A general strategy of “can I completely reverse my current claim and have it still make sense?” is a good one for this. When you’re talking about big, vague concepts, you can usually just flip them over and they still sound like reasonable opinions/positions to take. When you flip it and it seems like nonsense, or seems provably, specifically wrong, that means you’re into concrete territory. Try just … adopting a strategy of doing this 3-5 times per long conversation?
This seems useful and simple enough to try. I’ll set up an implementation intention to do this next time I find myself in a long conversation. It also reminds me of the reversal test, a heuristic for eliminating status-quo bias.
A general strategy of “can I completely reverse my current claim and have it still make sense?” is a good one for this. When you’re talking about big, vague concepts, you can usually just flip them over and they still sound like reasonable opinions/positions to take. When you flip it and it seems like nonsense, or seems provably, specifically wrong, that means you’re into concrete territory. Try just … adopting a strategy of doing this 3-5 times per long conversation?
This seems useful and simple enough to try. I’ll set up an implementation intention to do this next time I find myself in a long conversation. It also reminds me of the reversal test, a heuristic for eliminating status-quo bias.
Bostrom, Ord (2006)