Varieties of Argumentative Experience
slatestarcodex.com
slatestarcodex.com
The Center for Applied Rationality promotes double-cruxing, a specific technique that helps people operationalize arguments. A double-crux is a single subquestion where both sides admit that if they were wrong about the subquestion, they would change their mind. For example, if Alice (gun control opponent) would support gun control if she knew it lowered crime, and Bob (gun control supporter) would oppose gun control if he knew it would make crime worse – then the only thing they have to talk about is crime. They can ignore whether guns are important for resisting tyranny. They can ignore the role of mass shootings. They can ignore whether the NRA spokesman made an offensive comment one time. They just have to focus on crime – and that’s the sort of thing which at least in principle is tractable to studies and statistics and scientific consensus.
Your quote may as well replace "gun control" with "religion" and "crime" with "morality". The arguments on both sides become superficial as you've removed the specific causes for each side to argue. You may as well continue this trend until both sides are arguing "good equals good" for differing values of "good".
This stuff isn't easily arguable by humans with opinions. Removing the example data that forms the opinions doesn't make the arguments on either side stronger or weaker, it makes the argument as a whole less relevant to society.
This is unfortunate because, as you quote, "that’s the sort of thing which at least in principle is tractable to studies and statistics and scientific consensus"
Breaking complex issues down to be "tractable to studies" is possible, but most techniques are fraught with errors of over-simplification.
In this case, the double crux was on crime prevention, so after agreeing on the crux they'd be only looking at gun control vs. crime statistics. Did you mean to say something else?
I think parent's point is made later in the paragraph after the section on double-cruxing:
> High-level generators of disagreement are what remains when everyone understands exactly what’s being argued, and agrees on what all the evidence says, but have vague and hard-to-define reasons for disagreeing anyway. In retrospect, these are probably why the disagreement arose in the first place, with a lot of the more specific points being downstream of them and kind of made-up justifications. These are almost impossible to resolve even in principle.
I.e., many people who have strong opinions on gun control would never agree to this sort of double-crux. And even if they did agree to it in the context of one conversation, and then "lost" the argument on that basis, they wouldn't actually go on to change their mind. They would return to the "High-level generator" and everyone just wasted their time.
Doubele-cruxing can be useful in arguments, but the audience of a debate should approach any crux with incredulity. Anyone with half a mind toward "winning" a double-cruxed debate would choose an untenable position as their "crux". A practiced debater will find the scientific concensus and then work backwards to a crux. Not the other way around. Then they get the rhetorical benefits of acting "reasonable" without actually giving up anything useful to their opponent. In fact, if their opponent is clueless enough to accept the crux, they've just won the game. And if their opponent complains, well now the opponent is "meta-debating" which is apparently bad thing (and is a bad thing anyways because it makes you sound like an egghead).
So, double-cruxing is a great strategy for an argument between people who mutually respect one another. But audiences to a debate should be careful about whether they're being hood-winked by a rhetorical trick.
In short, a lot of this philosophizing about how to have a good argument really just boils down to "have the right argument with the right person". Two people who respect each other talking about something that both have fluid opinions on rarely devolves into a useless conversation.
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^1: A debate in which there's no third party present might be called "a waste of time".
The "double" part of double crux means that the crux you choose has to be a crux for both people, i.e. if it's established either way, that alone has to be sufficient to convince both people of the overall argument being true or false.
If you pick a crux that is a truly provably untenable position, and it turns out to also be a crux for the other person then they should happily change their mind on seeing the proof. If they don't it's not like they're committed to saying you've "won" against their will or anything, at worst it turns out that the crux they agreed on wasn't really a crux for them after all. At best, they discover that their belief rested on an untenable position.
By design it's pretty hard for a malicious actor to play double crux to win without also playing it to discover the truth, so long as they actually choose honest cruxes for themselves (and to some extent, even if they don't).
The rhetorical trick is to paint the opponent as unreasonable, pretentious, impractical, etc. if they don't agree with your double-crux. In this case, the resolution of the double-crux is not the strong argument (your opponent would never willinging agree to the double-crux)! The rhetorical characterization of your opponent is the strong argument. Again, it's just something you should watch out for as an audience member.
Also, inexperienced debaters will often agree to double-cruxes when they shouldn't because they don't understand the strategy that's being deployed agains them and the double-crux is presented in a "friendly" tone. And once it's deployed they realie that was a stupid thing to agree to. The truth we've discovered is that one of the debaters is inexperienced; we haven't learned anything about the underlying topic.
In practice, debates (acdaemic or out in the real world) are almost never searches for truth.
Again, as an audience member in an obviously zero-sum debate, I'm extremely skeptical of the double-crux. It's usually a steup for a rhetorical argument or a way of easily beating down an inexperienced person. It's rarely a geniune assertion that this one thing really is the fundamental point of contention.
In a friendly, respectful argument designed to search for truth, double-cruxes can be a great tool.
For some context, double-cruxing came out of the rationalist community (specifically CFAR), which commonly refers to persuasive rhetoric as the dark arts. They do not develop tools for use in the dark arts.
That's a good point. The guide on double-cruxing[1] lists "epistemic humility" and "good faith" as pre-requisites for using the technique effectively.
[1] http://rationality.org/resources/updates/2016/double-crux
Always argue for your weakest crux. I.e. out of all the necessary premises of some position you hold, always keep the hardest to defend premise close to the front of your mind.
This is counterintuitive because people reflexively try to bury their weakest assumptions. What's more: we're rewarded for presenting strong arguments. But if there's some fact that, if disproven, would cause you to change your mind and you aren't really confident that that fact is true - you should care the most about finding out if it's false, or at the very least becoming more certain in your belief about it.
But in many contexts, this is not the end goal. The end goal is to either make one feel better about its own beliefs, or to exert social pressure/gain social status.
You can often kind of tell who is really discussing to find the underlying truth based on this very observation.
This is definitely not true. I think most people have social shaming arguments (another way of putting this is tribalism) so drilled into them that they believe it at a very core level and will socially shame you (in a less aggressive way) when speaking in private because it's core to how they think.
"I hate how you're always agreeing/on the side of X"
I will say that this is quite a large collection of papers. Do you have any pointers as to which of these papers I should start with as a foundation?
More specifically, if I were dang for a day, I'd edit the third guideline ("Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.") to add, "When in doubt, try paraphrasing the other side's argument in a way that they would agree with before responding to it."
Productive debates are more likely to happen in places with 1. Moderation and 2. an invested community. That's what makes HN successful, in my opinion.
But we can't turn every comment section into HN. Moderation is expensive. And some sites aren't niche enough to foster a sense of community.
So we should probably remove most comment sections.
News sites are particularly bad. Anyone can just stop by, leave their shitty opinion, and walk away.
Since this is basically the exact opposite from what I remember reading - correct me if I'm wrong - in "On Writing Well", I've started to assume that their core discussion/argumentation technique is actually a kind of attrition warfare - to tire the opponent out.
A couple of style changes would have a much larger impact on the reading experience. As is there are about 115 characters per line and a narrow line height. Bumping the paragraph size to 16px and the line height to 1.6 makes the article dramatically less tiresome to read.
If you publish long-form content, typography is incredibly important. For long articles like this 65-80 characters per line is the sweet spot.
I mean this as neither defense of SSC nor an attack on SSC. It is simply an explanation of what it is, and an observation that you may simply not be in the target audience.
People who really want to understand, say, the meta-ethics of modern democracy and debate are much better of reading Plato, Foucault and Rawls. Then you'd understand that sophism cannot be so easily dismissed because it is in fact pee pure sophism to say that certain arguments are "social shaming" and therefore not good arguments. The entire construction here -- the assumption that there is a single right answer to every argument and it can be arrived at if both sides are just reasonable enough and set aside their social biases -- is, as Foucault would show, a highly suspect assertion born of a very privileged position. People who seriously buy in to these sorts of simplistic models are going to have a bad time. Try having a "rational" debate with a Jewish person about whether all Jews should be exterminated. You might dismiss the response as "social shaming" and accuse them off being "triggered" and emotional... but such a victory won't buy you much.
I would be interested to see a survey of the reading speed of people who like/dislike SSC. It could be that the fans tend to skim texts and read more words per minute, so the posts don't feel as long.
And that's a lot of SSC. It's not "based" in science, nor is it based in "good writing." Often times its articles devolve into something that is almost self-fisking and difficult to follow.
I think though that finding ways to succeed at public arguments is an interesting discussion, and it encourages you to define "success" in ways other than "dominate and browbeat people by turning them into ideologically fetishized foils." Much of this discourse is aimed at denigrating this, but that's ultimately a quiet appeal to the status quo and the least rational, most passionate opinions. Often times denormalization of those opinions is it the best way to combat them, if they need combating.
A great example of this is repeating (in a tired voice) "No on cares but you" when someone goes off on a rant about how transexuals are "mentally ill." Repeating that this is a value judgement and not a universal axiom is a very effective tactic, because it refuses to accept the hidden premises that having such a conversation in the first place implies (i.e., that it's open for debate in the first place).
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/621/621-h/621-h.html
And it's easy to see the parallel the author makes. Every minute aspect of modern living has become "religion". And there is a very public jockeying amongst a high priest class of prognosticating pundits all vying for influence and attention.
But in the most fundamental matters of import beginning with the categorical assumption is essential. Namely, that there exists for any given problem, an optimal answer. It is simply a matter of collecting empirical evidence and making the appropriate analysis.
Steven Pinker argues in his most recent book that if there were "no Hitler, there would be no nukes!" It was only the pressing war that goaded formerly peacefully inclined nuclear physicists to construct such technologies. With the resultant problems we now face of non-proliferation, cyber command and control, etc.
And the logical extension would then take the form: well the Five Eyes nations or G-7 that represent our democratic allies need to develop the next generation of weaponry. To maintain the balance of power shifted in our favor. And so the policy of "mututally assured annihilation" continues ad infinitum until someone happens on a doomsday apparatus ;)
But it is far from optimal. An optimal solution would be something akin to peaceful equilibrium throughout the planet. With space based deterrents against alien attack. But barring an actual concrete threat in that regard. We lack the foresight and will to make it happen.
Obviously I believe part of the solution is electing more scientists and rational thinkers in positions of power. Which brings us back to square one. How to effectively communicate and "nudge" an outcome that foments optimal solutions.
But nuclear arms have essentially put an end to total war between developed nations. We've all agreed not to use them in conventional war, and disallowed chemical weapons as well, as those progressed from Lewisite and Mustard gas to terrifying V- and G- agents. In the absence of these technologies, pressing wars would have continued.
>An optimal solution would be something akin to peaceful equilibrium throughout the planet.
This is based on the notion that war is not necessary to maintain our species in optimal condition, which is an assumption that bears more examination. Why do we have war to begin with? Some species make war, many don't but some do, including us. But why do we do so? Doesn't it serve some beneficial or essential function for us?
“When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”
[...]
could be transformed into an argument like “Since it’s
possible to get guns illegally with some effort, and
criminals need guns to commit their crimes and are
comfortable with breaking laws, it might only slightly
decrease the number of guns available to criminals. And
it might greatly decrease the number of guns available to
law-abiding people hoping to defend themselves. So the
cost of people not being able to defend themselves might
be greater than the benefit of fewer criminals being able
to commit crimes.”
"When X is illegal to possess under some jurisdiction's law, then the residents of that jurisdiction will be criminalized by their possession of X, and thus the only possessors of X in the jurisdiction will be criminals."
"The original is a gotcha exactly because it doesn’t invite this level of analysis or even seem aware that it’s possible. It’s not saying “calculate the value of these parameters, because I think they work out in a way where this is a pretty strong argument against controlling guns”. It’s saying “gotcha!”."
Sure, and "My opponent once made a tweet that could arguably be interpreted as racist" will persuade even more people.
But this article is not about persuading people. It's about two people with opposite opinions who recognize that they might be wrong, sharing the evidence that supports those opinions in hopes of learning something. Persuading people is what you do when you already know you're right.
If an argument loses its persuasive power when its limitations and tacit assumptions are spelled out, then it wasn't that good an argument to start with.
Anyone who is thinking clearly, regardless of their position, can agree with "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns," as it is simply a tautology. If you hear someone agreeing or disagreeing with the statement, they are really agreeing or disagreeing with a longer, implied argument like the one provided, or else they're confused.