After a recent ‘doublecrux meetup’ (I wasn’t running it but observed a bit), I was reflecting on why it’s hard to get people to sufficiently disagree on things in order to properly practice doublecrux.\
But, it still sure is handy to have practiced doublecruxing before needing to do it in an important situation. What to do?
Two options that occur to me are
Singlecruxing
First try to develop a plan for building an actual product together, THEN find a thing to disagree about organically through that process.
[note: I haven’t actually talked much with the people who’s major focus is teaching doublecrux, not sure how much of this is old hat, or if there’s a totally different approach that sort of invalidates it]
SingleCruxing
One challenge about doublecrux practice is that you have to find something you have strong opinions about and also someone else has strong opinions about. So… just sidestep that problem but only worrying about something that you have strong opinions about.
Pick a belief that is actually relevant to your plans (such as where you’re planning to go to college, or what kind of career to go into, or ideally a project you’re actually working on that you’re excited about.
What beliefs are you confident in, that are underpinning your entire approach? (i.e. “going to college in the first place is the right move” or “A job in this industry will make me happier than this other industry” or “this project is a good idea because people will buy the product I’m building.”)
Instead of practicing discussing this with someone else, you can just ask yourself, with no one else around you, why you believe what you believe, and what would change your mind about it.
Having considered this, I think I like it a lot as an “doublecruxing 101” skill.
One problem with learning doublecrux is that doing it properly takes awhile, and in my experience starts with a phase that’s more about model-sharing, before moving to the “actually find your own cruxes and figure out what would change your mind.” But, the first part isn’t actually all that different from regular debate, or discussion. And it’s not quite clear when to transition to the second part (or, it naturally interweaves with the first part. See postformal doublecrux).
This makes it hard to notice and train the specific skills that are unique to doublecrux.
I like the notion that “first you learn singlecrux, then doublecrux” because a) it’s just generally a useful skill to ask why you actually believe the things you do and what would change your mind, and b) I think it’s much easier to focus on the active, unique ingredients when the topic isn’t getting blurred with various other conversational skills, and/or struggling to find a thing that’s worth disagreeing about in the first place.
It’d also have the advantage that you can think about something that’s actually slightly triggering/uncomfortable for you to consider (which I think is pretty valuable for actually learning to do the skill “for real”), but where you only have to worry about how you feel about it, rather than also have to figure out how to relate to someone else who might also feel strongly.
I think this’d be particular good for local meetups that don’t have the benefit of instructors with a lot of practice helping people learn the doublecrux skill.
(I might still have people pair up, but only after thinking privately about it for 5 minutes, and the pairs of people would not be disagreeing with each other, just articulating their thought processes to each other. At any given time, you’d have one”active participant” talking through why they believe what they believe and how they might realistically change their mind about it, and another partner acting more as a facilitator to notice if they’re stuck in weird thought pattern loops or something)
Finding a product you both might actually want to build, then disagreeing about it
But, still, sooner or later you might want to practice doublecruxing. What then? How do you reliably find things you disagree about?
The usual method I’ve observed is have people write down statements that they believe in confidently, that they think other people might disagree with, and then pair up based on shared disagreement. This varies in how well it produces disagreements that feel really ‘alive’ and meaningful.
But if doublecrux actually is mostly for building products, a possible solution might be instead to pair up based on shared interests in the sorts of projects you might want to build. You (probably?) won’t actually build the product, but it seems important that you be able to talk about it as realistically as possible.
Then, you start forming a plan about how to go about building it, while looking for points of disagreement. Lean into that disagreement when you notice it, and explore the surrounding concept-space.
At last night’s meetup, I paired with someone and suggested this idea to them. We ended up with the (somewhat meta) actual shared product of “how to improve the Berkeley rationality community.” We discussed that for 20 minutes, and eventually found disagreement about whether communities require costly signals of membership to be any good, or whether they could instead be built off other human psychological quirks.
This was not a disagreement I think we would have come up with if we “listed a bunch of things we felt strongly about.” And it felt a lot more real.
(I do think there’s a risk of most pairs of peoples ending up being “the local community” or something similarly meta as their ‘product’, but the actual disagreements I expect to still be fairly unique and dependent on the people in question)
Another useful skill you can practice is *actually understanding people’s models*. Like, find something someone else believes, guess what their model, is then ask them “so your model is this?”, then repeat until they agree that you understand their model. This sort of active listening around models is definitely a prerequisite doublecrux skill and can be practiced without needing someone else to agree to doublecrux with you.
Nod. I haven’t actually been to CFAR recently, not sure how they go about it there. But I think for local meetups doing practice breaking it down into subskills seems pretty useful and I agree with active listening being another key one.
As someone who may or may not have been part of the motivation for this shortform, I just want to say that it was my first time doing double crux and so I’m not sure whether I actually understood it.
Heh, you were not the motivating person, and more generally this problem has persisted on most doublecrux meetups I’ve been to. (There were at least 3 people having this issue yesterday)
After a recent ‘doublecrux meetup’ (I wasn’t running it but observed a bit), I was reflecting on why it’s hard to get people to sufficiently disagree on things in order to properly practice doublecrux.\
As mentioned recently, it’s hard to really learn doublecrux unless you’re actually building a product that has stakes. If you just sorta disagree with someone… I dunno you can do the doublecrux loop but there’s a sense where it just obviously doesn’t matter.
But, it still sure is handy to have practiced doublecruxing before needing to do it in an important situation. What to do?
Two options that occur to me are
Singlecruxing
First try to develop a plan for building an actual product together, THEN find a thing to disagree about organically through that process.
[note: I haven’t actually talked much with the people who’s major focus is teaching doublecrux, not sure how much of this is old hat, or if there’s a totally different approach that sort of invalidates it]
SingleCruxing
One challenge about doublecrux practice is that you have to find something you have strong opinions about and also someone else has strong opinions about. So… just sidestep that problem but only worrying about something that you have strong opinions about.
Pick a belief that is actually relevant to your plans (such as where you’re planning to go to college, or what kind of career to go into, or ideally a project you’re actually working on that you’re excited about.
What beliefs are you confident in, that are underpinning your entire approach? (i.e. “going to college in the first place is the right move” or “A job in this industry will make me happier than this other industry” or “this project is a good idea because people will buy the product I’m building.”)
Instead of practicing discussing this with someone else, you can just ask yourself, with no one else around you, why you believe what you believe, and what would change your mind about it.
Having considered this, I think I like it a lot as an “doublecruxing 101” skill.
One problem with learning doublecrux is that doing it properly takes awhile, and in my experience starts with a phase that’s more about model-sharing, before moving to the “actually find your own cruxes and figure out what would change your mind.” But, the first part isn’t actually all that different from regular debate, or discussion. And it’s not quite clear when to transition to the second part (or, it naturally interweaves with the first part. See postformal doublecrux).
This makes it hard to notice and train the specific skills that are unique to doublecrux.
I like the notion that “first you learn singlecrux, then doublecrux” because a) it’s just generally a useful skill to ask why you actually believe the things you do and what would change your mind, and b) I think it’s much easier to focus on the active, unique ingredients when the topic isn’t getting blurred with various other conversational skills, and/or struggling to find a thing that’s worth disagreeing about in the first place.
It’d also have the advantage that you can think about something that’s actually slightly triggering/uncomfortable for you to consider (which I think is pretty valuable for actually learning to do the skill “for real”), but where you only have to worry about how you feel about it, rather than also have to figure out how to relate to someone else who might also feel strongly.
I think this’d be particular good for local meetups that don’t have the benefit of instructors with a lot of practice helping people learn the doublecrux skill.
(I might still have people pair up, but only after thinking privately about it for 5 minutes, and the pairs of people would not be disagreeing with each other, just articulating their thought processes to each other. At any given time, you’d have one”active participant” talking through why they believe what they believe and how they might realistically change their mind about it, and another partner acting more as a facilitator to notice if they’re stuck in weird thought pattern loops or something)
Finding a product you both might actually want to build, then disagreeing about it
But, still, sooner or later you might want to practice doublecruxing. What then? How do you reliably find things you disagree about?
The usual method I’ve observed is have people write down statements that they believe in confidently, that they think other people might disagree with, and then pair up based on shared disagreement. This varies in how well it produces disagreements that feel really ‘alive’ and meaningful.
But if doublecrux actually is mostly for building products, a possible solution might be instead to pair up based on shared interests in the sorts of projects you might want to build. You (probably?) won’t actually build the product, but it seems important that you be able to talk about it as realistically as possible.
Then, you start forming a plan about how to go about building it, while looking for points of disagreement. Lean into that disagreement when you notice it, and explore the surrounding concept-space.
At last night’s meetup, I paired with someone and suggested this idea to them. We ended up with the (somewhat meta) actual shared product of “how to improve the Berkeley rationality community.” We discussed that for 20 minutes, and eventually found disagreement about whether communities require costly signals of membership to be any good, or whether they could instead be built off other human psychological quirks.
This was not a disagreement I think we would have come up with if we “listed a bunch of things we felt strongly about.” And it felt a lot more real.
(I do think there’s a risk of most pairs of peoples ending up being “the local community” or something similarly meta as their ‘product’, but the actual disagreements I expect to still be fairly unique and dependent on the people in question)
Another useful skill you can practice is *actually understanding people’s models*. Like, find something someone else believes, guess what their model, is then ask them “so your model is this?”, then repeat until they agree that you understand their model. This sort of active listening around models is definitely a prerequisite doublecrux skill and can be practiced without needing someone else to agree to doublecrux with you.
Nod. I haven’t actually been to CFAR recently, not sure how they go about it there. But I think for local meetups doing practice breaking it down into subskills seems pretty useful and I agree with active listening being another key one.
As someone who may or may not have been part of the motivation for this shortform, I just want to say that it was my first time doing double crux and so I’m not sure whether I actually understood it.
Heh, you were not the motivating person, and more generally this problem has persisted on most doublecrux meetups I’ve been to. (There were at least 3 people having this issue yesterday)
I’m also curious, as a first-time-doublecruxer, what ended up being particular either confusions or takeaways or anything like that.