curi & Firebench debate part 2
Part 2 continuing: https://3.basecamp.com/4983193/buckets/20858411/messages/3700597864
(Part 2 because basecamp doesn't support long topics. They start loading very slowly.)
(Part 2 because basecamp doesn't support long topics. They start loading very slowly.)
You have used the word "productive" several times. I would like to know what you mean by the term.
I have written a conversation tree for the nested quoting branch.
Elliot's Discussion Half
Firebench's Discussion Half
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What criticisms do you have of my conversation tree?
Elliot's Discussion Half
Anyway, here's my tree, what do you think generally, any specific objections, and how would you compare to yours? (if that's too much at once you can just answer part)
Firebench's Discussion Half
Writing the tree was definitely worthwhile for me to see that I wasn't approaching the conversation anywhere seriously enough. I didn't come into this debate with enough respect for you.
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In gigahurt's initial response to your post, he says:
Your summary of that sentence is "Good attitude." but I think that misses the subtext. He doesn't say it literally, but I think what he's saying is that he agrees with your motive (explicit) but not your method (implicit).
Shortly afterwards he says:
Your summary is: "but requiring that ideal would be problematic because people resent speech control".
You're making a literal interpretation, but I think what he actually means in addition to the literal meaning is your method is overly controlling.
This is guessing of course. I wonder, though, whether it would be worth adding guesses about implicit ideas to the nodes in the tree. What do you think?
Elliot's Discussion Half
Firebench's Discussion Half
But my response said I didn't know which question you were talking about. There were two questions I hadn't answered on the grounds I thought them rhetorical. Your summary loses sight of an error in your post that there was only a single question I'd missed.
Another example is you miss out my explanations about what I meant by "lazy" and give the impression that it was no more than a joke, rather than a humorous way to say something serious.
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Why do you think our debate is worth continuing?
Elliot's Discussion Half
Firebench's Discussion Half
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I don't find this a reasonable answer to my question (it implies I have done those things without explaining how), which means I've had a wasted question. I'll reword it into two parts.
Do you think our debate is worth continuing? If so, why?
Elliot's Discussion Half
Source: Re: 😊 curi & Firebench Debate - FI Learning
Firebench's Discussion Half
I thought you'd be able to understand how. From your rephrasing, it still looks to me like you do understand it. Are you saying you don't understand it? (If you do understand it, why waste time objecting and bringing this up?)
When you cross lines that are bad enough that I'm unwilling to answer a question, you should consider apologizing and trying to treat me in a reasonable way going forward, rather than complaining to the person you mistreated. Alternatively, you could write something substantive debating whether or not the line you crossed is actually important.
(BTW, I've been repeatedly generous and written much more than the minimum, as a conscious decision. This is another example. If you're going to have an ongoing attitude of detailed monitoring who does how much work and is how responsive, instead of being generous and charitable, I think we should just stop now. In general, I only raise problems I regard as of major importance and worth the attention; so you should either treat it as important or ask about why I think it is or debate it's importance if you know my reasoning but disagree. But don't casually assume I'm saying or doing stuff that doesn't matter. From my POV, I've let dozens of your errors pass without comment, to respond only to really crucial issues. I've also, at other times, said things of lesser importance but in a way where I thought you'd be able to tell that it was an aside or more minor thing. Sometimes I label things or give some other indicators. My objection to putting words in my mouth was not an aside.)
Elliot's Discussion Half
I recognized that I had been viewing the prose differently from the tree.
No, perhaps it wasn't clear, I changed my mind about the prose too after you gave the tree example. That is why I said, "Thank you for continuing to hammer the point until I got it." I have worked a lot with logic trees and trying to make the logic correct. The tree example helped me recognize that the precision I expect in a tree is just as important in prose too.
I'm no longer treating them differently. That is why I thought that the nested quote branch of the tree was resolved. I.e. I demonstrated to you that I understood what was wrong with my use of quotes and I changed my view and recognized that the error was important, not a triviality.
Firebench's Discussion Half
I objected because you didn't give reasons or make a clear connection to what I said. You left it to me to make some sort of guess about what you must mean—e.g. presuming that it was my previous question that you didn't like. I decided to make that guess rather than waste another question.
If you think I've crossed a line, I think you should make it super-clear what I have done, so I have a chance to defend myself from the charges.
I don't think I have crossed a line. I don't think I spoke for you or put words in your mouth. The assumption that was embedded in my question came from the following logic:
If I put words in your mouth then I agree that would be a serious matter.
If I did, please can you explain as clearly as you can why you think I did (if you can include general advice too that would be even better) so that I can try to avoid making the same mistake again.
If you don't mind, I would also appreciate an answer to why you are continuing to debate with me?
Elliot's Discussion Half
Firebench's Discussion Half
I was trying to be clear. I directly, explicitly raised my objection. The problem, which is very well known, is that I want to speak for myself. You don't get to present my opinions for me. I'll choose what to say and how to present it myself. Just because your assumption is a reasonable guess about my opinions doesn't mean it's OK to put words in my mouth and set things up so that I have to either confront you or accept your framing of my ideas.
PS You're saying lots at once, so I'm not responding to all your errors. Do not assume that no response to a point means I agree with or concede anything (as you've brought up previously).
Elliot's Discussion Half
Firebench's Discussion Half
I understand you want to speak for yourself. That's not news to me. I do too. What you didn't express clearly, directly and explicitly was what I had done that led you to claim I was speaking for you.
You need to explain why this is putting words in your mouth because I don't get it. I can see that there was an embedded assumption and that you would have to confront the framing of ideas, but I don't see what that has to do with your words or mouth.
Edit: Removed an extra word "to" that snuck in there.
Elliot's Discussion Half
But the prose wasn't low precision. It was wrong. Low precision basically means leaving out details, but what you did wasn't an omission like that. I think there's more going on here and it's important to dig deeper to find out more about what happened. I think you're trying to reach a conclusion too early and quickly. Does this project make sense and seem valuable to you?
EDIT: typo, deleted "what"
Firebench's Discussion Half
You built an idea about my opinion into your question, as an assumption, using the words "you think [Firebench's writing]", which is really blatant. That let you express my opinion with your words, framing and presentation. You were writing something (what I think) that should be my writing, not yours, and designed the question to move past it without me ever writing my own version (so it should be only me writing it, but you set it up to be only you).
Elliot's Discussion Half
Firebench's Discussion Half
I'm still interested in why are you continuing this debate with me. (I think if I know what the value is for you, I might be able to help achieve it faster.)
Elliot's Discussion Half
Firebench's Discussion Half
Re: 😊 curi & Firebench Debate - FI Learning
Elliot's Discussion Half
I agree with your point. No objections.
Firebench's Discussion Half
Elliot's Discussion Half
Also can you give a yes/no answer to whether you have more guesses of your own about what happened? You didn't volunteer another guess after my criticism of your first one, so I don't know whether you have more that I should be asking about or not.
Firebench's Discussion Half
Followups about the nested quoting related discussion branch.
Elliot's Discussion Half
I don't think that's right. I was chatting to a friend this morning about this debate and I was able to go through point by point what you said and what I said in different threads of the conversation. So the trees seem to be there in my mind.
Yes, I have another guess.
Firebench's Discussion Half
What is the value to you of these followups?
Elliot's Discussion Half
But you were doing that chatting in a conscious, purposeful, intentional way, so I think it doesn't give clear info about your autopilots (they do remember stuff; info is there; but that doesn't mean it's taken into account in certain ways automatically). But go ahead with your guess.
Firebench's Discussion Half
Elliot's Discussion Half
It's funny that you talk about purpose and intention because that's really what my second guess was about.
Firebench's Discussion Half
Elliot's Discussion Half
PS If you have any current/outstanding objections to past stuff (including thinking I made a mistake that you want to pursue), please bring it up in your half.
Firebench's Discussion Half
I do get useful partial hints from people. It's often hard to give them much credit, e.g. b/c they actually disagree with the conclusion I reached after considering a chunk of what they said, or because the new idea is 95% stuff they didn't know.
Overall, I think this reflects on the state of the world (negatively) and on how much I've learned using past study and discussion (positively).
Elliot's Discussion Half
It makes sense and it's fair.
No problem. That's what I would have done even if you hadn't said so. Just to clarify: the things I said in my guess were not meant to be criticisms of your actions, but recollections of what happened and my state of mind at the time.
Firebench's Discussion Half
Elliot's Discussion Half
Yeah I wasn't trying to.
I have a criticism of your explanation re the nested quoting error, but I want to start with something else first.
and
Why weren't you doing it already, earlier in the discussion?
Firebench's Discussion Half
I don't post-mortem minor errors like typos or comma splices. I could find you examples of those but I doubt they'll be useful. I also don't post-mortem suggested improvements on (usually private) drafts like that a particular part needs to be clearer or better organized. Those aren't really errors – I knew it was a flawed draft and I wanted that type of feedback. Also the general context of my articles is not seeking perfection, so imperfections aren't really errors – I'm aiming to create good work in a time-efficient way, not to e.g. have exactly zero typos (so I could, but usually don't, do an editing pass with text-to-speech which is a good way to catch more typos). I do pay attention to patterns of issues and consider if I should work on something in general, and I privately reflect and freewrite regularly.
It's also hard to post-mortem stuff that I changed my mind about or improved gradually over a period of years. But I've done some recent blog posts like https://curi.us/2414-what-i-learned-from-autonomy-respecting-relationships and https://curi.us/2426-biases-david-deutsch-taught-me so I'm not sure why you found zero examples – I think you're excluding stuff in some way that's not clear to me.
One of the reasons for a low error rate, besides fixing many things in the past, is having a good grasp of what I do and don't know, and appropriately qualifying statements when I don't know.
I'm also good at changing stuff quickly instead of getting defensive and doubling down on errors – but this doesn't lead to examples where I debated much and then changed my mind after that. For example, today I was thinking we'd need a manual process for member signups for the new forum because I'm going to use Ghost not Wordpress, so we won't have the Wordpress plugin for that. But I was wrong and Justin corrected me: there is a Discourse plugin for doing paid members which we should use instead of a manual process. But I didn't persist with my error so it wasn't really a notable event.
Anyway, while I don't think my philosophical ideas are perfect, I don't think anyone (besides myself) is currently willing and able to correct them in any big ways. And it's been like that for over 10 years. Partly it's because almost no one adequately understands the prior ideas I'm building on like Popper's, Rand's and Goldratt's ideas. Even understanding one of those thinker's ideas with great quality is very rare; understanding two or three is pretty non-existent outside my community.
I think a lot of specialist academics have a somewhat similar experience or viewpoint – they don't really think people outside their specialty can correct them – but the difference is they are making lots of mistakes revealed by stuff outside their specialty (particularly philosophy because they are always doing philosophy, whether they realize or study it or not), but my specialty is much more generic and helps with skills like knowing where the boundaries of fields are so I don't make a bunch of mistakes that they could use their specialty to correct (they use philosophy regularly without realizing it; I don't use ancient greek history or chemistry without realizing it). Also my field actually addresses how to find and correct mistakes, what a mistake is, how to debate, etc., while theirs does not.
Elliot's Discussion Half
I'm not certain what you mean by this question. My understanding is that "it" refers to bringing up objections to past stuff while in your half. I don't think I've brought up any objections in the wrong half since we split the conversation, but I may have done so inadvertently.
If you mean before we split the conversation, I'm not sure. I suppose I felt the conversation had become about drilling into the other person's errors until they admitted an error. You were trying to continue to press me on my quoting, when I thought I'd shown that I understood the mistake and I'd accepted your point. I brought up some criticisms that you seemed to evade. It all seemed a bit unfair, ego-led and win/lose to me and I was trying to stand my ground. I put it down to "storming"—a stage you can expect to go through before you get to "norming" and "performing".
As an aside, I think we've gone through the storming now. I think I get your modus operandi and am comfortable with it. I'm no longer thinking that you're going for win/lose and being pedantic. I was mistaken to think that way.
Firebench's Discussion Half
Do you currently think I actually did anything wrong?
Technically, no. But if you wanted to bring me into your approach quickly and smoothly, I think there were things you could have said that would have helped me. E.g. giving more explanation about your positive intentions along with your first few criticisms, and perhaps also some recognition of the effort I'd put in and my own good intentions.
At the time I received this response, I did not know that you wanted me to interpret your statements in a matter-of-fact way. I was still in the mode of trying to guess what you really meant. My guesses were that you were irritable and didn't have any respect for me.
I would suggest something like this:
The idea is to try to emanate respect, assume good intentions on my part, and explain your good intentions really early on.
There are major problems with saying it that way, and I think your view of how to conduct conversations effectively is unrealistic, as well as hindsight-biased regarding your personal pov. I think you lack relevant experience as well as theory with which to judge these things. You're trying to teach me about a subject I know a lot about but you don't, and you're trying to teach essentially conventional views that I'm already very familiar with. If you want to help with this matter – as I've often invited – you'd need to catch up to what's already known, past examples, etc., much more.
I don't think you actually know what would have worked with you, let alone what would work with anyone else or how to deal with people's differences and idiosyncracies.
Also you're dropping the context: you're essentially asking me to have treated you like a beginner i'm tutoring who needs guidance, but the reason we were having a debate is you objected to being treated that way and insisted on having a peer-like interaction that assumes your competence.
Asserting otherwise doesn't fix stuff like that.
I don't want to teach you. You asked me questions and I answered them. I was explaining what I think would have helped me.
Yes. I didn't approach the conversation seriously enough to start with. I didn't do sufficient "homework" on you and what you were expecting.
This description seems rather different than the one you gave recently:
Here, you talk about disliking stuff, having some sort of negative emotional state, hiding the problem from me, forming unstated negative judgments about me, and basically sabotaging the discussion. That was your reasoning for why you used nesting quoting poorly: because you were not taking the discussion seriously because of your bad attitude. All of this was essentially lying to me, because I'd just asked if you wanted a serious debate, but then you promptly started wasting both of our time with unserious messages.
I find it confusing and hard to deal with that one moment you'll admit to stuff like this, and the next when I'm trying to discuss these issues you give an answer that's a minimal excuse and doesn't follow up on any of this important stuff.
Similarly, previously, while you had negative attitudes that you were hiding, I could see that was going on, and I tried to ask about it, but you wouldn't admit to anything. I think you might claim it's wording specifics and you recognize some terms as relating to you but not others, but I doubt that's it and, in any case, if that was it then I wouldn't know how to communicate with you when I get wildly different responses for using synonyms.
From part 1:
And:
But thinking I was doing ego-led win/loses, and that you weren't really trying due to perceiving my early messages very negatively, is not a positive demeanor throughout and not being even a little upset about anything.
And you stonewalled really hard about this, even though I was right that there was a problem (as you revealed a few messages ago, but went back to hiding in your latest message). Here's how some of that stonewalling went:
That's a really strong denial.
It's hard to tell how much of what's going is due to lack of self-awareness. Doing all this stuff in a more conscious way sounds worse, but lacking self-awareness is also a big problem.
Correct. The new description is of what I consider to be the root cause. The other things you described being symptoms.
I was not lying to you at all. I have different levels of seriousness that I apply in different contexts. I don't see seriousness as binary.
I did not understand your approach to "serious debate", your attitude towards me etc. I made guesses along the way. I gradually updated my ideas. I think I could have saved myself (and you) time by doing more homework at the start.
If by "upset" you mean that I was guessing you were evading then, yes, I was upset. You call it a synonym, but I would never dream of using the word upset for that. If you meant that I was emotionally perturbed, then no. If it's raining, I don't get upset. I grab my umbrella. When I thought you were going for an ego-led win/lose, I didn't get upset. I tried to stand my ground.
EDIT: Fix a comma
No, it wouldn't make sense to deny having any kind of emotions. Emotions are part of being human.
In the case, near the start, where I wrote a long post and you responded in a way that showed no acknowledgement of the work I'd put in and no empathy of my positive intentions, yeah, I was put out.
So you were having negative emotions?
Yes, I was upset. That was several days before the conversation where I thought you were evading.
I see the misunderstanding. You thought when I said "this entire conversation" in that message you quoted a few messages ago, I meant the whole debate. No wonder you're confused. I only meant the back and forth we'd had that day. Misleading pronoun.
And then when you denied upsetness again today, moments before granting it ... I don't get it. I think you're being inconsistent and contradicting yourself, and your emotions are part of the cause, and it's too hard and unrealistic to get anywhere with impersonal philosophy issues while emotional stuff like this is going on with you.
There are two distinct occasions that I have been talking about: (1) Near the start of the debate after I posted a self-crit and you responded, "I don't know why you're jumping way ahead..."; (2) Several days later, a discussion about whether I fit patterns of human behavior in our society.
In (1) I felt upset that you didn't show empathy.
In (2) I thought you were evading and going for win/lose. I wasn't upset.
Try to read everything with that knowledge and you should see I've been consistent because that is genuinely what I thought.
I'm sorry for not thinking about the double meaning of "this entire conversation" and I agree that your interpretation was eminently reasonable.
Your stories seem ad hoc. Each time I point out an error, you come up with some new information to try to change things.
I could focus on some narrow points and pursue them to get some further concessions, but I don't think it would do any good in the bigger picture.
I don't want to emotionally manage you; it's not my job to in a debate; and it's very hard to do even if you were cooperative and wanted it, which you aren't and don't. I regard your reports about your emotional states as wildly unreliable, and I think you should too. We could talk about what processes you've gone through to make them reliable, what track record you have, what ways of objectively measuring success you have, but that is itself too difficult a topic to explain given its sensitivity and your ongoing derailing emotional reactions to things. Also that'd be more of a tutoring conversation than debate, and the ongoing ambiguity between those two modes of interaction is another problem which is difficult to discuss because of your emotional reactions.
~Everyone else is like this too. Most of them just won't talk about it in a serious intellectual setting or in a debate. They'll admit it in many respects on social media when they aren't on the defensive, though. Anyway, the point is these problems and obstacles are very generic, and I've faced the same things with others, and making progress on them would be useful with most people. E.g. forming negative interpretations and not saying them but letting them affect the discussion a bunch is an extremely common form of sabotage.
I had an idea that if people improved their skills and got them really solid, the skills would be more resistant to emotions, bias and social dynamics (people's skill of walking holds up under stress better than logical reasoning does, so there's scope to learn logic and other things in a more thorough, solid, automatic way). Plus people do have pretty substantial skills problems even when there aren't aggravating factors. But it doesn't work because people emotionally and socially resist doing that project. It actually offends and upsets people much more than, e.g., telling them they're wrong about induction. Which is a hint that I'm onto something – it's an actual threat to their static memes. Your resistance to caring about or taking seriously your quoting related error is related to people's general resistance to this project. It's hard to get people to take seriously that most of their errors matter. They usually have excuses for why errors don't count or aren't important.
I'm extremely doubtful that you'll want to take up mindfulness meditation to work on yourself in order to take a step towards being able to hold a conversation reasonably.
You're also following the standard pattern where one or a few demonstrations of error are inadequate to get people to change attitude. I sometimes try building up the stakes in advance of the demonstration, but I've never really found that works out, and it didn't here. Formal debate with written rules and ambitious goals is a way of raising the stakes but you're currently claiming basically that you just didn't take it seriously so your errors didn't mean anything. The reason demonstrations don't work, and that pre-specified stakes don't fix it (even if very explicit, which people generally hate and derail over), is that change has to come from within not without.
I don't know what would work for discussion.
You're making a huge deal out of this issue and continuing to say I'm contradicting myself. You're accusing me essentially of making up excuses, rather than giving you explanations.
EDIT: In case it breaks in the exported version later, and because it has a poor auto-generated title, my link goes to my previous message, which begins "You made some mistakes. You think the underlying cause is lack of trying".
Among other things, we partially debated some particular details/points.
I wrote a long post about some higher level issues and overall patterns rather than continue the more narrow, specific branch.
You took my scheduling something for later, or otherwise not responding, as meaning you win, you get to declare victory, and we both should accept you as having been right. Rather than seeing it like "we didn't finish discussing it and we still disagree" you decided that I'm "unable to rethink your views in light of new information" because I talked about something else that I regard as having logical priority over continuing the lower level branch.
Your declaring victory and expecting me to accept that victory was done implicitly, instead of stated, and you jumped immediately to an impasse.
Your declaring victory did not attempt to lay out an objective argument like talked about earlier including with this link https://curi.us/2232-claiming-you-objectively-won-a-debate
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Are you able to recognize this? Agree with it? Give your own account?
Your post on higher level issues may have been relevant if my thinking on my emotions through this debate was completely incoherent. But it wasn't. It was only incoherent while you were under the misapprehension that my statement about not being upset during "this entire conversation" meant the entire debate.
The logical priority was to reassess your thinking once you received the new piece of information that I'd given you, namely that I had meant only the entire conversation on that day, not the entire debate.
I don't know why you are talking about things in terms of declaring victories etc. I think we should be trying to create mutual understanding, not trying to win points against each other.
Why do you think that's an impasse?
You're accusing me of making things up.
I meant what I wrote. I just didn't mean what you thought I meant. You haven't understood my explanation for the misunderstanding and you're not trying to.
I think I did understand that, disagreed with it, gave some partial reasons I disagreed that you didn't respond to, and then started discussing the bigger picture because I didn't think discussing the narrow disagreement further would be productive. It seems like you're having trouble understanding that I did listen to you, consider what you said, and do my best to update my views using that information ... but that I still disagree with you.
I did not say I didn't mean what I wrote. Do you acknowledge that you have made a mistake?
If I said I didn't mean what I wrote, you can presumably provide the quote.
We disagree about this. You seem unable to comprehend disagreement and stop begging the question.
You keep trying to aggressively debate me and beg the question about a topic I'm not interested in discussing further (at least without first discussing higher level issues and context), while not clarifying your impasse statements (that appear to be incorrect).
Will a policy based on only focusing on most helpful criticisms (for that person at that time) lead to more productive discussions?
I'm not going to ban you or take actions against you, but I think what you're doing, and what it means, should be stated plainly.
Also, I request that you never speak to me again, or speak on my forums, while using a different name, without identifying yourself. I don't want to ever discuss with you again without knowing it's you, and would prefer not to read your stuff without knowing it's you (but if I happen to come across an article by you under another name, and you did nothing to bring it to my attention, that'd be OK). Do not try to bypass this discussion history to get a second chance by tricking me. If you do speak with me under an undisclosed name, I will consider you to be harassing me and initiating force against me.
big (and IMHO suspicious) attitude change
Sorry I said something wrong and that implied something wrong about you. I actually meant that no one has the skill to deal with so much criticism which is about complex things and deal with that criticism fast. To be able to do it fast one would need to have a lot of practice.
You are a liar.
I agree. It's really awful and irresponsible to either:
1) think some discussion term/condition is irrational but withhold that objection until already having entered into the discussion, or
2) suddenly raise an objection to the discussion terms weeks into a discussion and after one has already decided to violate those terms.
Yeah, at that point, I was getting value. Since then it feels like we've been mowing the same turf over and over and I've just had enough.
No one asked him to do it fast. Actually I repeatedly tried to get him to slow down but he was very resistant to that.
I went into the debate thinking that the topic was your criticism of my posts. We haven't gone anywhere near my posts. I think you were dishonest too. You didn't make it clear how much time would be dedicated to tangents. You presumably had an idea about that. I had no idea.
Notice how he's now admitting he lied.
Then he's doing classic redirection and lashing out. He wants a counter-attack and doesn't care if it's true (I did comment at the outset about unbounded topics, chaining tangents, etc.)
And notice how non-parallel the issues are. Firebench made a positive agreement to something specific then broke it. Meanwhile he accuses me of simply failing to fully inform him in advance of what actions I would take within the agreed upon discussion rules/terms. (Note also that he's the one who tried to jump ahead and resisted planning the discussion more at the start, and that taking too long to get to his goal topic is one of his main current complaints, but that complaint clashes with his demand that I have said more stuff earlier, and also clashes with his decision to drop his half of the discussion instead of using it to focus on what he wanted.)
I know. I was trying to think of a reason why debates end like this. Not being able to deal with so much criticism about complex things easily is my guess (I'm not sure if this is my guess. I think I got this from you only. You posted this somewhere). If something is easy to do then one can do it fast.
Edit:
I actually wanted to say: "I'm not interested in whether doing it fast was discussed"
You can call me names but that doesn't significantly improve the situation.
If you want people not to do what I've done, I would suggest you give people a clear heads up about what to expect. E.g. tell them that before they agree to a debate, they should read this debate or other debates. Your approach to debates is not normal. You surely know that. I had no real idea what to expect and you could have helped prep / warn me.
I'm not trying to shed reponsibility. I should have done homework myself beforehand.
The excuses about limited seriousness, not trying one’s best, being lazy, etc., are also great examples of what I was trying to avoid in advance with a formal, organized, serious debate.
Sadly, I don’t think getting people to agree to stuff in advance is very effective. They don’t know what it means, but pretend to. Just like how Firebench doesn’t know what an impasse is or how (or when or why) to construct an impasse chain correctly, but didn’t ask and pretended to understand (and I think didn’t consciously recognize that he didn’t understand). Sadly, Firebench derailed the preliminaries whenI actually tried to discuss impasses. He didn’t answer my direct, initial question about whether he’d read my articles about impasses – which is an example of being resistant to talking about it – and then he jumped into other major derailings, and then derailed more when I tried to address the earlier derailings, and so I ended up dropping some of my plans like to discuss impasses at the outset. Some other stuff I wanted to discuss at the outset also got dropped due to the urgent disasters Firebench was creating (Goldratt’s term for getting caught up responding to the crisis of the moment is “firefighting” or “putting out fires”, and it’s a bad mode to be in). I failed at my goal of organizing the discussion from the start and proceeding in a slow, methodical way (actually, to be more precise, the goal was to make a reasonable attempt at that and see what happened, and I did that and got some info – I said explicit stuff about slowing down and not rushing to bring up so much stuff at once and not skipping preliminaries or proceeding without mutual agreement, and Firebench was uncooperative). It’s a hard problem because people resist it so much.
I do have an idea for what to try next: default all comments to being side comments, make a single canonical discussion tree while going along (people have to agree on it), and explicitly label all text that is desired to be added as a node. The expectation should be adding one node at a time (top priority stuff, not all thoughts) and that every node gets discussion in side comments (like you ask clarifying questions and outline your reply and get feedback on that proposed reply before writing a formal contribution to the debate tree).
Returning to something I mentioned earlier: Even if someone did understand impasses well enough to know what is and isn’t an impasse, and why, in most cases, the impasse chain discussion method still wouldn’t work for most people. People would manage to forget how impasses work when they’re emotional. I think it’s a good theoretical method with value as an aspirational ideal or something experts can do, but that it won’t solve regular people’s problems (it’s still fine to try it and I don’t know a superior alternative – I just don’t think it’s enough to actually fix discussion for people).
Plus, besides not knowing what they’re agreeing to, they break their word even when they do know. Firebench straight up agreed to discuss to length five impasse chain (or mutual agreement) then ended the discussion without even a superficial attempt to create a length five impasse chain (he has a superficial but egregiously incorrect attempt at a length three impasse chain, but stopped there). He did know he agreed not to do that. He just doesn’t care. Maybe I should insert a clause that they owe me $10,000 if they break their word by leaving early. I don’t think that would fix it though. It’ll have results like they refuse the discussion (especially if I want it in escrow with a third party judge) or, more problematically, they create a very shoddy, dumb impasse chain of the appropriate length, but then claim it was reasonable and refuse to pay. I don’t think it’ll work well to give people extra motive to manufacture a fake impasse chain as an excuse. I don’t want to participate in them doing that.
Another example of not knowing what they’re agreeing to is I was clear upfront with Firebench that the discussion would branch and that all topics were inbounds. He nevertheless apparently wanted to make direct progress on the initial topic and is frustrated to be discussing other matters. He also claims the discussion is taking too long less than 3 weeks after proposing a 3 week break and insisting he’d come back for sure after that and that he was operating on longer timescales than that. Also he’s apparently blaming me for the discussion not making progress enough quickly enough, but without giving any kind of high level overview of what happened and whose fault it was, and also without ever making even a minimal effort to objectively establish that I was wrong about any detail point (he never wrote out any argument and claimed it was enough that a neutral third party should be persuaded that the issue was adequately done and he was right). I did attempt to discuss the big picture of what was happening and why, but Firebench strongly resisted discussing it with me … and then broke his word and left over his undiscussed, unargued beliefs about the big picture.
The discussion was useful for the example of someone else trying to use impasses. Firebench’s responses to my first impasse chain showed a serious and highly problematic lack of understanding of how impasses work. And Firebench used an impasse carelessly himself then retracted it, which is really problematic, and then later use one and chained it without clear, coherent, reasonable explanations of what the impasses were. The underlying problem is people’s inability to be clear, coherent and reasonable, but the impasse chain method relies on that as a prerequisite. I think the organized structure still helps and has major advantages over nothing. It’s similar to how explicit goals help. If someone won’t say their goals, then all criticism has to be based on guesses about their goals that lack help from explicit statements. If people do say goals, then a critic can point out how something fails at a stated goal. Similarly, “use impasse chain method” is a goal, so stating it helps for the general reasons that stating goals helps: one can see and criticize how someone/something fails at a stated goal.
Firebench tried to use impasses as a crude tool to seize control of conversation flow and demand attention for whatever he wanted to talk about. And he did it really confusingly without actually explaining what he wanted or why. And he egregiously broke the rules: After raising an impasse (and even a length 3 chain), he then tried to keep talking about object level issues, while refusing to discuss the impasses with me, which I was literally asking clarifying questions about. (My first two questions clarifying his impasse were met with him declaring a new impasse that made no sense, and him not explaining what his impasse meant. The reason I needed to clarify the impasse is that it was kind of just a rant and didn’t actually attempt to state and impasse and say why/how that was an impasse.)
Similarly, my attempt to use a discussion methodology (two discussion halves) didn’t work well because Firebench doesn’t understand what a discussion methodology is or what the meanings of his ~50 messages of derailing and refusing to cooperate were. He actually didn’t understand how he was controlling conversation flow, what choices he was making in the discussion, what they meant, etc. He was doing horrible things by accident because he was totally lost but wouldn’t acknowledge that and try to learn what was going on or get guidance. What doesn’t work, as often comes up, is the combination of ignorance/incompetence/etc. plus thinking one is skillful and acting reasonably.
One of the main issues in the discussion was Firebench downplaying the importance of all his errors (by introducing new, ad hoc claims out of the blue, that not only lacked foreshadowing in the text but had clear contra-indicators). He’d concede stuff but then deny it mattered. He was unable to go through the conversation without conceding errors, but he was also unwilling to treat the errors as important representatives of themes/patterns and meaningfully address the root causes like his mercurial emotions that he has little visibility into, his lack of integrity, and more generally his lack of having already built up a bunch of skill and knowledge (about critical discussion, emotions, integrity, etc.) and disinterest in learning via organized study and intentional practice. In other words, he was another overreacher who puts boundaries around what he’s willing to learn.
It's kind of funny to me because I've been through it but this isn't helpful. Well actually in the long run... I'm still here so maybe it is.
Also my goal with stating what he did was not to be helpful to him after the discussion ended. (Nor to hurt him; I don't know why he's still here; seems like those people who say they have to go to bed but then keep talking instead of going to bed. Seems like he's too caught up in his emotions and social status posturing (like trying to partially save face) to leave yet.)
I was trying to give you and others my own take on the issues, for your interest. If you're not interested that's fine. My guess is that your next debate will go the same way.
Yeah they would. But you're probably not aware how usual a thing lying is to people (link below). They expect it to be a normal behavior. So when you once made it clear to me that I am a liar you brought chaos into order (Jordan Peterson metaphor). It became a problem for me to deal with. Then it hurt me. First I was unsure why you decided to make it evident. Then I understood how lying fucks with truth seeking. Then I learnt I had a lying autopilot in me which messed up my reasoning powers in all areas.
[Link: Norm Macdonald on lying]
Gad Saad, *The Parasitic Mind*:
I already pointed out that the two supposedly conflicting leaves don't actually conflict. Another flaw is that Firebench framed the issue as a conflict within himself, but his proposed solution was actually an action to be taken by Elliot:
If having Elliot do something was in-scope for the cloud, then the root of the cloud as well as the branch leading to Elliot's action should have been written in a way that accurately represented Elliot's perspective.
† Source: Go to Re: 😊 curi & Firebench Debate - FI Learning and search for "I've written an evaporating cloud for the situation."
(This is much harder than he makes it sound for multiple reasons, including because there are tons of variations within normal or typical people.)
Firebench, earlier, responded to warnings – to me telling him, from experience, what I thought some dangers were – with saying he's a unique individual and that I shouldn't extrapolate past experience to his situation. He got offended about the matter and was super resistant to listening to my warnings, which he insisted were not relevant to him. (This came up to some extent multiple times, but the clearest example was when he said he was going to leave for 3 weeks and I tried to warn him about the danger of changing moods. Also he wants sympathy, love, respect and warmth or something – but also largely refused to admit to having emotions and didn't want to talk with me about the problems he was having.)
So there's a contradiction between first refusing to listen to warnings b/c he's not like other people and I don't know him and he can handle himself and I can't predict what he'll do, etc., but then later saying I should have warned him about stuff (and somehow gotten him to listen when he didn't want to listen to the warnings I did give!?).
He said basically that he'd definitely come back and definitely still want to discuss on that kind of longer timescale of weeks in the future, and that his only concern is if I'd still want him – he didn't want to lose the valuable opportunity to talk with me by leaving.
His tune has sure changed and he's already quit in a shorter amount of time than he was sure wouldn't change anything. And he's had the audacity to contradict himself by saying part of why he's quitting is the timescale of the discussion is too long and he expected more faster (said not long after a big breakthrough, lots of praise from him ... and then me trying to get back on the topic of the big breakthrough but him spending days refusing and derailing ... IIRC it was the next day after the big breakthrough and friendly mood that he'd already changed moods and become adversarial again, and then he wanted to try to catch me out instead of post morteming his error that he'd resisted acknowledging in the first place.)
Maybe now, again, he's not engaging his brain? And dismissing his serious errors as trivialities to rationalize not wanting to engage with my criticism? Just like he did earlier in the conversation. But he couldn't keep that kind of mood for long at all. And he actually put work into killing it on purpose, against my warning. Basically he was so infatuated with me that it was distracting him at work, so he decided to put effort into shutting it down and being colder to me, but since he's ruled by emotions it did not work out well to make himself cold towards me because it determines what he says in debate. Infatuation is the wrong thing but killing it on purpose just ruins the chance to maybe transition it to something rational.
Anyway, I thought him being in a temporary friendly mood was precious and volatile. He didn't think so. Maybe that's because it was a lot of work for me to convince him of anything to get the temporary friendly mood, but it wasn't much work for him to make careless errors (and non-careless errors too) and not pay much attention to what I wrote. Or maybe it's because not considering or discussing his emotional issues is one of his main themes (it was also the theme of the thread he deleted, allegedly for containing PII, but then he went on to talk about being a TOC expert who has taught trees, which is major PII, which makes the previous deletion seem even more like an excuse to cover up how the thread was meant to elicit agreement about how smart and rational he is, and then he didn't like getting critical responses instead that thought he should change himself. PII = personally identifying information.)
Here's some admission:
He jumped ahead to a topic – against my explicit plan and consent – because he wanted to go first. He's admitting he wanted to control the narrative. He also wanted to head off and present some potential criticisms from ever being written.
My plan, which I'd stated, was to do preliminaries and then talk about the extremely important issue of his recurring belief that I was being hostile. You can perhaps see, now, how crucial a topic that was, and it never got appropriate attention. And when I say explicit I mean it, like this:
and then he just ignored me and went to a different topic b/c he wanted to get in the first word. and then he wanted me to praise his good intentions and express my respect and my gratitude for the good effort he put in...
Then right after that, before I could bring the conversation back on topic, he made the nested quoting related error and derailed extensively with that (by his own account where he was "[trying] to dismiss it as a triviality! I did not engage my brain." and it took a lot of "hammer[ing]" from me to get anywhere. And then after that gratitude, he tried to take a long break before we resolved the topic – which I consented to – but then he didn't take the break, did change his mood, switched the topic, and was very hard to get back onto the topic that had actually been productive ... and then blames me for the conversation not producing results fast enough (I'd say that one result alone would make it a great, very productive conversation for him for the total effort invested, and in any case one must consider whose fault it is that Firebench kept derailing and then dropped his half of the conversation – after a huge stink about using that method at all – without ever establishing that I was wrong about anything or that any of his derail topics mattered ... it seemed like he just changed mood and lost interest, acknowledged he had not outstanding issues ... and then promptly got mad again, broke his word, and then got so lost in hostile emotions that he couldn't even acknowledge having so blatantly broken his word.)
By the way, when I talked about infatuation, it wasn't infatuation with Elliot. It was infatuation with the idea of a place where one can converse literally and get criticisms. It seemed great and had been something I'd searched for.
I had some exciting initial progress, but then started to find things settle into a tedious pattern of Elliot pulling negative judgments of me out of his ass and expecting me to discuss them in excruciating detail. I did not find it valuable. The debate also occupied my mind during the day in a way that I found distracting. That distraction factor was another major reason I pulled out.
I'd recommend to whoever comes next not to accept a debate with Elliot. I can understand the temptation and it was an interesting experience. However, "unbounded" effectively means no clear end. If you do accept, you should negotiate a way to exit early. I had thought I could use impasses to exit but then decided it was better just to concede. Elliot's goal seemed to be to declare victory, so I tried to give him that. But that was dishonest because I don't really consider him to have won anything meaningful only worn me down. In retrospect I should have brought up the issue of me wanting to exit with him in the discussion. I regret not doing that. We live and learn.
I take that back and apologize. That was not productive. I know he thought he had reasons for each judgment and would have been willing to explain them. I just didn't want to hear them.
As I already explained to you the cloud is for "what to do first?". It's my own cloud. The cloud-evaporating injection is as I expressed it in the cloud. The implementation of the injection would be me asking Elliot to take an action. The wording of clouds can always be improved, but the purpose of evaporating clouds is to solve problems not to be perfect. If you think that the wording needs to be perfect, you have misunderstood Goldratt.
Later I wrote:
And Firebench answered:
But I didn't say that was all possible options or that it was a complete dichotomy. He's doing the thing, that I'd explained earlier, about misreading a typical sentence as having some kinda very strong modifier like "all" in it. It's a typical example of bad pedantry that he'd already done, and then he repeated the error despite my having already explained the issue.
That's problematic on its own, and it's also an indication that Firebench saying roughly "you should have warned me more and pre-explained more stuff" would not actually have worked. (You'll note that people say that in hindsight a lot but never explain how I should have known which warnings to devote how much time to in advance. I did devote substantial time to advance warnings about things, but not all the very many things that could be warned about. And of course I have many more warnings written down in public, and the constraint there is that people aren't willing to read them, and secondarily, when they do read some, like Firebench did read my explanation re all/never/etc, they often don't learn it effectively anyway.)
And anyway I did give some warnings but no matter how many warnings I gave, there are infinitely many warnings I did not give, so in hindsight it's always possible to pick some warnings I didn't give and claim that those were the crucial ones. So I could never do this perfectly, but also no matter what I did someone could could up with a claim, in retrospect, that I had not done it perfectly.
The worst, though, and this is very common, is when people mix together the two roles/modes-of-interaction, and want some peer stuff and some tutoring stuff, at the same time, without clear labelling. That's extremely unfair, and it comes up all the time, and I don't really know how to deal with it. I've tried explicitly talking about it as it happens but that hasn't worked well. One of the typical results is they get offended and deny wanting to be treated as a non-equal in any way. But they do want it. Like how Firebench asymmetrically thinks I should have known some stuff and warned him. And of course he wants it: I have ~100x his discussing/debating experience, and he is not in fact my equal (re current knowledge), and I have lots of insight that he doesn't know (but not vice versa). etc. But he also in various ways doesn't want it and/or doesn't want to admit it.
BTW the massive experience gap often leads to misinterpretations because people are bad at considering other people's povs. So our discussion is e.g. 10% of Firebench's discussion history and 0.1% of mine (very rough, inaccurate numbers), and so Firebench is much more reactive to the discussion than me, and it plays a bigger role in his life, etc. And it's hard for him to see how different it is for me than it is for him, so he does lots of projection. Similarly, people often overestimate the effort it takes me to write things, which contributes to misconceptions about what I care about, how much, where my attention is, what my priorities are, etc. I'm a much calmer person than Firebench in any case, but also it being yet another similar discussion makes it much easier to be calm, not emotionally invested, keep some distance and perspective, etc.
Due to that disruptive pattern, I didn't think ignoring Firebench's posts was a good option. So I said something. It included how he was avoiding debate and shouldn't be going around teaching here when he doesn't know much about FI, has no track record of successfully learning FI stuff, is disagreeing with FI indirectly, and is doing debate-avoidance behaviors.
His response was: he's totally up for debate!
I did not think he wanted debate or would like it. I tried to talk him out of it. He insisted.
I proposed very strong debate terms. He accepted them.
Then, after the debate, he has repeatedly complained that my terms were too harsh. Bro, that was part of the point. They are meant to filter people out. It says so right in the article about them. He insisted he could deal with them and shouldn't be filtered out...
I don't think stronger filtering will help psychologically with someone whose attitude is "I am good and competent, and I can handle anything in the realm of debate".
I don't know what to do differently in situations like this.
I suspect I should be less cooperative early on. Maybe absolutely ignore off-topic stuff and go through more preliminaries. People dislike that and react badly – omg so much meta and never getting to the point! And it's really hard to stay focused when they actually can't understand half of what I say, making write a bunch of errors showing clear misconceptions, and trying to explain that to them would be a huge can of worms.
Maybe I should ask them to convince me it's worth my time and they are competent. Where are your 20 blog posts showing your skill and sustained interest/effort? Where is your objective track record about anything? This will alienate people but at least it will filter more people early.
I thought of this too. I thought you were doing it so if someone comes back to read your analysis in the future it could be of help to them.
are you talking about my comments yesterday and today? i was talking about the debate itself.
the comments now are just downstream consequences and are not personal attention (Firebench can leave or not read them; idc; I'm not speaking with him). they are ok re unearned in a similar way to how posting an essay on my blog is. like yeah the readers didn't fully earn it but it's also not personally for them so it's ok. the world as a whole has earned some public thoughts by e.g. providing books, food, computers and the internet to me.
today.
Doing two things in parallel was explicitly on the table. However, you misread or misunderstood Elliot's comments on that approach, so you ruled it out prematurely. The result was that the question "what to do first" contained an incorrect assumption, and there should not have been a conflict arrow between two options that could have been done in parallel.
Alisa didn't say "perfect". This is the same error I talked about above:
Re: curi & Firebench debate part 2 - FI Learning
It's the post where I start by quoting myself saying:
I remember that your policy was something like 'declaring everyone as stupid and not talking with anyone is not sensible'. This was surprising to me because it was such an open policy. It made me reconsider my closed attitude as well.
I was particularly tempted to impasse after an especially hostile message, below. But I think I have some sort of intuitive faith in humanity and will keep trying even when I can predict stuff won't work and I already see plenty of errors.
Actually I did impasse on this message b/c it was a continuing refusal re discussion methodology. But I considered impassing on the hostility, both initially and also as a next action after Firebench finally agreed to a discussion methodology. But I decided to try to continue the thing I was most interested in instead.
This message was both really nasty and really confused, though.
what values will you use to develop those filters? being open to criticism is on the top I guess. Keeping only that as the value doesn't make sense also. It would actually mean no filter I think. 😕
You shared some trees with me I remember. I was like fuck that. This is pedantic. What worked for me is learning that I am bad at reason. A non triggering example that can show that might be the way to go.
Then this. This solves it I think. The person just needs to understand that building up actually makes sense. It's not that you could have a 30k+ word discussion but you didn't just because you didn't wanted to.
Edit: The person just needs to understand that building up is an actual thing / phenomenon.
Edit: Error: It's not that you...; you as in the person wanting to have debate.
In other words: he thinks I made a mistake.
That's not an impasse.
Having a mistaken premise does not making progress impossible. Not even close. You can just criticize the mistake. For it to be an impasse, you need a mistake and a reason that error correction is blocked. That's how impasses work in general: a problem plus something that blocks problem solving.
How does one make non-triggering examples of that? People usually get triggered.
When you raise an impasse, what you're supposed to do next is halt the object level discussion and discuss the impasse.
What happened?
Firebench raised an (alleged) impasse (but as above it wasn't one). I asked a clarifying question.
Firebench then raised a second impasse. It was also unclear. At best I can tell, the second "impasse" was that I responded to the first impasse instead of responding to the object level issue that he wanted me to respond to.
I tried to discuss the impasses and clarify stuff again, and Firebench then declared a third "impasse" which again was about me trying to discuss the impasses themselves – discuss the meta level – instead of discussing the object level. And then he tried to write about and discuss the object level more in the midst of his own "impasse" chain. He actually has no idea how discussion levels and logical priorities work.
I'm personally very oriented to the world of reality, physical objects, contracts, agreements, reason, logic, facts, etc.
It's really unintuitive to me that people will simply break their word, violate consent, ignore facts, etc., when they have strong enough emotional or social motivation (or static memes or whatever). But they do. ~Everyone is like that. My intuition is wrong. And this isn't a new issue. It's something I've had difficulty correcting. My ability to predict stuff like this has improved more than my intuition, and my prediction still failed in this case.
It's like I'm used to chess and it never even occurs to me to consider: What if they play an illegal move? What if they just move their king like a knight, or pick up four of my pieces and remove them from the board?
Young kids are do things like knock over the board when they're losing a board game. Adults mostly avoid such blatant actions but still have similar attitudes and desires. Firebench's breaking the agreement and quitting is the same sort of thing as a toddler knocking over the chess board.
I don't think you really do. You couldn't write most of them correctly yourself. Having heard of them and having some info about them is different than knowing them.
Also I don't think you're in a position to confidently know what are some of the best known ideas in history. You don't know enough to compare and judge that, and also haven't surveyed enough ideas.
New, permanent forum coming soon btw. It'll be Discourse software.
I assumed that because I've felt mindblown I must have understood those ideas. I was hurt to find out that I have not understood ideas that blew my mind.
Yeah I think a lot of people have attitudes a bit like that. They think they understand those books way more than they actually do. It's hard to correct people on that. They're resistant.
Learning is just way harder than people think it is, or at least learning anything unconventional is. Conventional stuff has more social support and tradition to aid learning.
Ideas like CR are way way way more complicated, deep, substantial, etc., than people realize. There's so much more to learn than fits in a book or than they extract from the book. They usually don't have a reasonable sense of how much more there is that they don't know yet.
I think the reason DT can say this is not special insight or cleverness. Like a bit of that, but it's not the main thing. This isn't primarily about him being smarter than other people who didn't say or see it.
The primary issue is he's friendly and not defensive now. I think a lot of other people could have some insight kinda like this if they were in the right mood, with the right emotions and social dynamics.
They want help managing their moods but won't say so or specify what help would be helpful, or when to give it, etc., and won't even admit to wanting this kinda favor.
One of the experiences I've had repeatedly is having correct insight into people's moods – seeing what's going on, and being right (as revealed later) – and still being unable to do anything about it. Just correctly stating what's going on often gets negative responses.
This is one of the realizations I had 2-3 months back. Being open about emotions work for me. I wrote it in my logs. Being anon helps. I don't feel any negative emotions stopping me from sharing because of being anon.
There are other things that are a very big deal, too, e.g. Goldratt's ideas, Rand's moral philosophy, economics, math, or political philosophy and organization stuff like liberalism. There's also lots of science stuff that isn't covered in the 4 strands FoR focuses on.
I agree with the idea of having one's own motor. If you were to ask me to explain myself I would say that this is the best alternative I have. I can either say these are the best ideas I know of (which I understand with low confidence) or the alternative is I don't know any other good ideas.
And it's not like my immediate goals are based on these low confidence ideas. I tried to base my immediate goals on high confidence ideas.