Comment by Gormisdomai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gormisdomai | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I dislike double cruxing along the lines of debating as a sport too, but I disagree that what you describe in the second half of your comment is a problem, in fact people should be encouraged to do what you describe.

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).

I'm unconvinced.

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.

> Again, as an audience member in an obviously zero-sum debate, I'm extremely skeptical of the double-crux.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com