Metablog

I just had this idea for a new way to organize discussions. You’d start out normally, with a short essay stating a position with supporting arguments. Then people add comments disagreeing with certain parts of the essay. Disagreements fall into one of two categories: people who disagree with logical steps made in the argument, or people who disagree with the premises of the argument. (Agreeing/expanding, free associating, joking, or topic changes could all be handled like normal comments.)

People’s disagreements would be responded to by expanding upon the original text, either by editing it, or by adding an explanation that’s linked from the original text. (You could also respond in comments, but there are various reasons why that’s less than ideal. If you’re going to use a system like this, you’ll end up learning when to edit and when to comment.) The link would be in a superscript, like Wikipedia’s links to footnotes and references. The linked explanation would be shown in a column to the right of the original, using a bit of fancy javascript or somethin’. Responses to the elucidation could be shown below it in the new column. (This would end up involving some horizontal scrolling, unfortunately. There are some things that could be done to make this less annoying.) Links to elaborations that have responses could be colored differently so that people that want to just read through the various responses could find them. Also, there could be a link at the bottom of each response to the next response, either in document order, or in chronological order.

The disagreements themselves could be moved from the bottom comment area, to a new section linked to from the part of the text they’re disagreeing with. (This would be more or less useful depending on the length of the text.)

The idea of discussion participants trying to modify position statements in response to each other’s changes, instead of commenting back and forth without updating the original statements, is an idea I learned from Robin Hanson, which he called “reflective equilibrium”. I think it has the potential to make discussions more productive and less error-prone, but making it practical for general use is problematic. In general, the implementation would need to be friendly to ad hoc use by mildly interested participants. If it’s complicated, it’s going to scare people off, and people who do participate won’t be as involved as they could have been with a simpler system. If it has a steep or high learning curve, it’s going to shrink the pool of people who will end up being drawn into discussions. Naive implementations just won’t work.

Truth Mapping) is one such implementation. (I’ll set aside the primary weakness of the site, which is that the initial argument must be stated in terms of the logical steps of the argument. That’s not practical for widespread use, and may not even be practical for more specialized use.) It work like this: you see an argument you disagree with, and you add a comment (critique, in its terminology) stating the disagreement. The author of the argument responds with a comment. At that point, you’re out of comments. All further discussion has to take place by editing those two comments. Now, in theory, this ought to work. Any objections made to your reply could be addressed by changing the original reply to address them preemptively (or apparently so, in retrospect). But in practice, this doesn’t happen. At the Truth Mapping site, most of the arguments I saw (which is quite few—the place has been mostly empty for years) took place by appending replies to the bottom of comments, which defeats the purpose of the format pretty soundly.

Why do the participants resist the RE (reflective equilibrium) format? What makes it inconvenient and unnatural? Is is just a lack of familiarity with the format, or is it something about the way people want to have discussions? If so, can these habits be subverted?

My hunch with my latest idea is that there a certain kinds of inquiries that happen in discussions that are awkward and inefficient with pure RE, that are better served by the back-and-forth of normal conversation. One such inquiry happens as follows: I respond to an argument, the arguer responds, I edit my response to address the points made. But the arguer still feels his objections are valid as they stand, despite my attempts to address them. What happens next? With pure RE, the answer isn’t clear. The only obvious thing to do is to ask the person to clarify or expand upon their response to my reply.

If limited in certain ways, this back and forth might not defeat the purpose of using RE in the first place. But there is a danger that it will. I guess the only thing to do is to implement this system and try it out. (I implemented my last system, but it never got used. Let’s hope this one turn out a little better.)

Hey, check it out. 300 comments of people deriding my beliefs and treating me like a lunatic. And all because I dare defend the idea of the singularity.

I’ve played chess for a long time. I first learned from a cousin when visiting my grandmother’s house around the age of 8 or so. When I was about 15 I started getting quite interested in the game, and got some books to really start practicing it. This was about the same time that I started playing it daily in class with other bored classmates. (We had several classes that were sufficiently devoid of actual work to make this possible.)

I never could get my mom to learn how to play, or really my brothers either. And even I was reluctant to play in certain circumstances. I purchased Chessmaster 6000 (or some other iteration) and rather than playing the computer, I preferred to watch it play itself. When I started playing chess online, I got tired of the actual playing and started cheating using Chessmaster to make my moves for me.

So why didn’t I actually play? Because I lost. And losing in chess seems to be oddly different than losing in other games. For instance, I’ve recently been playing computer pool, and I don’t have any (psychological) problems losing half my games. Well, not as severe, anyway. For some reason, losing in chess feels a lot more like taking a beating than losing in other games. That’s probably what makes it so compelling for competitive people, and what makes it so repelling, yet no less fascinating, for people who avoid hard competition.

I’ve been trying in the past few days to get back into chess. I think it could do me good to regularly play several games a week. But when I sit down and try to get psyched up for a game, I find myself approaching the moment with trepidation. It’s almost as if I’m putting my intelligence, my ability, my very worth as a person, on the line in the game. Despite (or maybe because of) the fact that chess ratings are an accurate description of your skill at the game, as opposed to a reward for winning, it’s impossible to look at them without a twinge of shame, or pride.

Why must playing a game of chess be such a harrowing experience? Exactly how common is that experience? Continue reading »

I chose the name “Metablog” because at the time my main projecty interest was in ways of improving the quality and pleasantness of blogospheric debates, which, of course, is a metablogoshperical-typed task. (ish.) But, as it happened, personal problems and the tides of fate intervened, and my interest and energy waned, and I haven’t made progress on the issue. And this post is not a turning point either. But I do think that, today, I’ve come to understand one thing that was keeping me from working on this more than was necessary.

The project was just too ambitious. I wanted to make it a “Wikipedia of dialectic”, which is to say, something reusable and referencable and incrementally add-to-it-able. But I realize now that it was defining the scope of a very big problem, when there was a much smaller subproblem that was sitting right there with nearly as much urgency and fun to it. I just need to start out with being able to properly model individual debates. I need to dissect them, at microscopic levels. That’s plenty of work, right there, and maybe even something I can accomplish with a little bit of work. Very boring work, perhaps.

Well, maybe even that’s too ambitious. Maybe I should just start with normal, non-contentious discourse. I don’t think I’ll care to analyze humor much, but starting out with things that don’t generate big long flame wars might make the project less overwhelming to begin with. Let me start practicing on the easy things.

If any of you readers have recommendations on books about this, (which I haven’t tried to look for, because I hate looking for this sort of thing, especially when the emphasis and direction I’m giving it has probably never been studied,) please let me know. And please, if you would, provide a synopsis of the author’s approach so I can try to evaluate whether it’s even close to my own, because I’m not willing to try to extract value from it otherwise. My interest in this subject, unlike so many others, isn’t for its own sake. I’m interested in discussion as a performance art, and I only want to model it like a musician would learn anatomy to improve their technique, or a social scientist would use math. (No offense intended to social scientists, honest!)

Somnolent depression. Also called “retarded depression”. I’ve never heard of these terms before. I wonder if they’re in clinical use, or if some pop psychology snuck into the article.

Sara Robinson, at Orcinus, has just posted a list of different frames that people use for evaluating how change happens.

One of the grandest — and most frustrating — things about carrying on the great democratic conversation via blog is finding out how many of your fellow citizens (including many who are nominally on your side) turn out to be looking at the world from a completely different set of assumptions than you are. […]

You often find these meta-level disconnects at the core of online flame wars. […]

A goodly number of these online disagreements are based in our fundamental assumptions about how change happens. Believe it or not, different people can look at the same situation, and come to completely different conclusions about what’s likely to happen next. […]

My professors have, over the years, boiled the basic change drivers down to about nine. (There may be others; I’m open to suggestions.) In brief, here are the main assumptions people use to explain why change happens:

1. Progress. Change happens because humans want to improve their condition, and apply ingenuity and good problem-solving to create progress. The people with the best handle on the future are the optimists, though individuals have a lot of control over what will happen. Over the next 20 years, the social and economic conditions of the world will consistently get better, just as they have improved on a ever-rising linear path throughout history.

Her other entries include Development, Technology, Ideas, Markets, Cycles, Conflict, Power, and Evolution. Most people are partial to a few of these, and repulsed by a few. Some of them may be legitimately invalid. But they’re not mutually exclusive, so when two people argue over whether they should use one or another to evaluate the implications of some policy or moral stance, there’s often a neglect of a need to apply both frames in the analysis.

Sara thinks that these frames are behind most of the deep, hard-to-resolve disagreements between people, but I doubt it. I think that these are probably only a subset of all the different frames with that effect. There might be two or three higher-level categories that each contain a dozen basic frames, and this is only one of them. I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing. Sara is a wonderful writer and an insightful futurist. For more of her writing, see her Cracks in the Wall series, about the psychological roots and sociological roots of authoritarianism (especially religious).

When people in a discussion disagree strongly, I see a tendency for them to get especially exasperated when the discussion gets to the point where both of them are reading a small (e.g. 20–50 word) section of text, and disagreeing on what it says, or what the direct implications of it are. But I think this is exactly the opposite of what the right reaction is. When you find that kind of disagreement, it should be very easy to structure the remainder of the discussion around it to figure out exactly what some of your different assumptions and mental models are, which is very likely to lead to a lot more understanding. So you should be glad to find this sort of disagreement, since you’re lucky to have such a clear example of the nature of your underlying differences.

Unfortunately, people are much too quick to jump to the conclusion, in this situation, that one or the other must be acting in bad faith, even in the uncommon (but commendable) situation where they both remain civil about it. I think this is because people have a very hard time integrating the belief, if they have it at all, that differing assumptions and worldviews can run very deep and influence how we acquire and process information in very substantial and unintuitive ways. And so arguments often end up getting dropped at the very moment where they could begin to be the most fruitful. If people would just understand how deep these differences can run, and that they don’t necessarily make the others’ views illegitimate, then I think they would more easily see these instances in the light I do.

This might be one of the big mechanisms behind the tendency for people to have so much more trouble debating with people the further apart they are ideologically. The likelihood of encountering and disagreeing about a small section of plainly-written text increases proportionally to the magnitude of ideological difference between the participants. If this tendency weren’t there, people would still have a lot of trouble, but at least they wouldn’t end up doubting the other’s sanity.

Unfortunately, I don’t think everyone is capable of working through a disagreement on this level. It takes both an unusual willingness to dig into the argument, and a capacity for detailed philosophical or semantic discussion.

I think I’m going to edit this into my charitability post.

It’s weird how intellectual allegiance works. I had a scary experience yesterday. I was just reading along, forming a rough opinion of how much I agreed with the arguments. In general, I’m fairly favorable to them, but I worry that that’s just because I identify with the anti-IP culture of internet geeks. But then there was this one section I was much more skeptical about, concerning some attitudes toward government in general or something. All of a sudden the authors mention some other thinker who supports that idea, one that I generally respect and agree with, and who knows much more than me about the relevant issues.

At that point, my valuation of the arguments jumped. And if you’re a person who tries to overcome bias, the fact of this jump is pretty disturbing. First, I knew that it had no rational basis at all. (Edit: By my description, this is arguable. But take my word in this case.) But more importantly for me, it just revealed how much I had been evaluating all the other arguments using the same kind of credence. It hit me, pretty hard, the extent to which the subconscious* processes that comprise our judgment take into account tribal allegiance, and how that allegiance doesn’t have any consistent relationship to truth over humanity in general.

* I don’t agree with the expansive view of the subconscious espoused by many, but I don’t think the conscious mind is as powerful as it believes itself to be. Introspection, beyond direct perceptions of feelings and beliefs, is black-box deduction. We form theories of our motivations based on observing our emotions and their temporal relationships with external events and internal beliefs.

Continue reading »

This comment thread at unfogged was what sparked my musings about the absence of psychology in blogging, and its further development has given me an idea about why there’s a lack. I think it’s because for really helpful advice to be taken and given, you have to have a good, close relationship with the person or people you’re asking advice from. And because of the chicken-egg problem, a blog focusing on personal advice won’t be able to garner the trust and familiarity needed to take off. Plus, many blogs act as strong demographic selectors on their commenters, and people in similar life situations and of similar intellectual proclivities are going to be able to give better advice to each other than people with less in common. A more narrowly focused, non-ideological blog certainly wouldn’t do that as strongly. And the idea of the Unfogged post, of encouraging commenters, even regular ones, to post with a different pseudonym whenever they want to contribute an anecdote or ask a question that they don’t want associated with their main pseud for some reason, is a good one. People have already occasionally done this at Unfogged (and do it at other blogs, I’m sure,) but the practice was rare enough to not rise to the status of convention, and thus there was a small barrier that held back a considerable number people from asking advice over the months. (”Over the months”—heh, it’s internet time nowadays, baby!)

Robin Hanson, Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and others have started a new blog, called Overcoming Bias. I highly recommend it.