There are intelligent people speaking, without attacking each other. When they add facts, I am going to suppose those facts are likely true. That’s already better than 99.99% of internet.
Yet there seems to be no conclusion, and even the analysis seems rather shallow.
A new topic. Person X says something smart. Person Y says something smart. Person Z says something smart. Everyone moves to the next topic.
That’s okay if your goal is signalling smartness. It’s okay-ish if your goal is to have more information about the topic. I haven’t read much, but the debating style still feels adversarial—people are intelligent and polite, but they still give arguments for one side or for the other, so at the end of the day you still get Team Pro and Team Con.
The missing part is someone saying “these are arguments for, these are arguments against, after weighing them carefully, this seems like an optimal solution. (And in the Aumann’s ideal world, all participants of the debate would agree.)
Why? Because sometimes we ask questions when we need answers. If you ask “Is it better to do X, or to do Y?”, and you receive three smart answers supporting X, and three smart answers supporting Y, at the end of the day you still don’t know whether you should do X or Y. (Though if you make your decision, using whatever means, now you have three great arguments to support it. There is even a button on the website that will filter them for you.)
If you ask “Is it better to do X, or to do Y?”, and you receive three smart answers supporting X, and three smart answers supporting Y, at the end of the day you still don’t know whether you should do X or Y.
The goal of reading a site exploring a political question shouldn’t be that the reader comes away with: “I don’t need to think myself, the community decided that X is right, so I support X because I want to support what my tribe has chosen to support.”
Ideally the person leaves with a mind that’s more open than when they came.
I don’t need to think myself, the community decided that X is right
This is how I accept 99% of information about the world. I have never seen an atom, never been in Paris, still believe they exist. A community I consider trustworthy about the topic has decided that they exist, and I don’t have time to personally verify everything.
Getting more inputs for your independent research is great if you do have time and other resources necessary to do the research. Making the inputs public is also good, because some of the participants may have the time. But inputs without conclusion is still an incomplete work.
Ideally the person leaves with a mind that’s more open than when they came.
Is adjusting probabilities towards 50% a good thing?
Is adjusting probabilities towards 50% a good thing?
I don’t think that openness is mainly about probabilities but most people are heavily overconfident about most of their political positions so moving the probabilities closer to 50% is a good thing.
The world would be a much better place if more people would respond to Is policy A better than policy B? with I don't know instead of Policy A is better because my tribe says it's better.
I have never seen an atom, never been in Paris, still believe they exist. A community I consider trustworthy about the topic has decided that they exist, and I don’t have time to personally verify everything.
Let’s ask instead of are there atoms?is helium a molecule?. Thomas Kuhn wrote about the issue:
An investigator who hoped to learn something about what scientists took the atomic theory to be asked a distinguished physicist and an eminent chemist whether a single atom of helium was or was not a molecule. Both answered without hesitation, but their answers were not the same. For the chemist the atom of helium was a molecule because it behaved like one with respect to the kinetic theory of gases. For the physicist, on the other hand, the helium atom was not a molecule because it displayed no molecular spectrum. Presumably both men were talking of the same particle, but they were viewing it through their own research training and practice.”
You get a different answer to the question depending on who you ask is helium a molecule?.Does that mean that you should adjust probabilities towards 50% on the question of is helium a molecule?? No, that wouldn’t make any sense to average the 100% certainity of the physicist that helium is no molecule with the 100% certainity of the chemist that it is towards 50%.
I would want participants who read a political dicussion come away with thinking that there are multiple ways of looking at the debate in question.
But inputs without conclusion is still an incomplete work.
That’s basically rejecting skepticism. Skepticism is about being okay with the fact that you don’t have a conclusion to every question.
Keeping questions open for years is important for understanding them better.
That’s a very special kind of question: one that’s almost entirely about definitions of words. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone here that different people or groups use words in different ways, and therefore that questions about definitions often don’t have a definite answer.
Many many questions have some element of this (e.g., if some etymology enthusiast insists that an “atom” must be indivisible then the things most people call atoms aren’t “atoms” for him, and for all we know there may actually be no “atoms”) and that’s important to know. But this doesn’t look to me like a good model for political disagreement; word definitions aren’t usually a big part of political disagreements.
(What is usually a big part of those disagreements is divergence between different people’s or groups’ values, which can also lead to situations where there’s no such thing as The Right Answer.)
That’s basically rejecting skepticism.
Unless you allow the “conclusion” to be something like “We don’t yet have enough information to know whether A or B is the better course of action”, or “A is almost certainly better if what you mostly care about is X, and B is almost certainly better if what you mostly care about is Y”, or “The dispute between A and B is mostly terminological”. All of which I’m guessing Viliam would be fine with; it looks to me like what he’s unsatisfied with is debates that basically consist of some arguments for A and some arguments for B, with no attempt to figure out what conclusion—which might well be a conclusion with a lot of uncertainty to it—should follow from looking at all those arguments together.
That’s a very special kind of question: one that’s almost entirely about definitions of words.
On one level, yes, this is just a definition issue.
On a deeper level no, because particular answers to such questions place the phenomena into a specific framework. Notice that two answers to “is helium a molecule” arose not because two people consulted two different dictionaries. They arose because these two people are used to thinking about molecules in very different ways—both valid in their respective domains.
In that sense this “special kind of question” could be about defining terms, but it also could be about the context within which examine the issue.
I agree that the disagreement about whether a helium atom should be considered a molecule is related to what mental framework one slots the question into. I don’t think this in any way stops it being a disagreement about definitions of words. (In particular, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not taking “X is a disagreement about definitions” to imply “X is trivial” or anything of the kind.)
The physicist and chemist in Kuhn’s story could—I don’t know whether they would if actually asked—both have said something like this: “It turns out that there are a few different notions close enough together that we use the word “molecule” for all of them, and they don’t all agree about what to call a helium atom”. Again, this is far from what happens in most political disagreements.
For the avoidance of doubt again, I am not denying that some political disagreements are like this. For instance, there are cases where two sides would both claim to be maximizing equality, but one side means “treat everyone exactly the same” and another means “treat everyone the same but compensate for inequalities X, Y, and Z elsewhere”. I suggest that this is actually best considered a disagreement about values rather than about definitions, though. (Each group prefers to define “equality” in a particular way because they think what-they-call-equality is more important than what-the-other-guys-call-equality.)
this is actually best considered a disagreement about values rather than about definitions
Well, yes, because in the political context “framework” very often means “value framework”. However both definitions and frameworks matter—it is still the case that the argument will get nowhere until people agree on the meaning of the words they are using.
My experience is that if someone begins “Well, yes” rather than, say, just “Yes”, their intention is generally something less positive than simply agreeing with you. (“Well, yes. What kind of idiot would need that to be said explicitly?” “Well, yes, but you’re forgetting about X, Y, and Z.” “Well, yes, I suppose so, but I don’t think that’s actually quite the right question.”)
That’s a very special kind of question: one that’s almost entirely about definitions of words.
For Thomas Kuhn it’s a an issue of different paradigms.
When we look at the questions of atoms then saying: “Atoms exist.” likely means “Thinking of matter as being made up of atoms is a valuable paradigm.”
Lavoiser came up with describing oxygen as a new element. In doing so he rejected the paradgim that chemistry should analyse principles like phlogiston but rather think of matter as being made up of atoms.
Calling oxygen dephlogisticated air is more than just an issue of calling it a different name. It’s an issue at the heart of the conflict of two scientific paradigms.
Both the phlogiston theory and the oxygen theory successfully predict that if you put a glass over a candle the candle while go out. The oxygen theory says that it’s because there no oxygen anymore in the air. The phlogiston theory says that it’s because the air is full of phlogiston so that it can’t take any more additional phlogiston.
Phlogiston chemistry was a huge improvement over the chemistry of the four elements which neither explained or predicted that the candle would go out.
Understanding different paradigms to look at an political issue is often an important part of having a political debate. It moves the issue beyond tribe A vs. tribe B. Of course you can have a tribe A vs. tribe B political discussion but often that’s not the kind of political debate that I like to have.
In reality the kind of conclusions that parliaments draw from political debate are laws that fill hundreds of pages that specify all sorts of little details that happen to be important.
If the GBS does policy documents specifying details and coming to a conclusion makes sense but I don’t think that’s a good goal for a discussion on a forum like Omnilibrium.
As it turns out, our current membership does not fit very well into the “left-wing” and “right-wing” boxes, so we adopted different labels for the observed political clusters.
So what beliefs generally cluster the optimates and populares? I’ve been wondering this, and it seems fairly opaque as an outside observer, but I’m sure that people who regularly use the site have picked up on it.
There are two noticeable differences between the optimate/populare and the traditional left-wing/right-wing politics:
1) Traditional politics is much better approximated by a binary. Person’s views on one significant issue, such as feminism, pretty accurately predict positions on foreign policy, economics and environmental issues. By comparison, optimate/populare labels have much less predictive power. While there is a significant correlation between populare (optimate) and left (right)-wing views on economics and foreign policy, both optimates and populares are much more likely to cross ideological lines on individual issues.
2) On average, both populares and optimates are more libertarian and less religious than the traditional left and right.
I’m not sure what VoA should do beyond what it already does. It already provides a wide range of free programming to the world in a bunch of different languages. The programming—so far as I’ve seen it—is terrible and completely unconvincing for foreigners. On the other hand, home-grown youtube networks like The Young Turks seem to already have a large following from non-American viewers, despite being targeted towards Americans, and seem to do a much more effective job in exporting Western values to people who don’t already believe in them.
Investigative journalism costs money. Even in the US it’s hard to fund it in a for-profit way as shown by outlets like the New York Times employing fewer investigative journalists. VoA should fund investigative journalists in other countries.
The Young Turks aren’t doing genuine news. They comment on what various other people report and do little research into the subjects they cover.
To the extend that what VoA is producing is terrible, they should produce better content. Focus on material that get’s shared in the target nations via social media. I see stories from RussiaToday from time to time on my facebook feed. There’s no good reason why VoA shouldn’t be able to do the same thing in the countries it targets.
Pay local bloggers with regime critical views to write stories. If needed allow them to publish stories under a pseudonym if the story would get them thrown in prison otherwise.
We aren’t talking about journalism here. We are explicitly talking about propaganda. Or counter-propaganda, if you prefer.
The Young Turks aren’t doing genuine news. They comment on what various other people report and do little research into the subjects they cover.
Much like the rest of the media. And, again, geniune news is off-topic. Although they do tend to bring into focus some subjects that the rest of the media is hesitant to cover.
Pay local bloggers with regime critical views to write stories
No use if they get blocked, thrown in prison, etc. And even if not, it would most likely turn out to be very counter-productive if it emerged that anti-government bloggers were paid off.
We aren’t talking about journalism here. We are explicitly talking about propaganda. Or counter-propaganda, if you prefer.
Not really. Alex Jones is speaking critically about the US system but the factual background of what he says is poor. While he do has a relatively large audience he doesn’t strongly affect the political system.
To do effective propaganda you need to actually engage with the reality on the ground.
Michael Hastings couldn’t have written an article that forces Stanley McChrystal into resignantion without doing investigative reporting.
Much like the rest of the media. And, again, geniune news is off-topic. Although they do tend to bring into focus some subjects that the rest of the media is hesitant to cover.
Quite a lot of mainstream reporters do pick up the phone to call people to research a story.
The Young Turks just seem to pick up news story and then have a few people sit together to speak about what they think about that story.
Specifically, Russian propaganda in my country (don’t know if it works the same everywhere) usually markets itself as “the news for people who are not satisfied with propaganda and censorship in mainstream media”. Obviously, any information inconvenient for Putin’s regime is called “propaganda”, and the fact that Putin’s propaganda is not published in our mainstream media is called “censorship”. The target group seems to be people believing in conspiracy theories, and young people.
Essentially, they are trying to role-play Assange, while publishing the same stuff you would find on the official Russian TV. Plus the conspiracy theories, because everything that puts West in a bad light is a bonus. (Yes, that includes even theories like “vaccination causes autism”, because vaccination = big pharma = capitalism = the West.)
One tool in the toolset is providing a lot of links to “suppressed information” and encouraging readers to do their “research” for themselves. Basicly, instead of one propaganda website, you have dozen websites linking to each other, plus to some conspiracy theories written by third-party bloggers. And it works, because people who follow the links do have the feeling that they did a research, that they are better informed than the rest of the population, and that there is a lot of important information that is censored from the official media. If you ever had an applause light of “internet will bring freedom of speech and make the old media obsolete”, it feels like you are in the middle of it, when you read that stuff.
So, having a network of websites debunking Russian propaganda—using the engaging language of blogs, instead of the usual boring language of newspapers—would provide some balance. (Of course it would only take 10 seconds for all the “independent” websites to declare that all these websites are paid by evil Americans, but they already keep saying that about everything that opposes them.)
From Omnilibrium:
Should fundamental science be funded by international agencies?
Integration of Muslim Immigrants: US vs. Europe
What’s more important Laffer Curve or Income Inequality?
Should the US radically increase spending on Voice of America?
There are intelligent people speaking, without attacking each other. When they add facts, I am going to suppose those facts are likely true. That’s already better than 99.99% of internet.
Yet there seems to be no conclusion, and even the analysis seems rather shallow.
What do you want when you mean “conclusion”?
Well, currently it seems to me like this:
A new topic.
Person X says something smart.
Person Y says something smart.
Person Z says something smart.
Everyone moves to the next topic.
That’s okay if your goal is signalling smartness. It’s okay-ish if your goal is to have more information about the topic. I haven’t read much, but the debating style still feels adversarial—people are intelligent and polite, but they still give arguments for one side or for the other, so at the end of the day you still get Team Pro and Team Con.
The missing part is someone saying “these are arguments for, these are arguments against, after weighing them carefully, this seems like an optimal solution. (And in the Aumann’s ideal world, all participants of the debate would agree.)
Why? Because sometimes we ask questions when we need answers. If you ask “Is it better to do X, or to do Y?”, and you receive three smart answers supporting X, and three smart answers supporting Y, at the end of the day you still don’t know whether you should do X or Y. (Though if you make your decision, using whatever means, now you have three great arguments to support it. There is even a button on the website that will filter them for you.)
The goal of reading a site exploring a political question shouldn’t be that the reader comes away with: “I don’t need to think myself, the community decided that X is right, so I support X because I want to support what my tribe has chosen to support.”
Ideally the person leaves with a mind that’s more open than when they came.
This is how I accept 99% of information about the world. I have never seen an atom, never been in Paris, still believe they exist. A community I consider trustworthy about the topic has decided that they exist, and I don’t have time to personally verify everything.
Getting more inputs for your independent research is great if you do have time and other resources necessary to do the research. Making the inputs public is also good, because some of the participants may have the time. But inputs without conclusion is still an incomplete work.
Is adjusting probabilities towards 50% a good thing?
I don’t think that openness is mainly about probabilities but most people are heavily overconfident about most of their political positions so moving the probabilities closer to 50% is a good thing.
The world would be a much better place if more people would respond to
Is policy A better than policy B?withI don't knowinstead ofPolicy A is better because my tribe says it's better.Let’s ask instead of
are there atoms?is helium a molecule?. Thomas Kuhn wrote about the issue:You get a different answer to the question depending on who you ask
is helium a molecule?.Does that mean that you should adjust probabilities towards 50% on the question ofis helium a molecule?? No, that wouldn’t make any sense to average the 100% certainity of the physicist that helium is no molecule with the 100% certainity of the chemist that it is towards 50%.I would want participants who read a political dicussion come away with thinking that there are multiple ways of looking at the debate in question.
That’s basically rejecting skepticism. Skepticism is about being okay with the fact that you don’t have a conclusion to every question. Keeping questions open for years is important for understanding them better.
That’s a very special kind of question: one that’s almost entirely about definitions of words. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone here that different people or groups use words in different ways, and therefore that questions about definitions often don’t have a definite answer.
Many many questions have some element of this (e.g., if some etymology enthusiast insists that an “atom” must be indivisible then the things most people call atoms aren’t “atoms” for him, and for all we know there may actually be no “atoms”) and that’s important to know. But this doesn’t look to me like a good model for political disagreement; word definitions aren’t usually a big part of political disagreements.
(What is usually a big part of those disagreements is divergence between different people’s or groups’ values, which can also lead to situations where there’s no such thing as The Right Answer.)
Unless you allow the “conclusion” to be something like “We don’t yet have enough information to know whether A or B is the better course of action”, or “A is almost certainly better if what you mostly care about is X, and B is almost certainly better if what you mostly care about is Y”, or “The dispute between A and B is mostly terminological”. All of which I’m guessing Viliam would be fine with; it looks to me like what he’s unsatisfied with is debates that basically consist of some arguments for A and some arguments for B, with no attempt to figure out what conclusion—which might well be a conclusion with a lot of uncertainty to it—should follow from looking at all those arguments together.
On one level, yes, this is just a definition issue.
On a deeper level no, because particular answers to such questions place the phenomena into a specific framework. Notice that two answers to “is helium a molecule” arose not because two people consulted two different dictionaries. They arose because these two people are used to thinking about molecules in very different ways—both valid in their respective domains.
In that sense this “special kind of question” could be about defining terms, but it also could be about the context within which examine the issue.
I agree that the disagreement about whether a helium atom should be considered a molecule is related to what mental framework one slots the question into. I don’t think this in any way stops it being a disagreement about definitions of words. (In particular, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not taking “X is a disagreement about definitions” to imply “X is trivial” or anything of the kind.)
The physicist and chemist in Kuhn’s story could—I don’t know whether they would if actually asked—both have said something like this: “It turns out that there are a few different notions close enough together that we use the word “molecule” for all of them, and they don’t all agree about what to call a helium atom”. Again, this is far from what happens in most political disagreements.
For the avoidance of doubt again, I am not denying that some political disagreements are like this. For instance, there are cases where two sides would both claim to be maximizing equality, but one side means “treat everyone exactly the same” and another means “treat everyone the same but compensate for inequalities X, Y, and Z elsewhere”. I suggest that this is actually best considered a disagreement about values rather than about definitions, though. (Each group prefers to define “equality” in a particular way because they think what-they-call-equality is more important than what-the-other-guys-call-equality.)
Well, yes, because in the political context “framework” very often means “value framework”. However both definitions and frameworks matter—it is still the case that the argument will get nowhere until people agree on the meaning of the words they are using.
It feels as if you may be trying to correct a mistake I’m not making. I agree that definitions matter. As I said two comments upthread:
Nope, you just have all your defensive shields up and at full power :-) I am agreeing with you here.
Full power is more dramatic than that :-).
My experience is that if someone begins “Well, yes” rather than, say, just “Yes”, their intention is generally something less positive than simply agreeing with you. (“Well, yes. What kind of idiot would need that to be said explicitly?” “Well, yes, but you’re forgetting about X, Y, and Z.” “Well, yes, I suppose so, but I don’t think that’s actually quite the right question.”)
I’ll work on augmenting my expressions of enthusiasm :-)
For Thomas Kuhn it’s a an issue of different paradigms.
When we look at the questions of atoms then saying: “Atoms exist.” likely means “Thinking of matter as being made up of atoms is a valuable paradigm.”
Lavoiser came up with describing oxygen as a new element. In doing so he rejected the paradgim that chemistry should analyse principles like phlogiston but rather think of matter as being made up of atoms.
Calling oxygen dephlogisticated air is more than just an issue of calling it a different name. It’s an issue at the heart of the conflict of two scientific paradigms.
Both the phlogiston theory and the oxygen theory successfully predict that if you put a glass over a candle the candle while go out. The oxygen theory says that it’s because there no oxygen anymore in the air. The phlogiston theory says that it’s because the air is full of phlogiston so that it can’t take any more additional phlogiston.
Phlogiston chemistry was a huge improvement over the chemistry of the four elements which neither explained or predicted that the candle would go out.
Understanding different paradigms to look at an political issue is often an important part of having a political debate. It moves the issue beyond tribe A vs. tribe B. Of course you can have a tribe A vs. tribe B political discussion but often that’s not the kind of political debate that I like to have.
In reality the kind of conclusions that parliaments draw from political debate are laws that fill hundreds of pages that specify all sorts of little details that happen to be important. If the GBS does policy documents specifying details and coming to a conclusion makes sense but I don’t think that’s a good goal for a discussion on a forum like Omnilibrium.
A question about Omnilibrium. The FAQ states
So what beliefs generally cluster the optimates and populares? I’ve been wondering this, and it seems fairly opaque as an outside observer, but I’m sure that people who regularly use the site have picked up on it.
There are two noticeable differences between the optimate/populare and the traditional left-wing/right-wing politics:
1) Traditional politics is much better approximated by a binary. Person’s views on one significant issue, such as feminism, pretty accurately predict positions on foreign policy, economics and environmental issues. By comparison, optimate/populare labels have much less predictive power. While there is a significant correlation between populare (optimate) and left (right)-wing views on economics and foreign policy, both optimates and populares are much more likely to cross ideological lines on individual issues.
2) On average, both populares and optimates are more libertarian and less religious than the traditional left and right.
I’m not sure what VoA should do beyond what it already does. It already provides a wide range of free programming to the world in a bunch of different languages. The programming—so far as I’ve seen it—is terrible and completely unconvincing for foreigners. On the other hand, home-grown youtube networks like The Young Turks seem to already have a large following from non-American viewers, despite being targeted towards Americans, and seem to do a much more effective job in exporting Western values to people who don’t already believe in them.
Investigative journalism costs money. Even in the US it’s hard to fund it in a for-profit way as shown by outlets like the New York Times employing fewer investigative journalists. VoA should fund investigative journalists in other countries.
The Young Turks aren’t doing genuine news. They comment on what various other people report and do little research into the subjects they cover.
To the extend that what VoA is producing is terrible, they should produce better content. Focus on material that get’s shared in the target nations via social media. I see stories from RussiaToday from time to time on my facebook feed. There’s no good reason why VoA shouldn’t be able to do the same thing in the countries it targets.
Pay local bloggers with regime critical views to write stories. If needed allow them to publish stories under a pseudonym if the story would get them thrown in prison otherwise.
We aren’t talking about journalism here. We are explicitly talking about propaganda. Or counter-propaganda, if you prefer.
Much like the rest of the media. And, again, geniune news is off-topic. Although they do tend to bring into focus some subjects that the rest of the media is hesitant to cover.
No use if they get blocked, thrown in prison, etc. And even if not, it would most likely turn out to be very counter-productive if it emerged that anti-government bloggers were paid off.
Not really. Alex Jones is speaking critically about the US system but the factual background of what he says is poor. While he do has a relatively large audience he doesn’t strongly affect the political system.
To do effective propaganda you need to actually engage with the reality on the ground. Michael Hastings couldn’t have written an article that forces Stanley McChrystal into resignantion without doing investigative reporting.
Quite a lot of mainstream reporters do pick up the phone to call people to research a story. The Young Turks just seem to pick up news story and then have a few people sit together to speak about what they think about that story.
Specifically, Russian propaganda in my country (don’t know if it works the same everywhere) usually markets itself as “the news for people who are not satisfied with propaganda and censorship in mainstream media”. Obviously, any information inconvenient for Putin’s regime is called “propaganda”, and the fact that Putin’s propaganda is not published in our mainstream media is called “censorship”. The target group seems to be people believing in conspiracy theories, and young people.
Essentially, they are trying to role-play Assange, while publishing the same stuff you would find on the official Russian TV. Plus the conspiracy theories, because everything that puts West in a bad light is a bonus. (Yes, that includes even theories like “vaccination causes autism”, because vaccination = big pharma = capitalism = the West.)
One tool in the toolset is providing a lot of links to “suppressed information” and encouraging readers to do their “research” for themselves. Basicly, instead of one propaganda website, you have dozen websites linking to each other, plus to some conspiracy theories written by third-party bloggers. And it works, because people who follow the links do have the feeling that they did a research, that they are better informed than the rest of the population, and that there is a lot of important information that is censored from the official media. If you ever had an applause light of “internet will bring freedom of speech and make the old media obsolete”, it feels like you are in the middle of it, when you read that stuff.
So, having a network of websites debunking Russian propaganda—using the engaging language of blogs, instead of the usual boring language of newspapers—would provide some balance. (Of course it would only take 10 seconds for all the “independent” websites to declare that all these websites are paid by evil Americans, but they already keep saying that about everything that opposes them.)