Meta-level response about “did you mean this or rule it out/not have a world model where it happens?”:
Some senses in which you’re right that it’s not what I was meaning:
It’s more specific/detailed. I was not thinking in this level of detail about how such discussions would play out.
I was thinking more about pressure than about charisma (where someone genuinely seems convincing). And yes, charisma could be even more powerful in a 1-on-1 setting.
Senses in which it is what I meant:
This is not something my world model rules out, it just wasn’t zoomed in on it, possibly because I’m used to sometimes experiencing a lot of pressure from neurotypical people over my beliefs. (that could have biased my internal frame to overfocus on pressure).
For the parts about more even distributions being better, it’s more about: yes, these dynamics exist, but I thought they’d be even worse when combined with a background conformity pressure, e.g when there’s one dominant-pressuring person and everyone but you passively agreeing with what they’re saying, and tolerating it because they agree.
Object-level response:
conditional on the group having reached consensus, I do predict, with high probability, that it did so because of these types of social dynamics rather than because they are composed of people that react well to “valid arguments” that challenge closely-held political beliefs.
(First, to be clear: the beliefs don’t have to be closely-held; we’d see consensuses more often when for {all but at most one side} they’re not)
That seems plausible. We could put it into a (handwavey) calculation form, where P(1 dark arts arguer) is higher than P(5 truth-seekers). But it’s actually a lot more complex; e.g., what about P(all opposing participants susceptible to such an arguer), or how e.g one more-truth-seeking attitude can influence others to have a similar attitude for that context. (and this is without me having good priors on the frequencies and degrees of these qualities, so I’m mostly uncertain).
A world with such a proposal implemented might even then see training programs for clever dark arts arguing. (Kind of like I mentioned at the start, but again with me using the case of pressuring specifically: “memetics teaching people how to pressure others into agreeing during the group discussion”)
I think this is a good object-level comment.
Meta-level response about “did you mean this or rule it out/not have a world model where it happens?”:
Some senses in which you’re right that it’s not what I was meaning:
It’s more specific/detailed. I was not thinking in this level of detail about how such discussions would play out.
I was thinking more about pressure than about charisma (where someone genuinely seems convincing). And yes, charisma could be even more powerful in a 1-on-1 setting.
Senses in which it is what I meant:
This is not something my world model rules out, it just wasn’t zoomed in on it, possibly because I’m used to sometimes experiencing a lot of pressure from neurotypical people over my beliefs. (that could have biased my internal frame to overfocus on pressure).
For the parts about more even distributions being better, it’s more about: yes, these dynamics exist, but I thought they’d be even worse when combined with a background conformity pressure, e.g when there’s one dominant-pressuring person and everyone but you passively agreeing with what they’re saying, and tolerating it because they agree.
Object-level response:
(First, to be clear: the beliefs don’t have to be closely-held; we’d see consensuses more often when for {all but at most one side} they’re not)
That seems plausible. We could put it into a (handwavey) calculation form, where P(1 dark arts arguer) is higher than P(5 truth-seekers). But it’s actually a lot more complex; e.g., what about P(all opposing participants susceptible to such an arguer), or how e.g one more-truth-seeking attitude can influence others to have a similar attitude for that context. (and this is without me having good priors on the frequencies and degrees of these qualities, so I’m mostly uncertain).
A world with such a proposal implemented might even then see training programs for clever dark arts arguing. (Kind of like I mentioned at the start, but again with me using the case of pressuring specifically: “memetics teaching people how to pressure others into agreeing during the group discussion”)