’t putting in enough effort, but you’ve already ruled it out on principle, you will also fail to diagnose it.
I’m not surprised that the comment feels off, it felt off to write it. Saying something that’s outside the Overton window that doesn’t sound like clever contrarianism feels wrong. (Which may also explains why people rarely leave comments like that in good faith.)