Here is an imperfect goal productivity method which I think is interesting. Please read the whole essay before trying to use (or criticize) this method because there are clarifications and extra details later.

This isn't a philosophical principle. It's a self-help method. The chance that any self-help method is useful for you is under 50%, maybe under 5%. If you intuitively or explicitly don't like it, don't do it. Don't pressure yourself about it. If you try it, feel free to stop at any time.

The Method

Write down your goals. Include at least 10 goals, maybe around 25.

Then order your listed goals from most to least important. Write the date and save the document.

Do it again a month later.

Then do it again a month later.

Repeat until some goals are in your top five for three months in a row.

The goals that reoccur are more stable. You shouldn't pursue goals in a longterm way until you’re confident you’ll have the same goals in the future.

Focus on your stable goals. Prioritize them.

Consider avoiding or rejecting some of the other goals.

The numbers are completely made up and can be adjusted to suit you. For some goals, you might want them to be stable for 12+ months before you do them. For tiny goals, there's no need to track them for 3 months before doing them. You can also do way more than 5 small goals, but if you're focusing on really big goals, 5 could be too many.

The most important part of my method is writing down goal lists multiple times and comparing them. What you do with the results is pretty much up to you and acting on the top five goals that have 3 months of stability is just an example of what you could do. This is basically a form of journaling and gathering data about yourself to better inform your decisions.

Precursor Method

This method is based on a method that was falsely attributed to Warren Buffet. That method said to write down your top 25 goals, then do the top five and avoid the other 20. It said the other 20 take away energy from the top goals.

According to The 5/25 Rule: How to Apply It [+ Example], you might choose these top five goals:

1. Revamp the social media campaigns
2. Launch an email newsletter to customers
3. Recruit, hire, and onboard an analytics specialist
4. Redesign the company website and branding
5. Revamp the employee training program

After choosing those 5 goals , you're told to avoid other goals like "Attend one marketing conference a year", "Hire a summer intern", "Plan a successful holiday party for staff", and "Learn a new language". That's weird to me because you could do all of them. That's not that much stuff.

If they mean only doing 5 goals at a time, it's still weird because you'll quickly run out of slots if you're doing some goals gradually. Like if you're spending an hour a week on language learning, that seems completely reasonable. But with 5 things like that in your life, that'd use up all 5 of your goals in only 5 hours per week!

So my changes to the method are to focus more on big goals and to take into account the stability of the goals over time. And I made it more about journaling and information gathering rather than about harshly avoiding everything that isn't a high priority. I also acknowledge that I can't tell you exactly what numbers or details to use; that's flexible; there's nothing inherently great about the number 5.

Details

The original self-help advice didn’t consider people who keep changing their goals (which is less of a concern when the goals are fairly small work tasks). Frequently changing goals is a common problem. People often come up with some new goal and while they’re doing it they think it’s important and will last for years, but then they switch goals after a few days, weeks or months. And they do that over and over. If you make a list every month, and you’re changing goals often, at least you’ll see that you’re changing your goals. You’ll have written data to show you that you haven’t yet figured out some goals you care about in a stable way that will last over time.

My method doesn't offer a quick win. It'll take at least two months to get started (you can do your third list two months after you start because the first list is done after zero months). If you don't have stable goals, then my method becomes only a journaling method instead of a productivity method. That's OK. It's useful track your goals and see how stable or unstable they are. Being aware of what's going on may help contribute to you coming up with a good idea about what to do.

This advice requires writing down notable goals, not “eat meals so I don’t starve to death”. If you write everything important in life, you’ll need to pursue more than five things. You can just write down substantial achievements you’re aiming for or whole topics to work on. In other words, write down aspirational goals not background goals nor micro goals. Or write down more types of goals but label them. Or make multiple lists. How to format your journaling is up to a fair amount of personal taste.

If a goal is unstable, be cautious before spending much money on it, or making investments in it that are meant to pay off in the distant future. It'd really suck if you did the bad parts (in your opinion) that you thought would help with later good parts, then you quit right after that. Or it'd suck to spend a lot of money then quit. If an interest might be unstable, try to get some immediate enjoyment and benefit instead of relying on benefitting later. Starting with parts you don't like could also cause you to dislike the activity and quit.

Also, trying to work towards being one in a million skill level at twenty separate things is a way to never be get that far at anything. Getting that far is unreliable even for just one thing that you focus on. Instead of using words like "great" and "good", it may be worth putting some numerical thought into your goals like if you want to be top 10%, top 1% or top 0.0001% at something. Try to be honest with yourself and monitor that your actions fit your goals in a reasonable way. Maybe in 20 years you could be top 10% at 20 separate things but maybe being top 1% at 20 separate things would be too hard. But top 1% at 20 related things is way easier, like if you reach top 1% skill level at a board game, maybe you could also reach it at 19 more board games, and that'd be way easier than reaching top 1% skill at a bunch of separate things that don't overlap much like farming, chemistry, Mandarin, archaeology, architecture, programming, cooking, pottery, etc.

Don’t spend a month on something new – and be so busy you don’t make progress on your main goals – and then next month switch to a new thing that gets its own month, and repeat. If you want to be a philosopher but make zero progress on it this month because you're so into photography, and make zero progress on it next month because you're learning Japanese, and zero progress the next month after that because you decided to work on a no-hit run of Dark Souls, which you never finish because the next month after that you're trying to cook perfect stews, that is a bad system. Those activities could all be fine if they're what you want to do, but if things keep not going according to plan and keep distracting from some other goal you want to do, then you have a problem. People can keep that up for years and never make advanced progress on anything, which is fine if you just want to try a bunch of things but bad if you wanted to get really good at something and you let each new thing get the way of it. If you spent half your free time on your new hobby for the month and half on a long term goal, that'd work better. If you get really emotionally caught up in new things to the exclusion of everything else, and then you abruptly switch, and you keep doing that ... that's OK if you're happy with that but it's bad if that's not what you want your life to look like. (If you're doing that but aren't happy with it, consider why you're not happy with it. You could be right or could be wrong. You could have toxic attitudes to greatness.)

Also, people commonly decide to do their top goals later instead of first. This happens on a one day timeframe because they want to be at their best when working on their top goals. They want to read about the most important topics when they’re fully awake, practice those topics when in a good mood with no distractions, etc. They try to take their top goals seriously by allocating their best most productive time to those goals. But they don’t have enough of their best time, so their top goals get neglected. To reach an advanced level at something, it really helps to take some imperfect time, when you’re somewhat tired or distracted, and use it on your top goals.

People also commonly put off top goals until later on a large timescale. They plan to do university first, or get their career going and get several promotions, or get married and have kids, or all of those things. Then they're 40 and they have new goals and they never tried for their old goals or they just did them a little as a hobby.

A point of the top five goals method is to admit to yourself that some things are less important to you and stop using too much resources (including time, energy, attention and money) on them. A point is to do some prioritizing: to make some intentional decisions not to pursue some things which will cut down on distractions and help you achieve your top goals better. Considering trying to work on one of your top goals every day that you work on anything besides paid work (rest days, sick days, holidays, vacations, etc. are allowed).

You can rest. You can be busy with your job. You don’t have to try to make progress all the time. But monitor whether you're actually getting to your top goal(s) a satisfactory amount. You may need to find some easier ways to work on them or else you may find you make most of your progress on other, easier stuff.

Also, don't consistently overbook your schedule and plan to do more things than you're actually able to do. If that's happening, pay attention to how long things take and work on scheduling more realistically or conservatively.

Conscious and Subconscious Goals

Valuing a goal in a long term way often requires (consciously) thinking about what’s important and why, not just trying things until you happen to stick with some of them (because you subconsciously like them). It's important to have your conscious and subconscious be in agreement. They both matter.

A common way people show they’re bad with long term goals is cheating on their spouse. Some people are unhappy for a long time and purposefully go looking for someone else. But others are happy enough in their marriage and cheat with someone they just met, just for short term fun, because they’re short-sighted, and then they quickly regret it. They didn’t ever effectively integrate the value of their marriage into their thinking and decision making. It never became intuitive to them. They’d have to stop and think to remember it matters. They’d have to remind themselves about upsides of their marriage. But sometimes they don’t stop, think and remind themselves.

It helps to do some introspective thinking sometimes. Try to understand what you consciously and subconsciously like and look for ways those are the same or different. Try to understand what you consciously believe but don't find intuitive, or vice versa (intuition mostly comes from your subconscious). If you lack intuition for something, more time thinking about it and practicing can help. If you lack conscious reasons, more research and analysis can help. And when your conscious and subconscious disagree, either one could be correct and either one could be incorrect, so try to explore with an open mind instead of jumping to conclusions about which side of the conflict to take.

For more information about how I think about intuition and the conscious and subconscious, see:

• Don’t Suppress Your Intuition
• Intuition and Rationality
• Intuition and Rational Debate
• Intuition Is Part of Rational Living

Greatness

You don't have to try to be really great at anything. You don't have to be better than almost every else who works on it. Pursuing that has upsides and downsides. I have high goals with philosophy and I seem to attract some people who want to be really great at intellectual pursuits. My mentor David Deutsch had toxic attitudes to greatness, and I think I echoed some of those, more so in the past. It's OK to just be good at things! It's even OK to do some things you're bad at, and never get good at, if you like them! You shouldn't feel pressured into aiming at greatness. You can live a relaxed life and enjoy yourself while just not hurting others.

Long Term Goals Affect Short Term Decisions

Knowing your goals affects activities now. If I read an economics book and I plan to read 100 more in the next couple years, and be really thorough, I'll choose one book and way of reading it. If I plan to read only 0-3 more economics books in the next couple years, I may choose a different book and read it in a different way. I may choose a more general overview. Or I may choose a book I particularly enjoy instead of making sure to read books from opposing schools of thoughts.

If economics is just a hobby, I'm not going to have time to read all the important books from all the schools of thought, and I need to accept that I didn't thoroughly investigate everything and know my limits. I'll just have to be aware that I didn't personally check everything in the field and that the summaries I saw are not fully trustworthy. Hopefully being open to debate with people who read books that I didn't read will help fill in the gaps if I missed anything important, but that isn't reliable because too little productive debate takes place in our society.

And if I were reading a book in pursuit of the goal of being a top economist, I might want to take a lot of detailed notes and aim to write several essays about it. If I were reading it as a hobby, I might not take many notes and write one essay only if inspiration strikes because writing no economics essays is fine too.

Multitasking

If you're actively working on 25 goals at once, I doubt that's going to work well. A point of this method is to limit your multitasking some. Even if you are a generalist who learns a decent amount about lots of things, and you end up studying over 250 topics in your life, you can't do them all at once, so some focus is still useful.

If you want to get good at things, doing each topic for a month will work better than e.g. spending one day on each topic and rotating through 250 topics 30 times each. It's fine to go back to previous topics sometimes, but it's also important that your work on a topic doesn't get spread out too much, unless you're just doing it for fun and don't mind forgetting a lot. If you work on 250 things at once, then it'll be common that after working on something for a while you get distracted for a long time by the 249 other things.

Imperfect Method

As I said in the first paragraph, the top five goals method is imperfect. You can apply it loosely. You can modify it. If you don't have consistent goals every month, that's OK; it's good to know that. If the method mostly turns into journaling and having some data about your goals over time, that's fine; maybe that's good and the most useful part of it.

If you don't like the top five goals method, don't do it. It's just an idea. I thought the original method was flawed but worth existing and potentially useful for some people, and I thought I had a modification with some clear benefits. My version has some downsides too, like a lot of people want a method that they can use right now, whereas my method just involves journaling for at least two months before you actually do much. I think journaling is good but if you will drop anything that doesn't provide a quick win, then my method won't work for you unless the journaling part alone ends up providing a quick win.

With self-help advice in general, authors, no matter how smart and wise, can't customize their advice so that it'll work for every reader they've never met. You should expect that well under 50% of self-help advice will make sense to you and fit your context well. You should approach self-help advice prepared to not do most of it. It's not all going to work for you, and you need to pick and choose what you think will work for you. You need to help yourself by selecting the parts that will work in your life using your own understanding of them.

There are lots of productivity methods. If you don't like this one, you can use some other method. You don't need this specific method in order to be productive. There's nothing super special or important or logically necessary about it. That's how self-help, life hacks, life pro tips, etc., work in general. Some people find them helpful, and if you don't, you can skip that one, and you should expect to skip over the majority of them.

I wrote this essay because I thought my modification to an existing method was interesting. I didn't think the method should be used by everyone or that it's super great or super important. I thought that goal stability over time is an interesting issue. I also think journaling about your goals monthly, even with no other steps, could help some people. Just record the information, look at it, think about it a little, and then do whatever you think is a good idea, and that simple method could work well for some people (and poorly for others who do better with more concrete guidance).

If you think this method sounds really super great, even though you're reading the "imperfect method" section of the essay, please try to think critically about it before reading the final section. I think the method is decent not great.

Final Comment

Here's another issue with this method. If you didn't think of this issue, I hope you can accept that you're probably missing some other issues too.

It's common that a goal sounds great to people until after they try it. If you just plan to do it, it could be in your top five for months or years, but then once you try it you pretty quickly decide it's not for you.

If you don't have experience with something, instead of making a big goal about it, maybe you should make a small goal about trying it out a bit. And even if you've done some trials, pursuing it as a big goal may be different than trying it out. It's important to have some flexibility after you decide on a stable big goal, both early on (when you're more likely to change your mind) and forever (unexpected issues can come up later too).

I watched a TikTok video by alimcforever that particularly impressed me. It's also on YouTube. It only has 8129 likes on TikTok and 164 likes on YouTube, which is an example of how merit doesn't reliably rise to the top. The content of the video actually helps with understanding what prevents merit from rising to the top.

The video divides the concept of small talk into two separate concepts, small talk and low talk. In this new terminology, small talk is innocuous, harmless, low pressure, low stakes, natural, organic, opt-in, and not something people typically hate. When people say "I hate small talk" they mostly actually hate low talk. Small talk can build comfort, warmth and rapport.

Low talk is socially obligatory conversation disguised as politeness. It can transmit expectations, social cues, microcorrections and microagressions. It can subtly ask for information about people's lives which can be checked for conformity. Issues that come up include what you do on the weekend, where you live, your appearance and clothes, appearing tired, low energy or unfriendly, what TV you watch or what music you like. These allow for social surveillance and subtle pressure towards conformity without overt confrontation. Low talk comes up frequently in workplaces, including immediately before and after meetings when it can be hard for people to avoid it. Anything that nudges people to do performative responses is problematic.

The examples of small talk and low talk in the video are good, and better than I can give, and the video has more explanation I haven't covered, so watch the video. I'll quote examples which may serve as reminders if reviewing this in the future, but I think they're more understandable in the context of the video:

Small talk:

[I saw a nice dog]

[I tried a weird sandwich]

[I] saw a fox today

Low talk:

you've got your hair different today

you're very quiet today

that's not like you

I suppose you don't do dairy anymore do you?

does anybody have any good gossip?

British low talk class sorting:

where did you find that jacket?

do you live around here?

I thought this low talk concept was important and useful, and helped me understand some common conversational patterns better. I really appreciate insightful commentary on subtle conformity enforcement, social status hierarchy behaviors, and the hidden meanings behind social interactions. I haven't found a lot of high quality analysis (in my opinion) on these topics even though they affect people's daily lives.

The video doesn't discuss boring, repetitive talk like "It's sure rainy today." Ten different people can talk to you about the weather on one day, and also the same comments can repeat on every day with similar weather. People in some jobs keep hearing repetitive jokes from many different customers. This can cause performative responses and feel obligatory. It can get into some problematic social dynamics, e.g. you could potentially be identified as a non-conformist if you say you like the rain, though I think liking or disliking the rain are often both acceptable. Your answer could be judged as low energy and bored sounding or warm and friendly. Silence could be taken negatively. I don't know how alimcforever would analyze this: I see some of the low talk issues but it also seems less bad than the examples she gave.

In the TikTok comments, someone said:

this is FASCINATING! i'd love to write about this- do you have any other resources? (by yourself, or recommendations? i will cite you of course!)

alimcforever responded:

I didn't get this from a paper. I got it from a decade of sitting in Teams calls trying not to scream. I just made up the term 'low talk' today to describe my the difference but go hard and steal it for your research if you want. A book I'd recommend is David Graeber - Bullshit Jobs

I'd previously seen alimcforever doing leftwing history explainer videos which contradict various mainstream narratives. I found them interesting and important if true, but in general I don't know who is correct about which historical facts. I don't strongly trust or distrust mainstream history sources and I believe a lot of research is needed to reach a conclusion on each issue, especially when the issues are politicized. That research is generally too much work and not a top priority for me. If anyone wants to research some of her history claims and share their results on my forum, I'd be interested.

If you want to improve at philosophy, it's important to work on it on a regular basis. It generally takes a long time to get big results.

How do you work on it? Read, write about what you read, write about your thoughts, write for sharing with others (e.g. forum posts, essays), do intentional practice sessions, work on underlying skills (e.g. grammar, math, logic, trees). These steps aren't especially complicated or hard to figure out. They're well known.

Many people would improve significantly if they did this for an hour a day for a year. Even 15 minutes per day for a year would lead to progress.

It's important to do all of the major learning actions frequently, not skip some. If you read but never write, it's common to make less progress. If you read and write but never do practice sessions and you consider all prerequisites boring even though you're not great at them, that can be significantly less effective.

Many people have issues with working on something consistently over time. Their life is chaotic. They get distracted by a series of crises. Their goals and motivations change frequently. They get interested in something else and switch. If you want to be an expert at something, you need to have a stable interest over time and keep working on it.

You don't need to be a dedicated expert at anything. You can be a generalist not a specialist. You can learn about a variety of things. Maybe you can learn more than most people about a topic in a month but not try to compete with people who spend many years on that topic.

Some people like to participate in philosophical discussions and online arguments but don't like to study philosophy. They are different activities, which can be related and connected, but don't have to be.

What can I do as an async tutor?

My main goal is to help people with learning philosophy. I can give guidance on productive philosophical activities and review work for errors. I can answer questions. I can converse with people, guide discussions between others, design practice activities, recommend readings, ask questions, and identify weaknesses people can work on. I can help with building up underlying skills that are relevant to philosophy.

People could (for example) read Eli Goldratt books without me, if they wanted to, and make some progress. With my help, they could avoid some mistakes, get some corrections, get some pointers in the right direction, get some questions answered, and get better results faster. I can explain Goldratt's ideas or point out connections between them and other ideas. My goal and role is to make things better and more effective, not to take someone who doesn't want to read Goldratt, or couldn't handle it at all on their own, and change their personality or lifestyle.

I don't make people do philosophy activities. I can't reliably fix motivation or procrastination. I can't choose other people's goals for them. I can give some reasons that philosophical goals are appealing and some candidate goals, which people may find persuasive or not. I can talk about what I like about philosophy. I can give some tips on scheduling and other related issues, e.g. I can recommend getting plenty of sleep. I can suggest trying a variety of self-help books until one works well for you. I can give some thoughts on solving some specific problems in one's life that are getting in the way. But it's really up to each person what they want to do with their lives, what goals they have, what interests them, what they spend time on.

I made my async tutoring self-paced, with procrastination and motivation excluded as topics that I deal with much. I don't have great, super-effective solutions there (and I don't think anyone else does either). I know more about philosophy than psychology. And your preferences aren't necessarily problems to be solved. If you prefer knitting or baseball, maybe you should do that.

Not spending time on philosophy (or another goal) can mean a lot of things. Maybe you're really busy. Maybe you don't enjoy it. Maybe it's not the right goal for you. Maybe you're a perfectionist who's paralyzed by fear of making any mistakes so you don't do anything (even though inaction and perfectionism are themselves mistakes). Maybe you're chronically ill, exhausted, or have lots of bad habits. Maybe things will be different later or maybe they won't.

If you think you should like philosophy, but don't, I don't recommend trying to do it due to feeling external pressure from me or other sources. Please don't think I am pressuring you every time I speak positively about philosophy or criticize something. People also speak positively about all sorts of other topics, like playing the piano or cooking healthy food, and they criticize alternatives, and that's OK and shouldn't pressure you. When I write essays, I'm sharing my opinion and hoping my ideas are helpful on a fully voluntary basis; I'm not trying to and don't want to control your life.

I often share ideas which you can figure out how to use in your life, or not use, as you please. You can also have impersonal thoughts and discussions about my ideas, or not, as you choose. Ideas you read in essays are never perfect, never 100% complete, and are somewhat generic or impersonal. Even when essays include action plans, customization for your personal circumstances is important for getting good results.

Even if I'm your async tutor, detailed help with your psychology or motivations is out of scope, and my tutoring is more focused on more impersonal topics like philosophy, English, math, economics, science, etc. I'm willing to make some comments on psychology or self-help as abstract topics but that isn't detailed personal advice and async tutoring isn't therapy or life coaching.

Note: It's OK for students to bring up personal issues including about motivation. If there are relevant problems, I do want to have some idea of what's going on, even if I don't provide a full solution. I'm trying to set expectations, not give students something to worry about; as the paid tutor, staying on topic is my job not students' job.

I can help people in a more personalized way if we do regular calls instead of just async tutoring, but ultimately, as Karl Popper explained, people do their own learning. People have to create their own knowledge in their own heads with their own conjectures and refutations. People have to think for themselves to understand what others say or what knowledge is in a book. Teachers and authors are helpers who can be quite helpful but play a secondary role, not the primary role.

Rootclaim does judged debates with $100,000 wagers and likes Bayesian probability math. They lost their first debate about whether COVID came from a lab leak (their view) or from animal-to-human transmission. They paid but didn't change their minds, challenged the guy to a rematch with another $100,000 wager and a different debate format (he declined), and are still challenging the public to debate it for $100,000. They did a live debate but now think they should have done a text debate with a tree structure (done as nested bullet points), mid-debate feedback from judges, and word count limits.

Judged debates are interesting to me because I kind of like the idea but I don't think they work well when basic premises are being debated. For example, I don't see how to get fair judges for a debate about Popperian vs. Bayesian epistemology. If a lot of basic premises are shared between all debaters and all judges, then judged debates can work OK. If people agree on epistemology and are just debating a political topic, then judged debates can work better. The topics Rootclaim is interested in debating seem reasonably suitable for judged debates, but the philosophical premises I disagree with Rootclaim about do not.

I like the idea of debates with wagers but I think $100,000 is too large in general. That size excludes most people. Wouldn't it be better to have a lot more debates with lower stakes instead of just one high stakes debate so far? I'd be happy to have some $100 debates with people. But without judges, how do you decide who wins? You can use an honor system. If either side concedes, they pay. If someone unilaterally leaves the debate, they have to write a concluding statement and answer some followup questions, or they pay. If someone breaks a clear, objective debate rule, they pay. In many cases, neither side will pay, but I think that's OK, especially since the stakes aren't that high anyway. I see many advantages to this instead of $0 debates (and some disadvantages too).

Is an honor system effective? I think it's moderately effective when the stakes aren't too high and people have a reputation: a lot of fans, a lot of karma points, a long posting history, paying clients, academic credentials, etc. I don't think an honor system is very effective with fresh anonymous accounts, or amateurs with no track record or reputation using their real names, but that isn't necessarily important. I think it can be reasonable to offer a one-sided bounty for debates: if anyone can beat me in a debate, I'll pay them. If that's reasonable, then it also seems OK to have wagers where you're not confident the other person will actually pay if they lose.

Rootclaim posted an article titled Every Logical Argument You Ever Made Was Wrong. The article contains some decent points about how many premises are false. It concludes that we should give up on using deductive logic and focus on probabilities instead. I disagree. Logic being difficult to use effectively does not imply that we should give up on it. Maybe some people are using it well even if most aren't. Maybe many people are using it well sometimes; no comprehensive study was attempted; just a few examples were criticized which don't fairly represent all types of real world usage. Maybe no one is using logic well currently but we should try to solve that problem instead of rejecting logic.

Although I haven't investigated, I'm doubtful that the math underlying their probability work avoids all uses of deductive logic anywhere in it or its premises. Rigorous math tends to be closely connected with logic.

In the comment section of the article, Jon wrote:

This essay is wildly wrong. When premises are untrue, the argument is unsound, not invalid. Validity refers to the formal relationship between terms, and is always defined hypothetically, “…if the premises are true…” Unsound arguments can be formally valid, but have untrue or questionable premises. For example, “Spot is a dog. All dogs have fleas. Spot has fleas” is formally valid, but likely unsound, because the premise “All dogs have fleas” is probably false.

Rebecca, who appears to be affiliated with Rootclaim, replied:

Thanks for commenting, Jon.

As you can tell, we don’t care much for logical reasoning, so we don’t really bother with the formal terms. Please interpret words using their normal spoken meaning.

I think this attitude is really bad. How did they decide that logical reasoning is bad if they never learned much about it and don't know the basic terminology? Shouldn't they have expertise at logic before evaluating and dismissing it?

• What is a philosopher?
• Why be a philosopher?
• What skills are needed?
• What are the goals of philosophy?
• How do you tell good philosophy from bad philosophy?
• Is philosophy for everyone?

Regarding whether philosophy is for everyone: it could be in a better world. It used to be that only a few people learned math, but now in USA we try to teach arithmetic to everyone in elementary school. We’re not very good at teaching it, but a lot of people become competent at it. Not many people become specialist mathematicians who learn really advanced math. Philosophy could be the same way: ~everyone learns the basics, but only a few people become experts on more advanced parts of the field. Like we’re trying to make ~everyone literate but only a few people write books, are grammar experts, or are great at analyzing and understanding text (which gets into philosophy skill too).

---

Philosophy is the field which takes on big, fundamental, timeless, impersonal and abstract questions which aren’t covered by the hard sciences. To some extent, philosophy covers anything which isn’t parochial and isn’t covered by another field. Philosophy also has some specific topics it has claimed like epistemology (the study of knowledge), rationality, morality, metaphysics, ontology, scientific method, political philosophy and some stuff related to logic, aesthetics and theology (but logic, art and religion are major topics outside of philosophy, too).

The origin of the universe is a big question, but the “big bang” theory is part of physics not philosophy. Philosophers don’t do a lot of measuring or experimenting like scientists. (In the past, there wasn’t a clear distinction between philosophers and scientists, and “natural philosophy” meant things like physics, chemistry and biology.)

Philosophy is also used in all other fields because it provides part of the foundations of all other fields. Philosophical ideas can be applied to help with other fields. Philosophy includes topics like how to think rationally or how learning works (conceptually; various specific learning or teaching methods can be outside of philosophy), so that’s useful in every field.

Philosophy generally doesn’t deal with the details of psychology or current events. It sticks to more general principles like political philosophy deals with broad, timeless questions of how society can and should be organized. Economics is relevant there but is its own separate field.

On average, philosophers are more willing to be unconventional and potentially offensive, in pursuit of truth, than other people.

Debate and rhetoric are partly separate fields from philosophy. Debate clubs with score systems do things that aren’t very philosophical or rational. But how to actually debate issues to a conclusion is a philosophical matter (as opposed to how to bicker with others in ways our culture current considers effective or persuasive).

Philosophy deals with some very hard questions which is one of the reasons it’s not very popular. People often get pretty stuck and come up with several plausible answers and debate those answers for centuries without reaching conclusions. Philosophy has been overshadowed by science because scientists, in the last few centuries, have made a bunch of clear, objective progress. They’ve settled a bunch of disagreements using experiments and more conclusive modes of debate. Also, successful technologies have been pretty convincing. You generally can’t build a machine to demonstrate that your philosophy theory is correct as you can with many scientific theories. And machines can provide a lot of practical benefit to people. Electricity and motors come from science. You can see that light bulbs work and they’re very useful. Whoever invents or manufactures light bulbs must genuinely know something since they do work. People don't go around claiming that light bulbs are impossible; they aren't controversial; while there must have been skeptics about whether light bulbs would work before they were invented, the issue has now been settled.

Philosophy is pretty fractured with varied opinions. Even when many people appear to agree on something, like induction or justified, true belief (JTB), it’s often not really much agreement. There are many different views on induction or JTB. Advocates of these ideas continue to debate amongst themselves. They haven’t settled the issues and moved on to more advanced issues. Physicists and chemists have a bunch of ideas which weren’t known 500 years ago but which are pretty uncontroversial today, which they can build on instead of continuing to debate the same old topics.

I believe philosophy is very important today partly because it’s neglected and unsuccessful. There’s lots of room for improvement and more need to improve. Philosophy is more broken than science, so fixing it could provide more benefit.

Scientists use philosophy (“philosophy of science”). If philosophy were improved, then scientists could invent more. Philosophy could also help with political improvements, moral improvements, and people having more rational, effective, unbiased debates.

Scientists use the “scientific method”. How does that work? What thought processes should scientists use and what should they avoid? How can scientists be unbiased? These are philosophical questions. The detailed methods of experiment, like how to use specific tools or chemicals, are scientific matters. But questions like “How do you know when you have enough evidence to reach a conclusion?” are philosophical questions that scientists must deal with. “How can you know anything at all?” is another question that’s relevant to scientists who are trying to gain knowledge.

Scientists all have philosophical ideas. They have opinions on what knowledge is, how it’s acquired, and what makes it reliable, high quality or true. Scientists have opinions on whether we live in an objective reality which actually exists or whether our planet and lives are all one alien’s dream or a simulation on an alien’s computer. If scientists have incorrect ideas about these philosophical issues, then they do a worse job. For example, there are ongoing problems with scientists confusing correlation (which is easier to find and study) with causation. There are widespread confusions about what correlation is, how it does and doesn’t matter, what it means, what it hints at, etc. And correlation is an abstract, philosophical issue about knowledge and how to learn things and seek the truth. It’s covered by philosophy. When scientists study it, they are branching out into doing some philosophy. How correlation works is the kind of thing which has to be (hopefully rationally) debated. You can’t do experiments to figure out the right perspective on correlation.

Sometimes scientists work on philosophy without realizing it. This can go poorly because they don't know what field they're in, don't learn an overview of what's already known about philosophy, and try to use scientific methods that are a poor fit for philosophical jobs. Not having all the biases and misconceptions of typical philosophers could also be a helpful advantage, but so far I haven't seen scientists come in and solve major philosophical problems while mistakenly thinking they're still working within their own field. I have seen scientists write stuff that is over 50% philosophy and then tell me I can't possibly understand it and evaluate it myself because I don't have training as a scientist. They don't realize they're working more in my field than theres, and they're missing more relevant background knowledge than I am. (I've also studied science and math more than most scientists or mathematicians have studied philosophy. While I'm not an expert, I do know a lot of the basics, know a lot of general overview/summary information, and know some specific details. I also have fairly broad knowledge about science covering many topics, for example I know more about physics than most nutritionists and more about nutrition than most physicists. Many scientists working on philosophy know much less about it than I know about science; sometimes they know so little they don't even know which topics are part of philosophy not science.)

Should we gather evidence to support our hypotheses, and then decide they’re true when we have a big enough pile of evidence? That is one methodology. There are alternatives, like believing that some pieces of evidence matter more than others. Or maybe evidence can’t actually be weighed up to see how good a theory is. Maybe evidence has to be interpreted by theories rather than telling us about theories.

Another methodological issue is p-values (probabilistic confidence values for scientific experiments). People claim that if certain statistics show over a 95% chance that their experimental results aren’t due to random chance, then their results are “significant” and any lesser result (e.g. 93%) is “insignificant”. That is confused and contributes to lowering the overall quality and effectiveness of science.

Worse, an experiment might get 98% confidence and be considered significant. But what assumptions does that result rely on? Taking a step back and thinking about the bigger picture is one of the things philosophers do. Many of the assumptions that scientific results are based on are actually philosophical issues, not earlier scientific theories or experiments.

Experiments with 98% confidence have premises like “There were no relevant factors that we didn’t control for.” How do you know that? Maybe there were. Evaluating that issue requires philosophical debate. Trying to come up with relevant stuff that you didn’t even consider is the kind of task philosophers deal with. Philosophy can be hard and many philosophers aren't very effective, but at least philosophers try to do this kind of thing and they are on average better at it than non-philosophers (people who don't study philosophy and aren't trying to be good at philosophy).

Judging which of two scientific theories is better or should be tentatively believed and acted on (or concluding that we don’t yet know an answer) is a philosophical issue. Deciding whether we need more experiments or we should move on is a philosophical issue. Those involved methods of truth seeking and evaluating ideas.

Philosophers deal with arguments and explanations a lot. Those are part of how we seek the truth and try to understand the world. And being good at those techniques is more clearly necessary for philosophical questions (where it's common to make no progress at all without good arguments and explanations) than for scientific or cultural questions (where people figure some stuff out despite being pretty poor at explanation and argument).

What is an argument? What categories of argument are important? E.g. there are positive arguments (supporting ideas) and negative arguments (criticism). There are decisive arguments and indecisive arguments (partial support or weak criticism). How does an argument differ from an explanation? Do all arguments have to be explanations, but some explanations aren’t arguments? What makes some sentences explain an issue while others don't?

Philosophers also deal with the nature of ideas, e.g. what does it mean for an idea to be fallible or infallible? Tentative or not? Absolute or not? Biased? Meta?

Meta ideas are ideas about other ideas. Philosophers deal with meta ideas a lot, while other fields don’t use them as much. Meta ideas let you take an idea, take a step back, and analyze it or talk about it. They’re crucial for not getting too caught up in details and instead seeing the bigger picture, as philosophers strive to do.

Philosophers don’t look at only the big picture. They’re also somewhat known for detailed debates over the meanings of words and sentences. They can try to get details right so they can be precise. Philosophers focus on conceptual and linguistic details (language is one of the main tools of philosophy). Scientists often focus on other types of details such as doing very precise measurements or cleaning laboratory equipment very thoroughly.

Philosophers try to use their big picture view to figure out which details matter and then pay attention to those. They especially try to pay attention to details that matter to figure out big picture views correctly.

Philosophers often fail. They deal with hard stuff so the failure rate is higher than in most fields. Sometimes they advocate wrong ideas. Sometimes they debate details that aren’t important. Whole philosophical movements or schools of thought have gone wrong (but perhaps so have some whole scientific research projects like string theory).

In general, it’s harder to tell when a philosopher is doing a good job than when someone else is. Philosophical ideas are harder to evaluate. It takes a lot of skill to work with them. But it’s worth trying, even though it’s hard, because they’re important.

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Here are some additional thoughts that partly repeat the above:

Philosophers take on the deepest, hardest questions. As we get better at dealing with some questions, such as natural science, it becomes its own field and stops being part of philosophy. Philosophers don’t deal with settled, solved, uncontroversial easy stuff. They push boundaries. They work on problems that aren’t well defined yet. They work on issues where it’s hard to tell even when you have a correct answer. Many philosophical problems have been debated for millennia or centuries without reaching a clear conclusion.

Are philosophers the deepest, smartest thinkers? No. There’s lots of low quality philosophy work. Also academia tries to commoditize philosophy into specific specialties where people can make steady progress (or just teach and talk about existing ideas while making no progress) doing certain types of less creative research. Academia tries to get philosophers to fit into some predefined types which is contrary to the nature of a philosopher. Philosophers should be seekers of truth who explore widely instead of each philosopher staying under a particular lamp post (with some lamp posts having thousands of philosophers crowded under it).

Philosophers do the most big picture and meta thinking. They think about principles and methods. There’s confusion because many scientists try to understand the scientific method, while many philosophers don’t. But it’s a philosophical topic because you can’t measure it. It has to be debated with abstract reasoning. Scientists often spend some time working as untrained philosophers, and sometimes do better than trained philosophers (the philosophy training in school has upsides and downsides rather than being clearly good), which gives philosophy a bad reputation and confuses people about what philosophy is and isn’t.

Many famous philosophers were wrong, bad, ineffective. Studying them won’t teach you to think effectively. Not many philosophers had very useful things to say about the methods of rationality, how to be less biased, how to reach conclusions in debates, etc. But those things are necessary tools for analyzing all the other philosophical questions.

Philosophy is important but humanity hasn’t done very well at it so far. The ancient greeks did well for the time period, but it’s not clear that we’ve improved much since then. Certainly the progress in science and math has been far, far better.

What do philosophers do?

• hard problems
• bigger picture
• meta
• methods
• principles
• problems not addressed by other fields
• foundations and fundamentals
• asking “Why?” more than other people
• questioning stuff
• timeless ideas
• non-parochial ideas
• questioning intuitions, not being satisfied by intuitions (not just rejecting intuitions either)

Fields of philosophy include epistemology, morality, ontology and political philosophy.

Epistemology is a prerequisite for the others.

Many philosophers try to look at epistemology as vague stuff like “What is the nature of knowledge?” They don’t see philosophy as practical. They aren’t trying to figure out how to be rational, how to be unbiased, how to reach conclusions in debates. You need that stuff to do any kind of philosophy effectively. All fields of philosophy (and all other fields) require some skill at judging ideas. Philosophy requires that skill more because you get fewer practical hints about what works or not because it’s more abstract and deals with questions/goals that are harder to define. You can get by as a barber, dentist or experimental scientist with less knowledge of how to judge ideas than a philosopher needs. Knowledge and skill at rationality helps, particularly when trying to make progress (which many barbers don’t even attempt), but a philosopher is in more trouble without skill at rationality. Or put another way, a barber might get by with mediocre knowledge about judging ideas (not none) while a philosopher needs higher quality knowledge to be effective.

This is a followup on my post Rationally Ending Discussions. It also relates to gjm’s reply and Dagon’s reply. gjm said (my paraphrase) that he’s more concerned about people putting ongoing effort into conversations providing low value than about people missing out on important discussions; staying too long is a bigger concern than staying too briefly. Dagon said (my interpretation which I think he’d deny): intellectual norms are not the norm when human beings interact; human interaction follows social norms and it’s weird of you to even bring up rationality outside of special cases.

This post is fairly long and meandering. It's not a direct response to gjm or Dagon, just some thoughts on these general topics. I think it's interesting and relevant but it's not focused and won't provide talking point responses.

First I'll give brief but direct replies:

For gjm: If people are systematically missing out on the best, most important discussions, so those never take place, that is a huge problem for humanity's progress and innovation worldwide. I don't think most people are doing a good job of more efficiently (meaning with less time and energy) doing error correction elsewhere when they avoid a lot of low quality discussions but also avoid crucial error-correcting discussions. There aren't easy, better alternatives.

Also, there are lots of ways to deal with low value discussions better without being closed to discussion and missing out on great discussions. People can improve at discussion instead of giving up and focusing only on flawed, problematic alternatives that also need improvement. It's possible to identify and end low value discussions quickly and rationally, and to develop and use rational filters before discussion that improve the signal/noise ratio without blocking error correction like typical filtering methods today do.

Also, most of the people avoiding low quality discussion and blaming others don't know how to participate in a high quality discussion themselves and should practice more and try to fix their own errors instead of complaining about others. If you haven't spent thousands of hours on discussion (and on post mortems, analysis of discussion, trying to improve), why think you're so great and blame everyone else when things don't work out? Even if you spent a ton of time discussing you might still be bad at it, but if you haven't put in the time why be confident that you're discussing well? Even many prestigious intellectuals with multiple books and tons of fans have not actually spent a lot of time actually having intellectual discussions and trying to get better at discussing rationally (and aren't very good at it). Even if they've done a lot of podcast discussions, that's going to be a lot fewer hours than people can get doing written discussion on forums, verbal discussion enables lower precision and followups over time than written discussion, and it will also leave them inexperienced at discussing with the many types of people who don't get invited on podcasts.

For Dagon: I think it's reasonable for rationality-oriented forums to exist online, and he was posting on one of them. Like science labs, rationality-oriented forums are the special cases where rationality may be discussed today, or at least they are trying to be even if they sometimes fail. Let's try to make rational spaces work better instead of attacking that goal.

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People sometimes stay in discussions they don’t want to have. This is often bad for all parties. They tend to write low quality messages when they don’t want to be there. And they write things which are misleading about their intentions, values, goals, preferences, etc. – e.g. which suggest they will want to continue discussing this a bunch in the future, as a major project, rather than suggesting they have one foot out the door already. When they do leave, it’s often abrupt and surprising for the other person.

Sometimes there are hints the person may be leaving soon but they aren’t explicit statements like “I am losing interest and may leave soon”. Often the guy’s explicit statements deny there’s a problem. Instead, the hints are things like being a bit insulting. If the guy is insulting you, you can infer that maybe he’s less interested in talking to you. Or not. There are alternatives. Maybe he’s just a jerk who isn’t very skilled at calm, truth-seeking discussion, and you can be tolerant and charitable by ignoring the insults. Maybe the rational thing to do is refuse to take a hint. That’s certainly encouraged sometimes in some ways.

Sometimes people think I’m insulting them when I didn’t intend to. What people consider insulting varies by subculture, temperament, etc. A thick skin is a virtue sometimes.

If someone insults you and you say “Is this a sign you want to end the discussion?” often they will deny it. They might even apologize and say they’ll stop insulting you. That kind of statement is often a more effective way to get an apology than directly asking for an apology is.

Why do people deny wanting to end the discussion? One reason is they think they should discuss or debate their ideas. Another reason is they think you’re asking “Do you give up?” They want to defend certain ideas, not give up on defending those ideas. They want to be able to claim that their side can stand up to debate, not concede. So when they end the discussion, they want to blame you or external circumstances, so it has nothing to do with their arguments failing. If they stop discussing because they’re tilted and they insulted you, it’s like admitting they don’t have reasonable arguments. So they want to reply like “No, I really do have good arguments; let me do a rewrite.”

The same sort of thing happens with milder stuff than insults, in which case it’s even harder to deal with and it’s less clear what’s going on.

Insults are one of the ways people communicate that they think you’re being dumb. They see your position and reasoning as low quality. Why, then, are they engaging? It’s usually not some sort of rational, intellectual tolerance, nor a belief that the world is inadequate so high quality stuff more or less doesn’t exist (so there’s no better discussion available). It’s often that they want to change and control you – someone is wrong on the internet and they can’t just let him stay wrong! Or they want a victory for themselves. Or they want to embarrass and attack your tribe (the group of people with similar beliefs that they see you as representing). Or if you have obscure, non-standard or unique beliefs, often they want to suppress the heresy. How can you believe something so ridiculous or sinful? That seems maybe fixable in debate if anything is. If you can’t even correct a guy who believes something that’s flat-Earth level dumb (or pro-adultery level immoral), can you ever expect to correct anyone on anything? And one might think that correcting people with unpopular views should be especially easy (but actually people usually hold unpopular views for a reason, whereas if they hold a popular view they might never have thought about it much and not have a strong or informed opinion). If reason can work, surely this is one of the cases where it’ll work? (Nah, it’s actually easier to persuade people more similar to yourself who are already pretty good at reason. You could see them as more challenging opponents but persuasion isn’t just a battle; they have to think and learn something from what you said in order to substantively change their mind. Persuasion is partly about their skill and their willingness to be reasonable voluntarily.)

The easiest people to persuade in general have a bit less skill and knowledge than you, but not a lot less. So you can correct them on some stuff but they actually understand you pretty well and they know some stuff about learning and being reasonable. Amount of skill (or knowledge) isn’t a single dimension though so it’s more complicated (there exist many different skills).

Someone more skilled than you, even a lot more, can be easy to persuade if you’re right – if you actually know something they don’t and have some decent reasons (not just blind luck; you can explain some reasoning that makes sense). But that’s uncommon. Usually when you try to debate them you’ll be wrong. They already thought of more stuff than you did. But if you’re right, it can be easy, because they’ll help argue your side and fill in gaps for you. And they may quickly recognize you’re saying something they haven’t addressed before and take an interest in it, rather than seeing it as “the opposing tribe”.

There’s no great way to know who is more or less skilled than you. We can approximate that some. We can guess. A lot of guesses are really just using social status as a proxy. Some ways of guessing are better, e.g. if I read an intellectual book and it really impresses me, then I may guess the author is high skill: probably at least near my own skill, or else above me, not way below me. Part of what happens in debate is you can find out who is higher skill and more knowledgeable. It’s a bit of a side issue (the main issue is evaluating specific ideas) but people do gain some visibility into it (though they often find it rude for the higher skilled person to say anything about it, and also in acrimonious debates usually the people both think they’re higher skill than the other person).

In some ways it’s not important to evaluate people’s skill levels, but it’s not useless and it can help with mentally modeling the world. Imagine if a young child didn’t realize he was lower skill than the adults he was debating, when he really was way lower skill. That arrogance could make learning harder. It can be hard to do everything in the maximally rational way of just evaluating every idea on its merits. Realizing you’re outmatched and should try listening, even when you don’t fully understand why you’re wrong about everything (and may not be wrong in every case) can help too.

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People can exit discussions more easily when the stakes are lower, when they have a good reason/excuse, when the guy they are debating agrees with their reason/excuse for leaving, when their ego isn’t on the line, or when they won’t be assumed to have lost the debate because they left.

It’s hard to exit discussions when you’re trying to prove you’re open minded or open to debate. We all know (at least in communities with some interest in rationality), in some sense, that we’re supposed to be willing to argue our points instead of just assert claims and then ignore dissent.

Having low stakes, no debate methodology, no claim that debate matters to rationality, etc., clashes with the goal of transparency and with anti-bias procedures. Cheaply exiting discussions without explanation makes it easy for bias to ruin most of most discussions. Whenever something important comes up that relates to an anti-rational meme or bias, people can just take their free option to end the discussion with zero accountability. It’s unlimited, consequence-free evasion.

How do you control evasion, rationalization, bias, dodging questions, etc?

Similarly, when people decide the other guy is an idiot, or the discussion is low quality or unproductive due to the other guy, then approximately half the time they are wrong. It’s important that there be some error correction mechanisms: when you blame the other guy, how would you find out if actually you’re wrong? If you tried to construct a length 5 impasse chain, it’d often reveal the truth: it’d become clear to reasonable people whether you were right or wrong (sometimes this will even work for you even though you’re biased: what actually happened in the debate can be so clear it overcomes your rationalizations when you try to actually write it out).

Standard discussion procedure largely avoids meta discussion. If someone says something I regard as low quality, some of my main options are:

1. Don’t reply. Don’t explain why to the other guy or to the audience.
2. Ignore the low quality part and try to reply to whatever I think has value. Often this means ignoring most of what they said and focusing on the topic itself. This often results in complaints from people who don’t think you’re engaging with them … which makes sense because you’re intentionally not engaging with some of what they said.
3. Steel man it by charitably interpreting them as meaning something different than what they said. Try to guess a good idea similar to their bad idea and engage with that. But sometimes you can't think of any good ideas similar to the (from your point of view) confused nonsense they just said... And sometimes they don't mean or understand a better idea than what they said or they would have said something better.

What’s not socially permitted in general is:

1. Explain why I think their message is low quality. This would invite a correction or an end to the discussion.

The first difficulty is that the other guy will get defensive and the audience will read it as socially aggressive. You’re not allowed to openly talk about most discussion problems and try to address them head on. You’re typically supposed to sort of pretend everyone is good at discussion and doing nothing wrong, and discussions fade out blamelessly because people have differing interests and because productive discussion is hard and doesn’t always happen even when people make good tries at it.

For certain types of problems, you’re not supposed to attempt cooperative problem-solving. You’re allowed to assume and guess about what’s going on and make adjustments unilaterally (some of which are wrong and make things worse, which often would have been easy to figure out if you’d communicated).

Continuing to speak generally not personally: If I try to talk about a discussion problem, and the guy responds defensively and fights back, what happens next? Will I learn from his negative comments? No. I will see it as flaming or shoddy argument. I won’t find out I was wrong. This happens often. Even if he gave a great rebuttal, the typical result is I’d still be biased and not get corrected. There’s nothing here that causes me to overcome my bias. I had a negative viewpoint, then I stated a problem, and he responded, and then why would I learn I’m wrong? What is going to make that amazing result happen? It’s a harder thing to be corrected about than a regular topic. Maybe. Is it? If I made a specific accusation and he gave a specific, short, clear response which engaged with those specific words, that’s fairly easy to be corrected by. Not easy but easy relative to most stuff. But more ego is involved. Maybe. People are really tribalist about most of the stuff they care enough about to talk about. If they don’t have some sort of emotional investment or bias or whatever – if they don’t care – then they tend not to talk about it on forums (they’ll talk about the weather in small talk without really caring though).

Do people care about things without being biased? Do they have tentative positions which they think are correct but they’d like to upgrade with better views? Not usually.

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What do you do in a world where the dominant problem is people staying in discussions they don’t want to be in, sabotaging the hell out of them? And the concept of actually adding anti-bias procedures is a pipe dream that’ll threaten and pressure people into even more bad behavior? What a nightmare that is if straightforward rationality stuff actually makes things worse? What can be done?

This is a rationality is a harsh mistress type problem. (In my opinion, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein is a good book, though it's not relevant to this essay other than me borrowing words from the title.) People find rationality itself pressuring. Rationality is demanding and people self-pressure to try to live up to it. They can experience discussion norms about rational methods as escalating that pressure.

And how will they respond to analysis like this? They’ll find it pressuring, condescending, wrong, hostile, etc. Or they might grant it applies to most (other) people. But they generally won’t face head on the situation they are actually in and talk about how to handle it and what could work for them. That’d admit too much.

So … don’t talk to almost everyone? But that lets fakers get to the top of the intellectual world since they aren’t really held to any standards and aren’t accountable in any way. But if you publicly broadcast standards, as I do, it pressures people; it’s seen as a challenge to them (it basically is a challenge to the public intellectuals).

Most people on Less Wrong (LW) don’t take themselves seriously or think they matter, but also won’t admit that. They don't expect to come up with any great intellectual innovations and don't think their forum discussions are important to humanity's intellectual progress. It’s hard to ask for the people who think they matter to come forward and chat. People will pretend they are in that category who aren’t.

One of the things you can do is speak differently at different places. I’ve tried posting meta discussion at my own forum but not on another forum like LW. This doesn’t communicate about discussion problems with the people you’re discussing with, so it mostly isn’t a solution. But at least some people – those who care more – can discuss the discussion. It also has the risk that someone from the forum where you’re more guarded finds your less guarded comments and gets mad. But most people don’t look around enough to find out. There’s a self-selection issue. People who find the less guarded comments aren’t a random sample. They’re people who are more willing to explore who are more likely to take the comments well.

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Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn’t like to have discussions with his own community. He doesn’t post on Less Wrong anymore. My experience is they aren’t much like him (where “him” = his writing, which has a variety of good stuff, but I think he’s actually worse than that in discussion; people rarely live up to their best work on an ongoing basis). His fans mostly don’t seem to understand or remember a bunch of his published ideas. Plus they’re generally pretty flawed. Not entirely bad though.

One of the hard parts with LW is people read random bits of my posts. I posted a bunch of related stuff, mostly in sequence, and then people come in the middle and don’t understand what’s going on.

I can’t explain everything at once in the first post and also no one seems to be following along or be interested in a sequence of posts that builds up to something bigger. And they are pretty openly willing to skim and complain about post length when something is 4000 words. Saying “this is part 3 of 6 in a series” and linking the other stuff doesn’t help much. Most people just ignore that and won’t go visit part 1. Even if they only wanted to read one, I’d rather they go read part 1 not the new part they just saw, but they usually won’t. Most people have strong recency bias and a strong bias against clicking links.

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It’s hard to signal the right things to connect with the right people when people are putting up a bunch of fake signals.

The people staying in discussions they don’t want to be in are communicating false information and causing trouble. This is a major problem that makes it hard for the people who want rational discussion to find each other. Instead of viewing them as victims of social pressure (which they are), you can view them as trolls who are lying and sabotaging (which they also are).

When I signal (or very explicitly state) what I want, a bunch of people join the discussion who don’t want it. They don’t admit they don’t want it. They make it hard to figure out who actually wants it because they’re all pretending to want it.

What can be done about this false signaling problem? I’m pretty good at spotting false signalers. I can sometimes tell quickly now. That used to be way harder for me but I know more signs now. And I can point them out explicitly and do analysis instead of just asserting it. But the analysis sometimes involves a bunch of prerequisites and advanced logic so other people don't follow it. I could also explain the prerequisites but then it’s a big, long learning process that could take years.

But what do I do when I spot fakers? Telling them to go away tends to offend people and get requests for reasoning that they will find insulting and unwanted. They aren’t really open to hearing objective analysis of their flaws. And this can also get multiple offended people to gang up on me. Doing the critical analysis and reasoning without telling them to go away gets a similar result; they don’t want criticism.

I can ignore the fakers but then they’ll imply that I don’t want discussion since I’m ignoring lots of people without explaining. That’s one of the issues. There are social pressures to reply. People make assumptions if you don’t. Willingness to defend your ideas in debate is already judged conventionally; that’s not a new thing I made up.

I’m not socially allowed to just ignore over 90% of people that reply to me on forums because I don't think their claims to be interested in discussion are genuine. And I’m not socially allowed to say I don’t believe them; that’s offensive. And I’m not socially allowed to explain why I don’t believe them and criticize their integrity. And I don’t know how to create productive discussion with them. And I don’t know how to explain that I’m looking for a small minority of people on their forum and get the wrong people to actually stop pretending they qualify.

I do know some stuff about how to proceed properly in discussion. I could pretend the person wants a real discussion and do what I’d do in that case. The result is catching them out and showing some example of what they’re doing wrong, since they never discuss right. But then they just stop talking or muddy the waters. No one learns any lessons. I’ve done it many times. Maybe some of my fans learn something since they’ve seen it a bunch and now it informs their understanding of what the world is like and what forums are like (or maybe they just cargo cult some of my behaviors and treat people badly while thinking they’re being rational). But the people at the forum I’m visiting, or the people new to my forum, don’t learn about general trends from examples like that. Because they don’t want to actually discuss the trends.

People’s hostility to meta discussion makes rational discussion pretty impossible. That’s the key.

The general pattern of what ruins everything is:

1. Problem. This is OK so far. Problems are inevitable.
2. Something to suppress problem solving.

Part 2 is called "irrationality". Working against error correction or problem solving is what irrationality is.

And suppressing meta discussion means suppressing problem solving. Discussions run into problems but you aren’t allowed to talk about them and try to solve them because then you’re discussing the discussion, discussing the behavior of the participants, changing the topic (people wanted to talk about the original, object topic, not this new topic), etc. People are interested in talking about minimum wage or global warming, not about whether a particular paragraph they posted fits some particular aspects of rationality or logic or not. People generally don't want to discuss whether their writing is unclear and that is symptomatic of a pattern where their subconscious writing automatizations aren’t good enough to productively deal with the advanced topic they want to talk about.

If you try to do X (any activity or project including a discussion), and then you run into a problem, and then you talk about that problem, that is meta discussion. You’re talking about the activity and how to do the activity and that sort of thing, rather than doing the activity. How to do X is a meta level above X. People do put up with that sometimes. Mostly in learning contexts. If you go to a cooking class you’re allowed to talk about how to cook. But if you’re just cooking with your friend, commonly you’re supposed to assume you both already know how to cook and don’t talk about how to do it, just do it.

Some stuff has problem solving built in. If you’re playing a video game, talking about strategies (limited parts of how to play) may be considered part of the game activity. If you go to an escape room, talking about how to solve the puzzles is normal.

What people object to is one meta level above whatever they expect or want. Which is often exactly what you need for problem solving. Whatever the highest level of abstraction or meta that they are OK with, if you have a problem at that level, then talking about that problem and trying to solve it is one meta level too far.

If the goal is to learn cooking, then a problem at that level is a learning problem (not a cooking problem, which is a lower level). And talking about learning problems would be viewed as off topic, out of bounds, etc. So you can’t solve the learning problem.

In general, people can only learn one meta level below what they are willing to deal with. If you’re willing to talk about learning to cook, then you can learn to cook (one meta level lower) but you can’t learn to learn to cook (same level you’re willing to deal with). Learning about X requires going one meta level above/past X so you can talk about X and talk about problems regarding X.

But it’s actually harder than that. That’s something of a best case scenario. Sometimes your meta discussion has problems and needs a higher level of meta discussion.

With cooking, some people are willing to talk about learning to cook while trying to cook. They’re open to two different levels at once. But typical philosophy discussion doesn’t offer two levels to enable learning about the lower one because people aren’t openly trying to learn. They’ll try to talk about AGI or free will or atheism and that’s the one single level the whole discussion is supposed to take place at. Just do it. You aren’t discussing how to do anything, or directly trying to learn, so you don’t learn. People will set out to learn to cook but it’s uncommon to see anyone on a philosophy forum trying to learn. You can find people on Reddit (mostly students who are taking philosophy classes at university, but some hobbyists too) asking for reading recommendations to learn from, but they don’t normally actually try to learn in online discussion. On some subreddits (like AskHistorians or AskPhilosophy) people ask questions and try to learn from the answers without having discussions. People tend to try to do their learning by themselves with some books and maybe lectures and then when they talk to other people (in a back-and-forth discussion not just asking a question or two) they’re trying to be philosophers who say wise things.

And people will claim that of course learning from debate or saying ideas is one of the goals; but it usually isn’t really, not in a serious way; their focus is on being clever and saying things they think are right and they aren’t talking about actually learning to do a skill in the way people will try to learn to cook. They’re always saying like “I think X is true because Y” not “I need to figure out how to analyze this. What are some good techniques I could use? I better double check my books to make sure I do those techniques correctly.” Whereas with cooking people will ask how to cook something, and maybe double check some information source to remind themselves how to use a tool, which is more learning oriented than philosophy questions people ask like “What is a good answer to [complex, hard issue]?” When they ask for ready-made answers to tough topics, they aren’t learning to create those answers themselves; they aren’t learning all the steps to invent such an answer, compare it to other answers, and reach a good conclusion. With cooking, people often ask for enough information that they can do it themselves, so it’s more connected to actually learning something.

Prices (or exchange ratios between goods) are not primaries. They are derived from something else. They come second. They are implied by other information. You can’t just go directly discover them; they aren’t inherent in reality; they aren’t raw evidence; you go find something else and then calculate prices from it.

The value of each good is a factor in a different dimension. There are no general case conversions between dimensions.

Many individuals make many trades. How is any one trade done? By people judging “subjectively” whether they prefer A to B, and if so they will trade B for A, and if not they won’t. People do critical thinking about which thing will be more valuable to them. Prices are implied by these many binary decisions.

Sometimes people trade using amounts, e.g. 10 pounds of rice. There’s still ultimately a binary decision about whether to accept a particular trade or not. But people also judge, in a narrow context, how much of something they value against how much of something else. It’s a direct comparison normally between only and exactly two factors from two dimensions. When people judge how much they value rice against wheat – what quantity of each they see as equal – they aren’t thinking about corn. It’s not a many-factor decision.

There are two main ways they compare quantities. They either think about what problems stuff will solve in their own lives or they think about using it for future trade, which is ultimately based in solving problems in their lives but more indirectly.

Money doesn’t change the principles.

Anyway, I was rereading Time Will Run Back by Henry Hazlitt (which I like and recommend) and thinking about the connections between the coupon market with its exchange ratios (from the book) and decision making factors in different dimensions (from Critical Fallibilism (CF)). Here are some book quotes:

There is no inherent exchange ratio between bread coupons and cigarette coupons, or between bread and cigarettes.

The gain from the exchange occurs in each case not because of some inherent difference in the relative objective value of the goods themselves, but because each party to the exchange more fully meets his own desires by making it.

“Marx’s labor theory of value was wrong [...] among other reasons, because it rested on the assumption that values were measured by some objective unit, whereas values are only measured subjectively. The value of a commodity doesn’t reside in the commodity; it resides in a relationship between somebody’s needs or desires and the capacity of that commodity to satisfy those needs or desires.... Marx looked for some objective standard of value because he assumed that two commodities that exchanged for each other must do so because of some ‘equality’ between them. But if two commodities were exactly equal, in the opinion of two persons, each of whom held one of them, there would be no reason for any exchange to take place at all. It is only because Peter, who holds potatoes, thinks that a certain amount of prunes, held by Paul, would be more valuable to him, that Peter would want to make an exchange. And only if Paul placed the opposite relative value on a given amount of potatoes and prunes would he agree to make the exchange.”

Similarly, there are no objective exchange ratios between factors in different dimensions. There are no single right answers for conversion factors (as there are between miles and meters, which are factors in the same dimension, length). Instead, the comparative values of dimensions are contextual which Austrian economists call “subjective” – they vary by the relationship between the factor and a person’s needs or desires (which changes over time even for the same person, as his situation, goals, resources, etc. change).

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Ludwig von Mises says socialists can’t do economic calculation (without cheating). This is a claim that unit conversions between factors of production can only come from the free market, not from central planners. Why? Because they are “subjective” – they aren’t inherent in the goods themselves, but are instead related in complex ways to individual contexts. So a central planner can’t calculate it because it isn’t a property of the good itself, or of the manufacturing process, or of the statistics on raw materials mined this year, or of any combination of such things.

The ways socialists cheat are to use prices from a market as approximations. They can get prices from memory, looking at another country, or by allowing some trade in their socialist country.

In Time Will Run Back, the plot is designed so there are no other non-socialist countries and the characters can’t remember pre-socialist prices (and conditions changed a lot since then anyway). It’s been 100 years of worldwide socialism, and they destroyed books with capitalist ideas, and they made everyone change to a new language and stop using all prior languages, and they’ve been using the gulag system on ~15% of the population (that’s at present – probably more in the past). The people who remember capitalism are more likely to end up in labor camps (or, to avoid that fate, to never speak of it).

So they wonder how to calculate the total value of all their production for a year, and how to compare it to alternative production plans. Another book quote:

“But, chief, how can you possibly have such a figure? What is 200,000,000 pairs of shoes added to 1,000,000,000 bushels of wheat added to 1,000,000 quarts of gin? It’s 1,201,000,000—of what? You can only add things of precisely the same kind—otherwise the total is meaningless.”

Shoes, wheat and gin are factors in different dimensions. You can’t add them to get a total. This logic matches CF. This matters to planning:

Suppose we increased the production of shoes from 200,000,000 to 250,000,000 pairs a year, but only at the cost of reducing the production of wheat from 1,000,000,000 to 800,000,000 bushels a year. Would we be better off or worse off?

Without prices (exchange ratios between goods, unit conversions between dimensions), they can’t compare goods (or services).

A person can judge, for himself, if he’d rather have one pair of shoes or four bushels of wheat. But a central planner can’t judge which is better for the country.

This is really unintuitive to many people. They’re used to having prices. They don’t understand that socialism would actually lack prices and be unable to figure out basic issues like these. It's hard to envision such a different situation where you don't already have prices and then understand that you couldn't just figure them out easily even though they're so familiar to us.

Similarly, one of the typical attempted answers to CF's multi-factor decision making claims is: just convert everything into dollars to get all the factors into the same dimension. In general in the world today, dollars are the best solution we have for getting many different factors into a common measure of value. People assume that we can do it for everything like we do it for dollars. But we only do it for dollars using a market. You can’t do it without a market. And, further, people typically don’t understand how it’s done with dollars, what actions are required, what limitations there are, etc.

Market prices fluctuate. That’s totally unlike meter-to-mile unit conversions. Why? The prices aren't inherent in the goods. They’re “subjective” (contextual). They fluctuate with supply and demand, which fluctuate both with the conditions of production (how much of what is being made) and also the preferences of traders.

So you can’t just find out the market price and be done. You need to keep the market around to find out about price changes. If you get rid of the market, your prices will get more and more out of date as time passes.

Markets aren't perfect by the way. They don't find perfect prices. They're just a lot better at figuring out prices than any known alternatives, especially for a large society or for trade between strangers.

Market prices are derived. You don’t just figure out the market price because it’s not a primary. It comes out of many individual decisions to make or decline particular trades. People often try to approach decision making by coming up with weights first, but that’s not how markets work. In markets, weights (how much each factor is worth) are implied by what actually comes first, which is individual decision making about specific trades. Weights (prices) are an aggregate that we see second.

The market is our best mechanism for dealing with factors in many dimensions in a unified way, and people typically don’t understand the market which leads to confusions about decision making too. Asking people to make up decision making weights is like asking a central planner to make up prices.

The fundamental thing is critical thinking. Would this trade benefit me right now in my specific context? I try to think of problems with it and problems with refusing it. I try to think of my goals and how different goods can be used to achieve my goals.

Austrian economics doesn’t know specifically how people make their individual decisions. It’s not an epistemology. That’s OK. It just specifies that the decisions are made based on people’s preferences not based on inherent traits of the things traded (those traits are still relevant though), and that different people have different preferences, and that people’s preferences change over time and change as their context changes.

A good (or trade) is a bundle of many factors. Austrian economics doesn’t expect anyone to evaluate each of the many factors, weight them and sum them. It just expect them to choose between bundles. Do you prefer this shirt or that sack of rice? There are many factors by which we might evaluate shirts or rice, and you may take some into account, but you don’t have to do weighted factor math, and aren’t expected or assumed to. Instead, you think about things like whether your old shirt can be mended and whether you have enough food. Those are factors but they don’t aim at anything like comprehensiveness (you can’t ever really be comprehensive). Instead, they are just a few key factors related to your problems and preferences.

People’s assumption that decision makers can assign weights to a bunch of factors is the same basic error as socialist central planners assigning weights to goods to enable them to calculate tradeoffs between different production plans. There’s too much complexity. Instead, people tend to make choices like “I prefer A to B” and if you get enough choices like that organized by a market then you can derive market prices. And then when you get used to market prices, you start thinking in terms of prices (factor weights), and viewing them as normal. But they’re derived and they aren’t available in general, only via markets. They are summaries of market trading.

Market prices don’t tell individuals what to prefer. You can’t/shouldn’t use market prices to know what trades to make. They don’t dictate how much you should value something. You look at market prices to see what trades are available. They tell you your options. You then trade based on differences between your preferences and the market price options. To benefit from trade, you must have some preferences that are independent of market prices, which you then compare to market prices to find differences, and then you trade based on those differences. E.g. you currently value shirts (relative to dollars or potatoes) more than the market does, so you can beneficially trade for shirts. (And if you value shirts less, you could beneficially trade them away to get something else (sell them). Positive and negative differences both enable beneficial trading.)

If your preferences exactly matched market prices, then trade would be neutral for you, not beneficial. Market prices are an aggregate from many people’s preferences which differ from most/all people’s preferences. They’re like an average or blending.

Market prices don’t guide individual preferences. They’re derived from preferences and only useful because they differ from people's preferences. Market prices instead help guide production and trade. They alert people to what their fellow men value highly, so that people can offer it for trade (if they already have it) or produce it for trade.

People commonly don’t understand dollar prices and how those relate to exchange ratios between all the goods. They don’t think about the wheat-rice exchange ratio or “price”, and the shirt-rice price, the potato-rice price, and so on. They only think of prices in dollars. They convert everything to dollars (like generic goodness points in decision making) instead of converting directly between dimensions. To compare shirts and rice, they tend to compare the dollar value of each. They may not even be used to thinking of which they prefer between the two. But they might wonder which of two expensive items they’d rather have, realizing they can’t afford to buy both. They’ll also directly compare two couches, realizing they’ll only buy one (for space, price and/or usefulness reasons).

Instead of pricing everything in dollars, you could price everything in rice. In Time Will Run Back, after a while the market prices everything in terms of cigarettes.

Mathematically, it doesn’t matter what you price things in terms of. Practically, it matters to use something non-perishable, small, light, divisible (for making change), easy to measure and hard to counterfeit – something practical for trade.

Why does the math not care what prices are stated in terms of? Because markets work to make the exchange ratios between all the dimensions consistent, and when we do math we tend to idealize the market and assume consistent prices for all goods. How do markets approach pricing consistency? Arbitrage. When prices are inconsistent, people can trade profitably and this trading makes the prices more harmonious.

If 3 rice is worth a shirt, 2 potatoes is worth a shirt, and 1 rice is worth 1 potato, then prices are inconsistent. You can trade 2 potatoes for a shirt, which you trade for 3 rice, which you trade for 3 potatoes. You gained a potato for nothing. Your trades are also asymmetric: you’re adding demand to trade potatoes for shirts, but not shirts for potatoes. You’re also adding demand to trade shirts for rice and rice for potatoes, but not vice versa. Because you only take one side of each trade, you help move the price. The more you demand potatoes for shirts, but not shirts for potatoes, the more you’ll raise the price of potatoes in terms of shirts. You can keep doing this until the profit from your trades approaches or reaches zero.

After a while, you have to trade 2.33 potatoes to get a shirt, and the shirt only gets you 2.66 rice, and the 2.66 rice only trades for 2.33 potatoes. And so at that point, you trade in a circle, ending up with what you started with (probably slightly less due to transaction costs). The prices are now harmonious. There’s no more arbitrage opportunity.

Since the prices now all match each other mathematically, you could state the prices in terms of any good, and nothing would be inconsistent with that. In some sense, money is basically just whichever good is most popular for trading. Money is used as a store of value (you can sell now and buy later, instead of only trading away something now to get something now) and for indirect trade. Indirect trade means I want a shirt but I can trade with someone who isn’t offering a shirt. I get a shirt through two steps. I trade potatoes for money, then I trade money for a shirt. Without money, indirect trade can theoretically be done but it's likely to involve more steps and more hassle. Money keeps trading steps to two maximum, which is actually more convenient than one step because I can buy and sell as separate trades instead of having to buy from the same person I sell to. I can sell my eggs to one guy then buy a chair from someone else, instead of having to find one guy trading a chair for eggs.

I'll close with one more Time Will Run Back quote related to CF's Multi-Factor Decision Making Math:

“We have already decided [...] that we are working completely in the dark. You simply can’t add things that are unlike each other. Or subtract, or multiply, or divide them, or even, in any meaningful quantitative way, compare them. You can’t add pigs to pears, or subtract houses from horses, or multiply tractors by toothbrushes.”

Time Will Run Back is available for free as an ebook.

Many people's favorite argument lately is to assert that something has "no evidence" for it. In general, there is lots of evidence, which they don't count for various reasons they usually don't explain. The kind of person to say this doesn't usually make a list of all the evidence and then go point by point and say why each piece of evidence counts as "no" evidence.

What do they dismiss? Generally anything that's merely similar but not 100% direct proof. They want the exact thing in question to have been directly tested. For example, there could be dozens of studies showing that masks work with dozens of different viruses. But then when a new virus, COVID, comes along, some people will say there is "no evidence that masks work for COVID".

They should accept that the evidence about masks and viruses applies to COVID because COVID is a virus. Instead, they focus on the lack of studies specifically testing masks for COVID.

And evidence is broadly overrated anyway. Lots of issues should be considered with conceptual thinking, logical reasoning, explanations, and critical arguments. Evidence is most useful when you have multiple ideas which contradict each other that you don't know how to choose between. If you fail to resolve the issue using many other more convenient tools, then you look for differentiating evidence. Before that point, you don't know which evidence to look for.

The concept of looking for evidence for (or against) one idea is wrong. The only way that can work is if you find evidence directly contradicting the idea, in which case you can rule the idea out. Other than that, searching for evidence about one idea doesn't make sense. Which evidence should you look for? Why that? There are no good answers.

Instead, it makes more sense to look for evidence when considering two or more ideas. Which evidence do you look for? Look at issues where the ideas make different predictions about the same thing. Then observe and see which idea (or neither) was right. They can't both be right when they make different claims about the same thing.

Having two or more ideas tells you where to focus: you can specifically seek evidence that'll differentiate between those ideas. You figure out what they disagree about, which is related to the physical world, and then go look at or test the world to get a result. Then, since the ideas disagreed, no matter what result you get, at least one of them is wrong, so you can rule something out. There's still no such thing as positive evidence supporting ideas. All you can have is evidence that contradicts ideas or does not contradict them. Non-contradiction is also called consistency, but that isn't support or justification.

The idea of looking for evidence to differentiate between two or more ideas, rather than to support or evaluate one idea by itself, comes from Karl Popper. So does the idea that evidence can refute ideas but can't support them.

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Say, as a simple example, that I'm thinking of an integer from 1 to 10. John thinks it's 7. Alice thinks it's 4. They can't both be right. If I reveal my number, at least one of their predictions will be refuted.

Say they both claim to have telepathy and that my number is 4. That is negative evidence about John's telepathy. He was wrong. Is it positive evidence about Alice's telepathy? No. This particular piece of evidence doesn't refute Alice being telepathic, but it doesn't positively support or justify it either.

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In general, is it possible to test the exact right scenario? No. You can do a test of masks with COVID, but you'll do it in a different room than I'm in. How do you know it works in my room, or outdoors, rather than in the room you ran the tests in? There is no evidence – no published, peer-reviewed studies – that it works at my location or in the identical type of surroundings to mine.

You must always use conceptual/creative/logical thinking, not just evidence, to decide how to apply results. If it works in Idaho, will it also work in Texas? Yes, because the physics of air, viruses and masks is the same in both places. Should I also wear masks on the moon? Not necessarily: the moon doesn't have atmosphere, so there's a relevant difference there and reconsideration and possibly additional evidence is required.

A scientist may test 10 masks. But my mask isn't one of those ten. It may be the same type as one of those ten, or it may be a similar type, but it's certainly not one of the masks that was tested. So there is "no evidence" that my mask will work because my mask has never been tested. This is absurd, but arguments that are no better are routinely made in public, by respected intellectuals, and accepted by audiences. Usually they are made in favor of conclusions the speaker, and a lot of their audience, are already biased in favor of.

Why are they biased in favor of their conclusion? Some reason other than evidence. They analyze it in some other way, reach a conclusion, then claim the reason they reached it is based on evidence, even though it isn't. They do this because "evidence" is widely considered powerful and considered the appropriate way to evaluate ideas. Arguments and reasoning are less fashionable.

In our culture, saying "all the evidence supports my side" is a great appeal to authority; if people believe your assertion is true, they'll be really impressed. But if you say "all the arguments support my side" people aren't as impressed. It doesn't work as well. People seem to think that confusion about arguments is common – arguments are fallible – but evidence is more safe, reliable, trustworthy. Of course, sometimes they're wrong, at which point they may say "the evidence changed, and I changed my mind with it" or similar. They do know the current state of the evidence can change, just as the current state of the arguments can.

I think appeals to authority are bad. But they do seem pretty popular. I think our society would benefit a lot from better rationality.

Perhaps the fundamental reason people get away with saying there is "no evidence" for conclusions they dislike is because there is no such thing as supporting evidence. They may dislike and disagree with Karl Popper, but they're also sort of implicitly weaponizing one of his major claims (about the logical difficulties with supporting evidence) against everything they dislike. But they're also hypocritical. They don't use the same standards for ideas they do like. For their own ideas, they claim there's lots of positive, supporting evidence.

The correct way to judge ideas is: can we come up with any alternatives which are not refuted by evidence or critical reasoning? If you use criticism, including empirical (evidence-based) and non-empirical criticism, to refute all the alternatives anyone has come up with, then you can reach a conclusion because you have one single idea left that survived criticism. At least that's what I think. Popper wrote a lot of things which kind of suggest a viewpoint like that, but he didn't get all the way there. He said you could use a bunch of criticism and then evaluate which idea best survives criticism and use that even if there are several contradictory survivors. Popper didn't focus on decisive arguments like Critical Fallibilism. I think Popper's proposal makes more sense than the standard view. It's important to use negative arguments and to consider alternatives. If you want an idea to win, you need to figure out and criticize alternatives, not ignore alternatives and add a bunch of support to it. Support doesn't work, both logically and practically.

Note as a detail: People commonly bring up the concern that alternatives haven't been researched enough. But "this is under-researched and more research is needed" is an alternative that's very easy to think of; it's generic and you can repeat it for many subjects without having to creatively innovate each time. So that is one of the things you should consider, and if all alternatives are refuted it means you have a refutation of that.

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A better thing to say instead of "there is no evidence for X" is instead "the evidence for X isn't a perfect fit". In other words, none of our evidence directly confirms X as a really specific, narrow claim. Instead, our evidence shows patterns that fit X pretty well but don't fit every detail. That doesn't mean the patterns contradict any details, just that some details are omitted.

For example, the evidence that masks help prevent the spread of the flu isn't a perfect fit for whether this mask, in this building, will help prevent me from getting COVID.

If you say it this way, it leads to discussion about what patterns we're aware of and have evidence for, and how the patterns should be extrapolated or generalized. What cases are similar enough that the evidence for the pattern is evidence for that case, and when does it not count or not apply? That would be an honest conversation, and potentially productive, even though I think that kind of positive-evidence-for epistemology is incorrect.

But when people say "no evidence for X" they're suggesting there's nothing to talk about. They're suggesting there are no patterns that may or may not fit well enough to count and nothing to be discussed. They're suggesting there is no evidence/pattern that is even close. They're being super dismissive instead of opening the door to conversation. That's usually dishonest. If it's some dumb issue like "no evidence that aliens visited us and planted fake dinosaur fossils" then whatever, the phrase isn't such a big deal. But for reasonable topics where some reasonable people are on the other side, the people saying there is "no evidence" for the other side are just trying to prevent debate by being unreasonably dismissive. They're treating the other side like they're being as reasonable and evidence-based as people claiming aliens planted fossils, even though they're just saying masks work for COVID. That shows poor integrity.

Also, when people say "no evidence for X" it often sounds to the audience like X was studied and failed. But the real situation is often that there's no evidence just because it wasn't studied yet, so if it were studied you don't know what the outcome would be.

Also, as above, often some relevant things have been studied, and it takes thoughtful discussion to figure out if they are close enough, if their patterns should be extrapolated to this case, or not. Or put another way, even if the patterns are a pretty poor fit, wouldn't that be a small amount of evidence, not literally none? Stuff has to be pretty dumb for "no" evidence to be a reasonable, honest claim instead of "low" evidence. So "no evidence" is generally a red flag about the speaker, whereas "low evidence" is a hint they might be a more precise, reasonable, honest person who is open to conversation instead of really dismissive of alternative ideas.

Tons of stuff hasn't ever been studied well, even things that many people claim, assume or expect was studied well. So "no evidence" doesn't really mean as much as it sounds like. Like there's often "no evidence" that a vitamin helps with a particular disease because that hasn't ever been studied. Medical studies on humans are expensive! But there certainly is evidence that that vitamin has various benefits, and there's some evidence and knowledge about its function that lets us reason about what diseases it could help with, so there is absolutely relevant evidence that could be extrapolated to at least partially apply even if the exact issue hasn't gotten an expensive study.