The Xerox Parc/​ARPA version of the intellectual Turing test: Class 1 vs Class 2 disagreement

[hamishtodd1]

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.

[eye96458]

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?

[Mo Putera]

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:

In the 1970s at Xerox PARC, regularly scheduled arguments were routine. The company that gave birth to the personal computer staged formal discussions designed to train their people on how to fight properly over ideas and not egos. PARC held weekly meetings they called “Dealer” (from a popular book of the time titled Beat the Dealer). Before each meeting, one person, known as “the dealer,” was selected as the speaker. The speaker would present his idea and then try to defend it against a room of engineers and scientists determined to prove him wrong. Such debates helped improve products under development and sometimes resulted in wholly new ideas for future pursuit. The facilitators of the Dealer meetings were careful to make sure that only intellectual criticism of the merit of an idea received attention and consideration. Those in the audience or at the podium were never allowed to personally criticize their colleagues or bring their colleagues’ character or personality into play.

Bob Taylor, a former manager at PARC, said of their meetings, “If someone tried to push their personality rather than their argument, they’d find that it wouldn’t work.” Inside these debates, Taylor taught his people the difference between what he called Class 1 disagreements, in which neither party understood the other party’s true position, and Class 2 disagreements, in which each side could articulate the other’s stance. Class 1 disagreements were always discouraged, but Class 2 disagreements were allowed, as they often resulted in a higher quality of ideas. Taylor’s model removed the personal friction from debates and taught individuals to use conflict as a means to find common, often higher, ground.

Alan Kay responded to the above with

This is one of those stories that has distorted over time. “Dealer” was a weekly meeting for many purposes, the main one was to provide a vehicle for coordination, planning, communication without having to set up a management structure for brilliant researchers who had some “lone wolves” tendencies.

Part of these meetings were presentations by PARC researchers. However, it was not a gantlet to be run, and it was not to train people to argue in a constructive way (most of the computer researchers at PARC were from ARPA community research centers, and learning how to argue reasonably was already part of that culture).

Visitors from Xerox frequently were horrified by the level of argument and the idea that no personal attacks were allowed had to be explained, along with the idea that the aim was not to win an argument but to illuminate. Almost never did the participants have to be reminded about “Class 1” and “Class 2″, etc. The audience was -not- determined to prove the speaker wrong. That is not the way things were done.

which I suppose suggests the answer to this comment’s question is “probably not”.

[mesaoptimizer]

If you like The Dream Machine, you’ll also like Organizing Genius.

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