The Xerox Parc/ARPA version of the intellectual Turing test: Class 1 vs Class 2 disagreement
I’ve been reading the excellent book The Dream Machine about ARPA and PARC, the research communities that invented the personal computer (before them computers were just tools for military research projects).
Xerox PARC was managed by Bob Taylor, a great manager who drew on the management style of many great people before him. PARC is an astonishing example of far-out thinking colliding with cutting-edge technology, and it involved many extremely intelligent free-thinkers (read: difficult-to-”manage” people) coming together. There are many PARC-isms; another one is the fact that they had meetings on beanbags instead of chairs, apparently in order to stop people rising to their feet to denounce others.
Taylor distinguished class 1 and class 2 disagreement. In our terminology, a class-2 disagreement is one in which both sides could pass an Ideological Turing Test(ITT) - that is, if they paused and were asked to state their opponent’s opinion, they could do so in a way that their opponent would be happy with (perhaps going so far as to successfully convince someone who didn’t know better that they actually held their opponent’s opinion, hence the name).
Class 1 is apparently “just both sides yelling at each other”. This, I suppose, skips over the fairly likely situation that one party could pass an ITT but the opposing party can’t. But perhaps that’s not a useful distinction; the one-sided situation is an unstable equilibrium (eg rage-inducing for the side that has taken the time to check their ability to pass the ITT).
So it’s a high and rarefied standard to meet for something called “Class 2” (one wonders if they had class 3, and that’s why no lab has made as significant breakthroughs as PARC since their glory days).
I think in order to get to it, it can sometimes take a very long time; I have an ongoing debate intelligence with two friends of mine that has lasted days of discussion (spread across a years!), and in spite of huge amounts of patience on their part, they don’t think they can pass the ITT for my position. But, I endlessly appreciate them for their desire to pass it; plausibly that’s a part of what friendship is. I mean that partly in the cute way, but also partly with a sad implication: that we’re being unrealistic to hope people including ourselves will try as hard pass it for our enemies.
Did Taylor have any techniques for trying to increase the number of Type 2 disagreements and decrease the number of Type 1 disagreements among his staff?
Thought it would be useful to share this 2017 HN thread.
The Myths of Creativity by David Burkus has this passage on class 1 vs class 2 disagreement:
Alan Kay responded to the above with
which I suppose suggests the answer to this comment’s question is “probably not”.
If you like The Dream Machine, you’ll also like Organizing Genius.