This post explains a way of organizing a discussion. It’s meant to be useful in some cases, not all the time. It doesn’t require that the other person know it’s being used. This method can be collaborative, or can be used as tips to guide your own actions.

The problem: people debate endlessly without anything being resolved.

The method: instead of having many debates, focus on reaching clear conclusions about three issues.

How? Ask the other person what they think is important or interesting. Get them to say something serious about an important issue (or link something they already wrote). Then focus on that. Instead of discussing whatever they carelessly say mid-discussion, try to get something more substantial that you can reply to. (People shouldn’t say careless things in discussions that they wouldn’t take responsibility for … that’s irresponsible … but they do.). Then clearly point out mistakes. Do one issue at a time, three times.

Tips: Focus criticism on key topics, not tangents or cherrypicked errors. Preferably, the criticisms to will point out important problems, not “this is incomplete” or “this is sloppy” (that doesn’t mean ignoring incompleteness or sloppiness, it means trying to get them to provide material which is more complete and effortful so that you have something good to respond to). If they can’t produce anything good (in your opinion), get them to say they think something they wrote is good (in their opinion), then point out that it’s incomplete or sloppy. That means they’re a poor judge of quality (which is an important criticism, but that should be your backup plan only if you can’t get them to say anything decent about a primary topic of interest like dinosaurs, history, politics, physics, etc.).

People make lots of excuses about their errors. They don’t want to figure out what caused their error (often a bad thinking method or static meme) and what other errors that cause could cause (often lots) and then fix the underlying problem. Focusing on three high quality critical interactions can reduce excuses. Pick things where they’d have few excuses for being wrong.

Does this method assume you’ll be doing all the criticizing, and unfairly have them stick their neck out while you don’t? That depends. People are welcome to criticize any of my important pieces of writing. Their criticism can be two of the three issues discussed, but shouldn’t be all three. If you want to use this method but have no public writing available for anyone to criticize, that’s a problem.

The second problem: People want answers to their questions, and corrections of their errors, one by one. What they should be doing is learning how to think better for themselves – learn better thinking methods, critical thinking skills and philosophy – so that they can answer more of their own questions and correct more of their own errors. Often, people want to ask a bunch of questions while not saying anything substantial themselves, so they minimize the ideas they expose to criticism.

It’s inefficient to outsource your thinking to me or to another wise person. I don’t have time to answer all your questions. I’ll answer a few if I like them, and to see if you learn much, and because people are interesting, and to interest people in learning my thinking methods (by giving examples of my wisdom). But most of your questions have to be answered by creating your own thinking and research skills, not by using mine. It’s the difference between teaching a man to fish and doing the fishing for him then giving him fish. Answering a question is giving someone a fish.

The solution: People should take an interest in learning to be better thinkers so they make fewer errors and can effectively find or create good ideas. I’ve written (and talked) a lot about how to do this and I’m open to questions about it.

Part of what learning involves is changing one’s mindset. It’s one thing to be a peer or equal, who is contributing about as many fish as he receives. It’s another to be unable to fish. (Or maybe you can only catch small fish, but you ask questions and make claims about big fish and are talking to people who know how to catch big fish. Big fish are complicated ideas.) You need to know which situation you’re in and act accordingly. Should you focus on learning more (to catch up to existing knowledge), or should you pursue your directly projects (with critical discussions and learning being secondary)?

The third problem: People view themselves as peers when they should be learners. And they don’t want to change that. They think they already are educated, good thinkers who can catch their own fish. They view their questions (areas of ignorance) and errors as occasional things, not a major pattern.

The solution: Show them their errors using three clear examples. Show them their ability to deal with ideas is less effective than they think it is, or less effective than it could be if they had the thinking skill that you do. Show them that you catch substantially bigger fish than they can, which is a skill they should learn if they want to successfully contribute anything important to human knowledge (or want to fight with their family less, or otherwise have a better life).

The three discussions method serves multiple purposes. It helps clarify the outcomes of discussions, and it helps limit how many different discussions happen before the patterns in the discussions are addressed, and it helps clarify the relative skill and knowledge of the participants, and it helps show people why they should try to learn to think better (because, three out of three times, they missed errors in their ideas – the type of errors that make the difference between success and failure).

The three discussions method can also show when something else is going on. Maybe the other guy will be right on some of the issues. Maybe there won’t be a pattern of error. Maybe he is wise, too. Maybe he can contribute a fair amount. That’s possible. Maybe you’re roughly equals. Maybe he knows far more than you, and you should be trying to learn from him. The three discussions method helps find out what the situation in a time-and-effort-efficient way.

Link: my discussion forums.

The first comment, below, is a second article on this topic with more info.

EA risks falling into a "meta trap". But we can avoid it. (EA is effective altruism. It is favored by people who believe they are into reason and logic, similar to the Less Wrong community. The standard type is an atheist who rejects superstition, loves science, talks about thinking fallacies and biases, and reads non-fiction books.)

While donating to AMF all our lives is great, if we can spend our effort to get two people to donate to AMF instead of us, we’ve doubled our impact.

The author means: instead of person A donating $100 to charity, he can spend $100 on marketing/outreach/persuasion to get persons B and C to each donate $100 to the charity. He claims that, if that works out, then it means person A has doubled his impact.

Is that good? I think it means person A doubled his impact at triple the total cost. Now $300 was spent instead of $100.

This is the same issue as the broken window fallacy, also known as the fallacy of the seen and unseen. (The seen is the window repair guy getting paid and then spending that money at a bakery and then the baker buying shoes and so on. The unseen is that the window owner would have spent the money on something else if he didn't have to buy a window repair, e.g. he would have bought a suit and then the tailor would have bought bread and then the baker would have bought shoes and so on. So breaking the window did not stimulate the economy by creating demand for window repairs and thus make people better off. Breaking windows is bad.) The seen here is persons B and C donating $100 each to the charity. The unseen is what they would have used that money for otherwise. That $200 would have been spent elsewhere, and might have provided more value than an additional $100 for the charity.

(If you don't recognize my explanation of the broken window fallacy, and want to learn more, read Economics in One Lesson. I'm just repeating economists like Bastiat and Hazlitt, not saying anything new. The book description at the link states 'this is the book that made the idea of the "broken window fallacy" so famous'. It's a great introductory book which doesn't require doing math.)

In the author's math, the $200 spent elsewhere has zero impact. It's worthless. That's not a considered opinion, it's because he forgot to count it for anything, he didn't think about it, just like the broken window fallacy forgets to consider what the window repair money could have been spent on instead.

Suppose the $200 was spent quite badly, then maybe it would have $50 of impact (25% effectiveness on a scale where the charity is 100% effective). That's generous and lets his meta strategy come out ahead, but not by double. Let's do the math on how much the person A actually helped anything. If he donates $100, and the other people spend their money badly, the total impact is $150. If person A does marketing and gets B and C to donate, the total impact is $200. The increase in impact in this generous scenario is 33% not 100%. (100% impact means double, that's the claimed impact.)

If B and C would have spent their money at 50% effectiveness, then everything comes out equal. If they would have spent their money at 75% effectiveness, then person A hasn't double his impact, he's made the world worse.

Also, charities can handle their own marketing. If you donate $100, the charity itself can then use that for marketing and bring in $200 of donations. If they don't think more marketing is the best use of that $100, there is a reason.

Some charities seem happy to spend $100 asking for donations in order to bring in $101 of additional donations. This makes the world a worse place! A lot more wealth gets spent on mailing letters and other things that don't help people.

The author thinks spending $100 to bring in $200 of donations is a $100 win. By the same logic, spending $100 to bring in $101 of donations is a $1 win. He'd see it as a positive thing because he forgets that those $101 of additional donations would have been spent on something else that would have been a larger win than the $1 benefit he sees.

Conclusion: The EA community is grossly incompetent. It's not just this one writer (who participates in EA discussions a ton), it's the whole community, or else he would have been corrected (the post was high effort and got significant attention, and there are a bunch of very positive comments). They are literally doing broken-window-fallacy level thinking while believing they are cleverly improving charity, and the whole big community of "smart" people do not see and correct the error.

Understanding people you agree with is difficult. Understanding people you disagree with is even harder. When you comment on someone’s position – especially to disagree – it helps to use an exact quote and then directly engage with their words. The quote should have a source, too, so that people can check the context and accuracy of the quote.

If you specifically attribute an idea to a person, then you should quote it. If you only paraphrase from memory, you may do it wrong, and there’s no reasonable way to refute your mistake. Without a source, no one can point out your misreadings, nor can they see that you’re right and change their mind. All people can say is “uhh i don’t think i said that, i don’t know what you’re talking about”. That’s not productive.

You should use quotes and sources when the person might not be happy to agree that they said something, or when you’re saying something critical or negative.

If the person said something similar to what you remember, the difference may matter. Let’s see the actual quote. Maybe they were precise with their wording in ways you don’t even think about. Or not. We need the quote in order to analyze and decide.

Also, don’t use controversial examples from past discussions without quotes or references. It’s not much of an example if I can’t look at it! People commonly say things like “Joe was [bad thing] in a discussion 3 months ago” without quotes or details. (Examples of bad things to go in that sentence: mean, rude, dishonest, unreasonable, incorrect, wrong.) Sometimes people don’t even give a paraphrase or summary, they just claim something happened.

Often, people didn’t criticize Joe’s statements at the time they were said. Now they are bringing them up without any details. This avoids analysis, at the time or later, of whether their claim about Joe’s statements is correct or incorrect (that typically seems to be the goal of not using quotes). And it indicates they were holding an unstated grudge, which was hidden from criticism (like correcting a misunderstanding or incorrect logical reasoning). They never gave Joe the opportunity to change his mind, retract his statement, learn from his error, or refute the charges – and yet they remembered it negatively, or else they wouldn’t have brought it up negatively at a later time (especially without a quote, which means they didn’t go look it up to refresh their memory). It’s also especially unfair to expect other people to remember something that you thought was negative but you didn’t complain about at the time – you didn’t draw attention to it, so why would others have picked out that particular thing to remember?

Rational criticism involves explaining why something is a mistake. It has to be possible to learn from the criticism, but Joe won’t learn from being told an unspecified past statement was bad. And it has to be possible to refute the criticism, but there’s no way to give counter-arguments when the details are missing. (All one can do is refute the method of criticism for not using quotes, but that doesn’t actually mean Joe didn’t do the bad thing.)

So, at my forums – and I’d recommend this everywhere – don’t make unsourced accusations.

Update: I think this needs emphasiszing: Quote don't speak for themselves. Give a quote and an argument about that quote.

This is a discussion topic for Anne B. Other people are welcome to make comments. Anne has agreed not to post anonymously in this topic.

This is a discussion topic for Alan Forrester. Other people are welcome to make comments. Alan has agreed not to post anonymously in this topic.

This is a discussion topic for Andy Dufresne. Other people are welcome to make comments. Andy has agreed not to post anonymously in this topic.

After people make errors, they should do post-mortems. How did that error happen? What caused it? What thinking processes were used and how did they fail? Try to ask “Why?” several times to get to deeper issues than your initial answers.

And then, especially, what other errors would that cause also cause? This gives info about the need to make changes going forward, or not. Is it a one-time error or part of a pattern?

Effective post-mortems are something people generally don’t want to do. What causes errors? Frequently it’s irrationality, including dishonesty.

Lots of things merit post-mortems other than losing a debate. If you have an inconclusive debate, why didn’t you do better? No doubt there were errors in your communication and ideas. If you ask a question, why were you ignorant of the answer? What happened there? Maybe you made a mistake. That should be considered. After you ask a question and get an answer, you should post-mortem whether your understanding is now adequate. People usually don’t discuss thoroughly enough to effectively learn the answers to their questions.

Regarding questions: If you were ignorant of something because you hadn’t yet gotten around to learning about it, and you knew the limits of your knowledge, that can be a quick and easy post-mortem. That’s fine, but you should check if that’s what happened or it’s something else that merits more attention. Another common, quick post-mortem for a question is, “I asked because the other person was unclear, not because of my own ignorance.” But many questions relate to your own confusions and what went wrong should be post-mortemed. And if you hadn’t learned something yet, you should consider if you are organizing your learning priorities in a reasonable way. Why learn this now? Why not earlier or later? Do you have considered reasoning about that?

What if you try to post-mortem something and you don’t know what went wrong? If your post-mortem fails, that is itself something to post-mortem! Consider what you’ve done to learn how to post-mortem effectively in general. Have you studied techniques and practiced them? Did you start with easier cases and succeed many times? Do you have a history of successes and failures which you can compare this current failure to? Do you know what your success rate at post-mortems is in general, on average? And you should consider if you put enough effort into this particular post-mortem or just gave up fast.

You may wonder: We make errors all the time. Should we post-mortem all of them? That sounds like it’d take too much time and effort.

First, you can only post-mortem known errors. You have to find out something is an error. You can’t post-mortem it as an error just because people 500 years from now will know better. This limits the issues to be addressed.

Second, an irrelevant “error” is not an error. Suppose I’m moving to a new home. I’m measuring to see where things will fit. I measure my couch and the measurement is accurate to within a half inch. I measure where I want to put it and find there are 5 inches to spare (if it was really close, I’d re-measure). The fact that my measurement is an eighth of an inch off is not an error. The general principle is that errors are reasons a solution to a problem won’t work. The small measurement “error” doesn’t prevent my from succeeding at the problem I’m working on, so it’s not an error. It would be an error in a different context like doing a science experiment that relies on much more accurate measurements, but I’m not doing that.

Third, yes you should try to post-mortem all your errors that get past the previous two points. If you find this overwhelming, there are two things to do:

1. Do easier stuff so you make fewer errors. Get your error rate under control. There’s no benefit to doing stuff that’s full of errors – it won’t work. Correctness works better both for immediate practical benefits (you get more stuff done that is actually good or effective instead of broken) and for learning better so you can do better in the future.
2. Learn and write down recurring patterns/themes/concepts and reuse them instead of trying to work out every post-mortem from scratch. If you develop good ideas that can help with multiple post-mortems, that’ll speed it up a ton. Reusing ideas is a major part of Paths Forward and is crucial to all of life.

This is an open discussion topic. Discuss whatever you want.

If you post a link, express an opinion about it, ask a question, say something. Also, if you think something is bad and are posting it for criticism, say so – the default expectation is you agree with, and have a positive opinion of, whatever you post. Or if it seems good to you but you're sharing it because you have doubts and want to find out if people have criticism, say that.

How do you find replies? There's a recent comments link in the side bar. You can use an auto refresh browser plugin. There's a Comments RSS Feed. Or use website change notification software.

Details on posting images.

View the latest 30 comments. Use this if there are hundreds of comments and the page loads slowly.

FYI, I also have an email discussion forum which is active (703 posts in the last month). Posting there requires learning how to do plain text email quoting correctly.

Unsure what to discuss? Ask a question. Read some of my writing and comment or criticize. Try my book recommendations and try to analyze what you read and share your notes. Or share some of your life goals, learning goals, or problems you'd like help with, or share anything you think is important.

If you'd like your own discussion, with your name on it, please ask and I'll make a new post for you.