Are written debates a bit better for this? Of course, way fewer people would consume such things.
(I also would have been interested in seeing a mention of competitive debate, given that I believe you have said in the past you have experience with that.)
It is stunning how much we can delude ourselves, I work hard to fight my blue tribe bias and I still catch myself being deluded. The debate format may be especially hard to evaluate objectively.
BTW inside/outside view is originally from Kahneman and Tversky.
There is no real reason for people to admit that they are wrong or lost a debate. No consequences, no incentive to do it. On topics like abortion and religion people are generally more interested in imposing their preferences in an aggressive fashion than arriving at truth, so it makes perfect sense for them to behave in this way.
>People seem to have no ability to evaluate who is actually winning a debate.
It can be tough. Bias is powerful and notoriously difficult to self-detect. I’m certainly one of these people you’re calling out. Does “people” include you, too, or have you licked the problem through study and practice?
>If you find yourself constantly in conflict with the consensus of experts, likely something has gone wrong in your thinking.
No doubt. Do you ever run into this problem yourself? How do you reconcile this with your own minority positions? At what point should one consider waving the white flag?
Yes! I think it's usually easier to evaluate who is winning a debate when you know something about a topic. So I don't think I'd eggregiously err regarding who's winning in a philosophy debate. But in a debate about politics, physics, economics--I could very well massively misjudge.
"was confident—in order to see that the debate went poorly, one would need to actually listen to the words that were said. Merely listening to the voices of the debaters wasn’t enough to see who won"
I often wonder if Christopher Hitchens had this effect on his listeners. His style, accent, and humor often would give off the perception of "winning" or making concrete arguments in a debate. However, looking purely at the content of his argument one may come to a different conclusion.
>One pretty good idea coming out of the Rationalist community that of inside vs. outside views.
The point is that you use outside view for topics where you are unable to interpret the arguments themselves. As soon as you can engage with the topic on the object level, the argument sceens off the authority, so the credentials and number of people holding a particular view become irrelevant.
Otherwise you risk to start double counting your evidence: if the reason why a huge group of people believe something is a particular argument, then updating on the opinion of this group of people after updating on the argument is isomorphic to updating on this argument twice. This is a mistake that, I believe, you often make in your posts. When you say something like: even if you are not persuaded by any arguments for a theory A, you should still update in it's favor because a lot of people believe it's true, ignoring that the reason why these people believe in A in the first place is exactly these kind of unpersuasive arguments.
The important caveat is to err on the side of caution while choosing whether to use inside our otside view. People are often overconfident in their abilities to reason on object level about matters. You don't want to be one of those who "do their own research" and then come to the conclusion that the Earth is flat. If there is an expert consensus first you should be able to recreate it with our own reasoning, before making your own exciting discoveries. Holding both inside and outside views estimate in your head at the same time and trying to check how well one works compared to the other is also a good excercise. Just do not naively combine them into the same estimate as if they are independent factors.
> Anderson’s argument, in a nutshell, was that the laws of logic, being necessarily true and thoughtlike, point to a necessary mind. Weirdly, TJump denied that the laws of logic were true propositions, claiming that truth was only a property of sentences.
Don't you also follow the correspondance theory of truth? Truth is the correspondance between reality and statement: territory and a map if you will. We can conceptualize it as a boolean function of two variables:
isTrue(Reality, Statement)
> When it was pointed out this would imply that nothing was true before we invented language (if only sentences are true, then before there were sentences, nothing was true)
Well in a matter of speaking... yes! If you do not have any statements, then you naturally can't provide the second argument to the function and therefore its value is undefined. The math interpreter will return you an exception:
This becomes confusing only if you are sloppily reasoning in natural language - the scourge of conventional philosophy since its early days and, quite sadly, up until now. Then you can confuse non-existence of statement with one of the following:
1) Function returning 'False'
2) Function returning different values at different times, while getting the same arguments
3) Reality not existing
None of it is the case, but people can use the same phrase "nothing was true" to mean any of it. As soon as you switch to precise mathematical categories, however, the confusion immediately dissolves
So I'd say TJump wins this one. Even if he failed to dissolve the confusion for Anderson, at least he wasn't confused himself.
The objective point of you post still stands. Though, it gets a huge grain of irony to it.
People are in general absurdly overconfident about their own opinions. They might know in the abstract about things like "confirmation bias", but they don't actually rigorously apply those ideas to their own beliefs.
This makes sense, because people aren't truth-seeking robots-- we're tribalistic apes, and the primary way our individual political beliefs may benefit or harm us is in terms of how they help us fit in with (or exclude us from) a community.
Are written debates a bit better for this? Of course, way fewer people would consume such things.
(I also would have been interested in seeing a mention of competitive debate, given that I believe you have said in the past you have experience with that.)
Know thyself and thy opponents comment section and you need not fear the results of a hundred debates
Unrelated to this post: Was great debating you!
Yeah, it was fun!
Excited to watch it after seeing your discussion with roon, where I thought you were both really thoughtful.
It is stunning how much we can delude ourselves, I work hard to fight my blue tribe bias and I still catch myself being deluded. The debate format may be especially hard to evaluate objectively.
BTW inside/outside view is originally from Kahneman and Tversky.
There is no real reason for people to admit that they are wrong or lost a debate. No consequences, no incentive to do it. On topics like abortion and religion people are generally more interested in imposing their preferences in an aggressive fashion than arriving at truth, so it makes perfect sense for them to behave in this way.
>People seem to have no ability to evaluate who is actually winning a debate.
It can be tough. Bias is powerful and notoriously difficult to self-detect. I’m certainly one of these people you’re calling out. Does “people” include you, too, or have you licked the problem through study and practice?
>If you find yourself constantly in conflict with the consensus of experts, likely something has gone wrong in your thinking.
No doubt. Do you ever run into this problem yourself? How do you reconcile this with your own minority positions? At what point should one consider waving the white flag?
Yes! I think it's usually easier to evaluate who is winning a debate when you know something about a topic. So I don't think I'd eggregiously err regarding who's winning in a philosophy debate. But in a debate about politics, physics, economics--I could very well massively misjudge.
This is a good post
"was confident—in order to see that the debate went poorly, one would need to actually listen to the words that were said. Merely listening to the voices of the debaters wasn’t enough to see who won"
I often wonder if Christopher Hitchens had this effect on his listeners. His style, accent, and humor often would give off the perception of "winning" or making concrete arguments in a debate. However, looking purely at the content of his argument one may come to a different conclusion.
Oh, and one more thing.
>One pretty good idea coming out of the Rationalist community that of inside vs. outside views.
The point is that you use outside view for topics where you are unable to interpret the arguments themselves. As soon as you can engage with the topic on the object level, the argument sceens off the authority, so the credentials and number of people holding a particular view become irrelevant.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5yFRd3cjLpm3Nd6Di/argument-screens-off-authority
Otherwise you risk to start double counting your evidence: if the reason why a huge group of people believe something is a particular argument, then updating on the opinion of this group of people after updating on the argument is isomorphic to updating on this argument twice. This is a mistake that, I believe, you often make in your posts. When you say something like: even if you are not persuaded by any arguments for a theory A, you should still update in it's favor because a lot of people believe it's true, ignoring that the reason why these people believe in A in the first place is exactly these kind of unpersuasive arguments.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WN73eiLQkuDtSC8Ag/one-argument-against-an-army
The important caveat is to err on the side of caution while choosing whether to use inside our otside view. People are often overconfident in their abilities to reason on object level about matters. You don't want to be one of those who "do their own research" and then come to the conclusion that the Earth is flat. If there is an expert consensus first you should be able to recreate it with our own reasoning, before making your own exciting discoveries. Holding both inside and outside views estimate in your head at the same time and trying to check how well one works compared to the other is also a good excercise. Just do not naively combine them into the same estimate as if they are independent factors.
> Anderson’s argument, in a nutshell, was that the laws of logic, being necessarily true and thoughtlike, point to a necessary mind. Weirdly, TJump denied that the laws of logic were true propositions, claiming that truth was only a property of sentences.
Don't you also follow the correspondance theory of truth? Truth is the correspondance between reality and statement: territory and a map if you will. We can conceptualize it as a boolean function of two variables:
isTrue(Reality, Statement)
> When it was pointed out this would imply that nothing was true before we invented language (if only sentences are true, then before there were sentences, nothing was true)
Well in a matter of speaking... yes! If you do not have any statements, then you naturally can't provide the second argument to the function and therefore its value is undefined. The math interpreter will return you an exception:
"Function 'isTrue' missing 1 required positional argument: 'Statement'"
This becomes confusing only if you are sloppily reasoning in natural language - the scourge of conventional philosophy since its early days and, quite sadly, up until now. Then you can confuse non-existence of statement with one of the following:
1) Function returning 'False'
2) Function returning different values at different times, while getting the same arguments
3) Reality not existing
None of it is the case, but people can use the same phrase "nothing was true" to mean any of it. As soon as you switch to precise mathematical categories, however, the confusion immediately dissolves
So I'd say TJump wins this one. Even if he failed to dissolve the confusion for Anderson, at least he wasn't confused himself.
The objective point of you post still stands. Though, it gets a huge grain of irony to it.
The funniest TJump video is with Perry Hendricks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wd-lTVptxcA
People are in general absurdly overconfident about their own opinions. They might know in the abstract about things like "confirmation bias", but they don't actually rigorously apply those ideas to their own beliefs.
This makes sense, because people aren't truth-seeking robots-- we're tribalistic apes, and the primary way our individual political beliefs may benefit or harm us is in terms of how they help us fit in with (or exclude us from) a community.