Metablog

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.

I write posts on topics that are all over the place. Why does it seem like there are no other blogs like me? Am I really that special?

No, it’s because the more narrowly-focused the blog, the more easily it will gain readership. For someone to become interested in this blog, they have to, in addition to liking my writing, share at least 20–50% of my interests. (People who share fewer interests will be bored by 95% of the posts and eventually stop coming, even if they really like the other 5%.) But on a single-topic blog, you get people with all sorts of different interests, who happen to share the one interest common to most of the posts. (Unfogged, for those familiar with it, is less eclectic than you might think on first impression—its topics are liberal politics, sex, humor, relationships, and pop culture. Not exactly an esoteric collection.)

The reason I don’t know of any blogs as eclectic as mine is that none of them have any traffic. And the ones that I have come across have been so boring as to hardly make an impression on me. Well, there go my dreams of being a B-list blogger.

BTW, major periodicals are successful despite their range of subject matter because (a) journalists are paid to write in an entertaining way about subjects readers are unfamiliar with. Writing for a lay audience is something experts don’t often do for free, and when they do it’s usually only on their main subject of expertise, so the eclectic blogs tend to be a bit more in-groupy (and, of course, less expert). Also, (b) the mass media are sources of original reporting, and (c) periodicals come in chunks all at once, so ignoring all of the articles you’re not interested in is less annoying than with blogs. Plus any number of smaller reasons.

I made a little script for Unfogged comments threads that linkifies numbers in comments to go to the comment with that number. Link.

It sort of breaks on comments with links in them that have numbers in the URL. Not sure how I’d go about fixing that.

It should be extendable, with trivial modifications, to most other blogs with comments that use comment numbers in the same way.

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!)

Something I’ve been wondering recently about the internet. Where are the good psychology blogs? No, not this kind of psychology blog—I mean the kind of theraputic psychology with psychoanalysis behavioral therapy and “tell me about your mother”. There’s plenty of pablum out there. And there are plenty of people who occasionally or even regularly blog about sometimes intensely personal issues. But where are the expert or amateur counselor-bloggers? It seems like everything on the internet of this nature is just big, poorly designed ads for some service or workshop or book or 8-cassette-series-with-free-workbook-for-only-49-95. It’s all shit. And yeah, there’s a a few good things, like eMedicine, but it’s not really the same thing as concrete advice, you know? I’m just surprised at the lack of quality that abounds. It either indicates that I really don’t know where to look, or that psychological counselling is a profession that is really low on brainpower. Or maybe that no one really knows what they’re doing?

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

Charity sure doesn’t get a lot of love. Many Unfogged commenters don’t like the idea much. (Though more express support.) It’s so frustrating to combat the cynicism of those who think there’s not any hope for people productive rational debate. Take, for instance, comments from SomeCallMeTim:

Particularly when we’re talking about something that has been widely discussed, like abortion, people lining up on different sides have at least slightly different baseline principles. And those baseline principles are themselves contingent on a certain series of assumption about facts and the way those facts relate to other facts, and so on. You can’t really overcome the tendency because you often aren’t trying to overcome one opinion, but a host of them, the vast majority of which never get brought up in the debate for reasons of time, etc.

I think we disagree about the (a) the existence of common priors, (b) how willing we are to change our common priors, and (c) how deeply rooted and, at the same time, contingent belief in a set of common priors really is. I think you’re looking for a coherence, stability, and factuality to beliefs that simply doesn’t exist, for any of us. Debating or arguing is really much more about finding out the shape of a possible deal, with the understanding that, like any deal, someone may pull out down the line when his perceived interests change.

What can you say to that? Perhaps a study that trains people in debating productively, then pits those people in discussions with ideological separated people and see if their position changes more than a control group? Maybe there’s some easier way to test the issue using existing data? Someone call Steven Levitt.

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RCIACID metastasizes! I basically rewrote the last section, and it turned out to be less “rules concerning implication and charity in debate” and more “how to debate charitably”. I think I might split up the page into two. They basically talk about the same thing, but from opposite perspectives, and thus they don’t actually have much substance in common. Decisions, decisions.

Having participated in a couple of discussions in the past day or two, my experience has really driven home, once again, my belief that most people are really terrible at debating. So I decided to write an article about the biggest problem I saw. (I completely gave up on the discussion at Alas, a Blog. The commenters ginmar and Q Grrl especially were guilty of the faults I describe there. Also, I’m not resentful in particular about these discussions, they just happened to be the most recent ones I’ve had that have led me to think about these issues, and thus, to write this post. Also, I’d like to say that LizardBreath is already a quite good follower of the advice I give in the third section of the article, though of course there’s always room for improvement.)

You should really, really go read it now. It’s also right over there on the sidebar, so if you ever want to link to it, you know where to find it.

I remember reading somewhere (don’t feel like googling) that people who spend time in “enemy” forums, like liberals posting at Red State or whatnot, tend to solidify their prejudices about the other side, and rarely really gain a more naunced and sympathetic understanding of their opponents’ positions. I wonder if the dynamic I describe in the article is at least part of the mechanism behind this.