It’s proven that mutually-known rational agents with matching priors cannot disagree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem . This doesn’t even require exchange of evidence, just the fact that each other is trusted to be rational is enough to move their beliefs to alignment.
It’s well-known that this doesn’t apply to humans, which are not fully rational, and don’t have matching priors (or, really, any consistent priors). I think this kills your thesis as well.
In that case, both parties would have the same information which will then be processed the same way. Just by these factors, there shouldn’t be.
Priors are still a problem. But that’s not the biggest problem.
However, disagreements do still exist, and we’d like to believe we’re rational, so the problem must be in the exchange of information.
WHAT? The problem may include difficulty in exchange of information, but you can’t blindly and silently jump from “we’d like to believe we’re rational” to “we are, in fact, rational”. The biggest problem is that humans are NOT rational, and anyone who thinks otherwise is deluded.
As we progress as a species we expand our languages to communicate more complexity
Perhaps true, but this doesn’t lead to cost-free instantaneous perfect information exchange (aka brain-state merging of two individuals). Leaving aside the time and complexity issues, there are adversarial drives that make self-interested agents (like humans) PREFER imperfect communication.
I agree. My main point is not that we’re rational yet we disagree. But even as we strive to be rational in the future, we can still disagree due to imperfections in language. Perfect communication doesn’t entail complete revelation of brain states, as with perfect communication humans can still be selective as to what to communicate, so self interest wouldn’t be a major problem.
I have no clue how to determine which of the following contribute how much to any given disagreement:
human irrationality and inability to update correctly on new information.
(related to #1) human cognitive and attention limits—just can’t remember and process enough to really understand the content of very complicated attempts at communication.
misalignment (adversarial/competitive motives for (mis)communication).
many other obstacles.
imperfections in language .
My intuition is that #5 is pretty far down the list, ESPECIALLY if you separate “imperfect understanding of context of the speaker and their reasons for communication choices” as a new bullet point.
This leads me to believe that language does evolve, but it won’t make much of a dent in the conflict and disagreement we see among people.
It’s proven that mutually-known rational agents with matching priors cannot disagree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem . This doesn’t even require exchange of evidence, just the fact that each other is trusted to be rational is enough to move their beliefs to alignment.
It’s well-known that this doesn’t apply to humans, which are not fully rational, and don’t have matching priors (or, really, any consistent priors). I think this kills your thesis as well.
Priors are still a problem. But that’s not the biggest problem.
WHAT? The problem may include difficulty in exchange of information, but you can’t blindly and silently jump from “we’d like to believe we’re rational” to “we are, in fact, rational”. The biggest problem is that humans are NOT rational, and anyone who thinks otherwise is deluded.
Perhaps true, but this doesn’t lead to cost-free instantaneous perfect information exchange (aka brain-state merging of two individuals). Leaving aside the time and complexity issues, there are adversarial drives that make self-interested agents (like humans) PREFER imperfect communication.
I agree. My main point is not that we’re rational yet we disagree. But even as we strive to be rational in the future, we can still disagree due to imperfections in language. Perfect communication doesn’t entail complete revelation of brain states, as with perfect communication humans can still be selective as to what to communicate, so self interest wouldn’t be a major problem.
I have no clue how to determine which of the following contribute how much to any given disagreement:
human irrationality and inability to update correctly on new information.
(related to #1) human cognitive and attention limits—just can’t remember and process enough to really understand the content of very complicated attempts at communication.
misalignment (adversarial/competitive motives for (mis)communication).
many other obstacles.
imperfections in language .
My intuition is that #5 is pretty far down the list, ESPECIALLY if you separate “imperfect understanding of context of the speaker and their reasons for communication choices” as a new bullet point.
This leads me to believe that language does evolve, but it won’t make much of a dent in the conflict and disagreement we see among people.