There are two cultures in this particular trade-off. Collaborative and adversarial.
I pitch collaborative as, “let’s work together to find the answer (truth)” and I pitch adversarial as, “let’s work against each other to find the answer (truth)”.
Internally the stance is different. For collaborative, it might look something like, “I need to consider the other argument and then offer my alternative view”. For adversarial, it might look something like, “I need to advocate harder for my view because I’m right”. (not quite a balanced description)
Collaborative: “I don’t know if that’s true, what about x”
Adversarial “you’re wrong because of x”.
Culturally 99% of either is fine as long as all parties agree on the culture and act like it. They do include each other at least partially.
Bad collaboration is not being willing to question the other’s position and bad adversarial is not being willing to question one’s own position and blindly advocating.
I see adversarial as going downhill in quality of conversation faster because it’s harder to get a healthy separation of “you are wrong” from, “and you should feel bad (or dumb) about it”. “only an idiot would have an idea like that”.
In a collaborative process, the other person is not an idiot because there’s an assumption that we work together. If adversarial process cuts to the depth of beliefs about our interlocker then from my perspective it gets un-pretty very quickly. Although skilled scientists are always using both and have a clean separation of personal and idea.
In an adversarial environment, I’ve known of some brains to take the feedback, “you are wrong because x” and translate it to, “I am bad, or I should give up, or I failed” and not “I should advocate for my idea better”.
At the end of an adversarial argument is a very strong flip, popperian style “I guess I am wrong so I take your side”.
At the end of a collaborative process is when I find myself taking sides, up until that point, it’s not always clear what my position is, and even at the end of a collaborative process I might be internally resting on the best outcome of collaboration so far, but tomorrow that might change.
I see the possibility of being comfortable in each step of collaboration to say, “thank you for adding something here”. However I see that harder or more friction to say so during adversarial cultures.
I advocate for collaboration over adversarial culture because of the bleed through from epistemics to inherent interpersonal beliefs. Humans are not perfect arguers or it would not matter so much. Because we play with brains and mixing territory of belief and interpersonal relationships I prefer collaborative to adversarial but I could see a counter argument that emphasised the value of the opposite position.
I can also see that it doesn’t matter which culture one is in, so long as there is clarity around it being one and not the other.
Collaborative: “I don’t know if that’s true, what about x” Adversarial “you’re wrong because of x”.
Culturally 99% of either is fine as long as all parties agree on the culture and act like it.
Okay, but those mean different things. “I don’t know if that’s true, what about x” is expressing uncertainty about one’s interlocutor’s claim, and entreating them to consider x as an alternative. “You’re wrong because of x” is a denial of one’s interlocutor’s claim for a specific reason.
I find myself needing to say both of these things, but in different situations, each of which probably occurs more than 1% of the time. This would seem to contradict the claim that 99% of either is fine!
A culture that expects me to refrain from saying “You’re wrong because of x” even if someone is in fact wrong because of x (because telling the truth about this wouldn’t be “collaborative”) is trying to decrease the expressive power of language and is unworthy of the “rationalist” brand name.
I advocate for collaboration over adversarial culture because of the bleed through from epistemics to inherent interpersonal beliefs.
I advocate for a culture that discourages bleed-through from epistemics to inherent interpersonal beliefs, except to whatever limited extent such bleed-through is epistemically justified.
“You’re wrong about this” and “You are stupid and bad” are distinct propositions. It is not only totally possible, but in fact ubiquitously common, for the former to be true but the latter to be false! They’re not statistically independent—if Kevin is wrong about everything all the time, that does raise my subjective probability that Kevin is stupid and bad. But I claim that any one particular instance of someone being wrong is only a very small amount of evidence about that person’s degree of stupidity or badness! It is for this reason it is written that you should Update Yourself Incrementally!
Humans are not perfect arguers or it would not matter so much.
I agree that humans are not perfect arguers! However, I remember reading a bunch of really great blog posts back in the late ’aughts articulating a sense that it should be possible for humans to become better arguers! I wonder whatever happened to that website!
if Kevin is wrong about everything all the time, that does raise my subjective probability that Kevin is stupid and bad.
This is largely tangential to your point (with which I agree), but I think it’s worth pointing out that if Kevin really manages to be wrong about everything, you’d be able to get the right answer just by taking his conclusions and inverting them—meaning whatever cognitive processes he’s using to get the wrong answer 100% of the time must actually be quite intelligent.
if Kevin really manages to be wrong about everything, you’d be able to get the right answer just by taking his conclusions and inverting them
That only works for true-or-false questions. In larger answer spaces, he’d need to be wrong in some specific way such that there exists some simple algorithm (the analogue of “inverting”) to compute the right answers from those wrong ones.
If multiple parties engage in adversarial interactions (e.g., debate, criminal trial, …) with the shared goal of arriving at the truth then as far as I’m concerned that’s still an instance of collaborative truth-seeking.
On the other hand, if at least one party is aiming to win rather than to arrive at the truth then I don’t think they’re engaging in truth-seeking at all. (Though maybe it might sometimes be effective to have a bunch of adversaries all just trying to win, and then some other people, who had better be extremely smart and aware of how they might be being manipulated, trying to combine what they hear from those adversaries in order to get to the truth. Hard to do well, though, I think.)
The reason this question comes up in the first place is because there’s multiple conversation and debate styles that have different properties, and you need some kind of name to distinguish them. Naming things is hard, and I’m not attached to any particular name.
The thing I currently call “Adversarial Collaboration” is where two people are actively working together, in a process that is adversarial, but where they have some kind of shared good faith that if each of them represents their respective viewpoint well, the truth will emerge.
A different thing, which I’d currently call “Adversarial Truthseeking”, is like the first one, but where there’s not as much of a shared framework of whether and how the process is supposed to produce net truth. Two people meet in the wild, think each other are wrong, and argue.
What I currently call “Collaborative Truthseeking” typically makes sense when two people are building a product together on a team. It’s not very useful to say “you’re wrong because X”, because the goal is not to prove ideas wrong, it’s to build a product. “You’re wrong because X, but Y might work instead” is more useful, because it actually moves you closer to a working model. It can also do a fairly complex thing of reaffirming trust, such that people remain truthseeking rather than trying to win.
And yes, each of these can be “collaborative” in some sense, but you need some kind of word for the difference.
(There are also things where you’re doing something that looks collaborative but isn’t truthseeking, and something that looks adversarial but isn’t truthseeking)
And each of those tend to involve fairly different mental states, which facilitate different mental motions. Adversarial truthseeking seems most likely (to me) to result in people treating arguments as soldiers and other political failure modes.
What I currently call “Collaborative Truthseeking” typically makes sense when two people are building a product together on a team. It’s not very useful to say “you’re wrong because X”, because the goal is not to prove ideas wrong, it’s to build a product. “You’re wrong because X, but Y might work instead” is more useful, because it actually moves you closer to a working model. It can also do a fairly complex thing of reaffirming trust, such that people remain truthseeking rather than trying to win.
What if we’re building a product together, and I think you’re wrong about something, but I don’t know what might work instead? What should I say to you?
(See, e.g., this exchange, and pretend that cousin_it and I were members of a project team, building some sort of web app or forum software together.)
There’s a couple significant aspects of that exchange that make it look more collaborative than adversarial to me.
Copying the text here for reference:
Isn’t allowing <object> an invitation for XSS?
Also, at least for me, click-to-enlarge images and slide galleries weren’t essential to enjoying your post.
The first sentence could have been worded “Allowing <object> is an invitation to XSS.” This would have (to me) come across as a bit harsher. The “Isn’t?” frame gives it more a sense of “hey, you know this, right?”. It signifies that the relationship is between two people who reasonably know what they’re doing, whereas the other phrasing would have communicated an undertone of “you’re wrong and should have known better and I know better than you.” (how strong the undertone is depends on the existing relationship. In this case I think it would have probably been relatively week)
Moreover, the second sentence actually just fits the collaborative frame as I specified it: cousin_it specifically says “the product didn’t need the features that required <object>”, therefore there’s no more work to be done. And meanwhile says “I enjoyed your post”, which indicates that they generally like what you did. All of this helps reinforce “hey, we’re on the same side, building a thing together.”
(I do suspect you could find an example that doesn’t meet these criteria but still is a reasonable workplace exchange. I don’t think you *never* need to say ‘hey, you’re wrong here’, just that if you’re saying it all the time without helping to solve the underlying problems, something is off about your team dynamics.
Probably not going to have time to delve much further into this for now though)
This feels sort of on the edge of “is useful outside of the current discussion.” It’d be fine to write up as it’s own post but my current feel is that it’s accomplishing most of it’s value as an answer to this question.
[this just my opinion of what feels vaguely right as a user, not intended to be normative]
I roughly endorse this description. (I specifically think the “99% of either is fine” is a significant overstatement, but I probably endorse the weaker claim of “both styles can generally work if people are trying to do the same thing”)
There are two cultures in this particular trade-off. Collaborative and adversarial.
I pitch collaborative as, “let’s work together to find the answer (truth)” and I pitch adversarial as, “let’s work against each other to find the answer (truth)”.
Internally the stance is different. For collaborative, it might look something like, “I need to consider the other argument and then offer my alternative view”. For adversarial, it might look something like, “I need to advocate harder for my view because I’m right”. (not quite a balanced description)
Collaborative: “I don’t know if that’s true, what about x” Adversarial “you’re wrong because of x”.
Culturally 99% of either is fine as long as all parties agree on the culture and act like it. They do include each other at least partially.
Bad collaboration is not being willing to question the other’s position and bad adversarial is not being willing to question one’s own position and blindly advocating.
I see adversarial as going downhill in quality of conversation faster because it’s harder to get a healthy separation of “you are wrong” from, “and you should feel bad (or dumb) about it”. “only an idiot would have an idea like that”.
In a collaborative process, the other person is not an idiot because there’s an assumption that we work together. If adversarial process cuts to the depth of beliefs about our interlocker then from my perspective it gets un-pretty very quickly. Although skilled scientists are always using both and have a clean separation of personal and idea.
In an adversarial environment, I’ve known of some brains to take the feedback, “you are wrong because x” and translate it to, “I am bad, or I should give up, or I failed” and not “I should advocate for my idea better”.
At the end of an adversarial argument is a very strong flip, popperian style “I guess I am wrong so I take your side”.
At the end of a collaborative process is when I find myself taking sides, up until that point, it’s not always clear what my position is, and even at the end of a collaborative process I might be internally resting on the best outcome of collaboration so far, but tomorrow that might change.
I see the possibility of being comfortable in each step of collaboration to say, “thank you for adding something here”. However I see that harder or more friction to say so during adversarial cultures.
I advocate for collaboration over adversarial culture because of the bleed through from epistemics to inherent interpersonal beliefs. Humans are not perfect arguers or it would not matter so much. Because we play with brains and mixing territory of belief and interpersonal relationships I prefer collaborative to adversarial but I could see a counter argument that emphasised the value of the opposite position.
I can also see that it doesn’t matter which culture one is in, so long as there is clarity around it being one and not the other.
Okay, but those mean different things. “I don’t know if that’s true, what about x” is expressing uncertainty about one’s interlocutor’s claim, and entreating them to consider x as an alternative. “You’re wrong because of x” is a denial of one’s interlocutor’s claim for a specific reason.
I find myself needing to say both of these things, but in different situations, each of which probably occurs more than 1% of the time. This would seem to contradict the claim that 99% of either is fine!
A culture that expects me to refrain from saying “You’re wrong because of x” even if someone is in fact wrong because of x (because telling the truth about this wouldn’t be “collaborative”) is trying to decrease the expressive power of language and is unworthy of the “rationalist” brand name.
I advocate for a culture that discourages bleed-through from epistemics to inherent interpersonal beliefs, except to whatever limited extent such bleed-through is epistemically justified.
“You’re wrong about this” and “You are stupid and bad” are distinct propositions. It is not only totally possible, but in fact ubiquitously common, for the former to be true but the latter to be false! They’re not statistically independent—if Kevin is wrong about everything all the time, that does raise my subjective probability that Kevin is stupid and bad. But I claim that any one particular instance of someone being wrong is only a very small amount of evidence about that person’s degree of stupidity or badness! It is for this reason it is written that you should Update Yourself Incrementally!
I agree that humans are not perfect arguers! However, I remember reading a bunch of really great blog posts back in the late ’aughts articulating a sense that it should be possible for humans to become better arguers! I wonder whatever happened to that website!
This is largely tangential to your point (with which I agree), but I think it’s worth pointing out that if Kevin really manages to be wrong about everything, you’d be able to get the right answer just by taking his conclusions and inverting them—meaning whatever cognitive processes he’s using to get the wrong answer 100% of the time must actually be quite intelligent.
That only works for true-or-false questions. In larger answer spaces, he’d need to be wrong in some specific way such that there exists some simple algorithm (the analogue of “inverting”) to compute the right answers from those wrong ones.
If multiple parties engage in adversarial interactions (e.g., debate, criminal trial, …) with the shared goal of arriving at the truth then as far as I’m concerned that’s still an instance of collaborative truth-seeking.
On the other hand, if at least one party is aiming to win rather than to arrive at the truth then I don’t think they’re engaging in truth-seeking at all. (Though maybe it might sometimes be effective to have a bunch of adversaries all just trying to win, and then some other people, who had better be extremely smart and aware of how they might be being manipulated, trying to combine what they hear from those adversaries in order to get to the truth. Hard to do well, though, I think.)
The reason this question comes up in the first place is because there’s multiple conversation and debate styles that have different properties, and you need some kind of name to distinguish them. Naming things is hard, and I’m not attached to any particular name.
The thing I currently call “Adversarial Collaboration” is where two people are actively working together, in a process that is adversarial, but where they have some kind of shared good faith that if each of them represents their respective viewpoint well, the truth will emerge.
A different thing, which I’d currently call “Adversarial Truthseeking”, is like the first one, but where there’s not as much of a shared framework of whether and how the process is supposed to produce net truth. Two people meet in the wild, think each other are wrong, and argue.
What I currently call “Collaborative Truthseeking” typically makes sense when two people are building a product together on a team. It’s not very useful to say “you’re wrong because X”, because the goal is not to prove ideas wrong, it’s to build a product. “You’re wrong because X, but Y might work instead” is more useful, because it actually moves you closer to a working model. It can also do a fairly complex thing of reaffirming trust, such that people remain truthseeking rather than trying to win.
And yes, each of these can be “collaborative” in some sense, but you need some kind of word for the difference.
(There are also things where you’re doing something that looks collaborative but isn’t truthseeking, and something that looks adversarial but isn’t truthseeking)
And each of those tend to involve fairly different mental states, which facilitate different mental motions. Adversarial truthseeking seems most likely (to me) to result in people treating arguments as soldiers and other political failure modes.
Abram’s hierarchy of conversational styles is a somewhat different lens on the whole thing that I also mostly endorse.
What if we’re building a product together, and I think you’re wrong about something, but I don’t know what might work instead? What should I say to you?
(See, e.g., this exchange, and pretend that cousin_it and I were members of a project team, building some sort of web app or forum software together.)
There’s a couple significant aspects of that exchange that make it look more collaborative than adversarial to me.
Copying the text here for reference:
The first sentence could have been worded “Allowing <object> is an invitation to XSS.” This would have (to me) come across as a bit harsher. The “Isn’t?” frame gives it more a sense of “hey, you know this, right?”. It signifies that the relationship is between two people who reasonably know what they’re doing, whereas the other phrasing would have communicated an undertone of “you’re wrong and should have known better and I know better than you.” (how strong the undertone is depends on the existing relationship. In this case I think it would have probably been relatively week)
Moreover, the second sentence actually just fits the collaborative frame as I specified it: cousin_it specifically says “the product didn’t need the features that required <object>”, therefore there’s no more work to be done. And meanwhile says “I enjoyed your post”, which indicates that they generally like what you did. All of this helps reinforce “hey, we’re on the same side, building a thing together.”
(I do suspect you could find an example that doesn’t meet these criteria but still is a reasonable workplace exchange. I don’t think you *never* need to say ‘hey, you’re wrong here’, just that if you’re saying it all the time without helping to solve the underlying problems, something is off about your team dynamics.
Probably not going to have time to delve much further into this for now though)
Should this be its own post?
This feels sort of on the edge of “is useful outside of the current discussion.” It’d be fine to write up as it’s own post but my current feel is that it’s accomplishing most of it’s value as an answer to this question.
[this just my opinion of what feels vaguely right as a user, not intended to be normative]
Yes, because I can only upvote it once if it remains an answer on this question. Also, because it’ll be useful to refer to in future discussions.
I roughly endorse this description. (I specifically think the “99% of either is fine” is a significant overstatement, but I probably endorse the weaker claim of “both styles can generally work if people are trying to do the same thing”)