A successful example of "adversarial collaboration"
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
Seems like this is the ideal model for how politics should work.
Instead of the norm, which is opposing parties yelling past each other and blocking the other party just out of spite.
Science (done properly) is knowledgeable, skeptical experts trading written documents that only they can fully understand, and making it their career to understand and critique everything.
Politics (done the only way we know how, democracy) is knowledgeable experts playing an idiotic reality TV game for an audience of millions of viewers who will spend about 5 seconds of thought on it, relying heavily on charisma, reputation, and sound bites of spoken word, so that the world is not captured by even worse experts.
My hot take: We could take the lizard-brain stuff out of both politics and advertising if we didn't have live debates, didn't show faces or allow voices. It's harmful to voters who are not literate, and nobody would actually support this, but I think keeping "system 1 thinking" away from the fate of the free world might be helpful.
For instance, I think gasoline should cost more. System 1 says that can never happen, it's political suicide. To justify carbon taxes takes more attention than voters can afford. And the reasonable critiques would not be "fuck you I want cheap gas" but "why save the environment if our superpower rivals aren't going to help?"
Without a way to attach an identity to the involved parties, any field of debate will quickly become rife with sock puppets.
> Seems like this is the ideal model for how politics should work.
If you think so, I don't think you really know what politics is.
IMHO, the adversarial collaboration is only practical in relatively easy cases, when there's already significant common ground and shared goals between the factions.
> Instead of the norm, which is opposing parties yelling past each other and blocking the other party just out of spite.
That's what happens when the factions are unified and have incompatible ideologies. The blocking isn't so much out of spite, but a desire to see something not done.
And guess what: in coalitions you get more of your parties program through (and thus increase the chance of getting relected) if you manage to convince the other parts of the coalition that your plans are reasonable and make some changes that they demand.
Sometimes that leads to "watered down" laws that are neither here nor there, but often this also leads to better, more practical laws that are better for more people.
Politicians are different. Say some politicians on the left and right got together to study questions like "how does changing billionaire tax rates affect jobs" or "is buying homes and other assistance for the homeless a net savings." No outcome, even with absolute, rock solid evidence, would be acceptable to at least one side of the study. Imagine a Republican coming back to the floor to say "wellp, my committee studied it, and it turns out that dramatically raising taxes on billionaires is just fantastic for America! Who would've thought?" He'd be out of office just as soon as the next election could happen, and maybe sooner. Being right and having evidence is convenient for politicians but is neither sufficient nor necessary.
Imagine Party A and Party B both produce models to estimate the effects of tax changes on job growth. Based on these models each Party produces a policy proposal. Party A is in power so their proposal is chosen. This is now a natural experiment to test both models! Data collected after the policy is implemented can now be used to judge the validity of both models. If a model is shown to be wrong, the Party either needs to explain the inconsistency or change their model to suit.
Why doesn't this occur in the real world? Politicians know that many of their policies are not predicated on fact but on pragmatic political considerations. Revealing their ignorance by publishing models is just adding to the attack surface that their opponents can use to criticize them. Thus as long as there are no competing parties producing explainable (in the modelling sense) policy, there is no advantage to explaining policy in this way, it is all downside.
It would take a very courageous group to change the paradigm, and they would probably be ridiculed because they would need to reveal their ignorance when publishing their models.
"Trickle down economics works" suggests that this is not what happens if a model is shown to be wrong.
There are lots of studies and papers and economic tomes that argue for trickle down, but no model that a politician points to.
So my takeaway is that working with people that disagree with you is beneficial, provided they're not so invested in their opinions that it becomes a social issue.
It feels like that's the obvious goal of collaboration in general... People of differing views coming together to make a more complete view. Is that wrong?
Ideally, no. Realistically, it usually devolves into people trying to convince each other why they're right, instead of being open to being wrong, which is ultimately not productive.
This is how I see it and how I've always seen those "diversity improves success" works. I mean no one (serious) is suggesting it is a genetic difference but rather cultural, and thus different points of view.
But per your quote, the way I see to implement this is rather to have lower stakes. Competition happens no matter what. You get competitive with your friends when playing videogames, sports, or even stupid shit like a literal pissing contest. That's all fun and you can see people get creative and explore strategies in those situations. But there's one thing notable, there isn't any real cheating and when it does happen it's more done jokingly and not hidden. Often a jab at some exploitation of the rules (which helps update rule sets). On the other hand, when the stakes are high (say in situations like grades, job applications/leet code, money, etc) then you're actively incentivized to cheat. But people are not going to be open here about that cheating. (It also seems to lead to a lot of fighting and bad outcomes like the squeaky wheel getting the grease -- complaining loudly gets action while doing work quiet doesn't, unfortunately)
Idk if we can really get away from these high stakes games until we reach a post scarce society, but certainly there are frameworks we have now where this can be done. In academics, jobs, and such. We just need to reframe our thinking, which is far easier said than done.
On the other hand, there is this law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law .
It only works with 2 people / parties at a time, and it only works if you both respect each other to obey the format. I think if both people don't respect each other, they were never going to have a productive debate in the first place.
The Yes/No format is essentially producing a tree of idea nodes, where a branch is created to investigate disagreements. You could colour code the nodes to show agreement/disagreement between parties, and publish graphs to be a starting point for further debate.
I think it would be interesting if someone did a survey across all of Mike Rowe's dirty Jobs to see what the sex representation was.
Made me think!
The topic is adversarial collaboration, essentially, the idea is to have people with diverging opinion work together as a way to limit bias and make something better in the end.
Because gender studies are a highly polarizing topic, it is an appropriate example, but I think the same ideas can be applied to topics like programming. For example, by pairing an architecture astronaut with a hacker, one may get something sensible, if both survive the encounter. For me that's what diversity is all about, more than narrow concerns about race, gender, religion and sexuality.
I work with some people who I almost always disagree with, almost like magic. But from that disagreement can often come better solutions than either one of us would have been able to come up with on our own.
It obviously doesn't work in every situation, and everyone needs to ultimately be on the "same team" and want a similar overarching goal, and everyone needs to know when it's time to back off and concede a point. But there's just something so powerful about working together to solve problems from completely different viewpoints that prevents anyone from getting too focused on some small part of a problem.
This sounds a lot like my workplace, where we have a shop foreman and fabrication team who tends to just want to build to print and get it shipped on time and at a profit, an engineering team who tends to hyper-optimize and inspect every parameter of the design, and an administration team that prioritizes process following. Left to their own devices, build would throw together something unreplicable and in desperate need of a redesign, engineering would be perpetually making ever more complicated prototypes and never ship anything, and admin would be holding so many meetings to go over so many forms that there would be no time remaining to make any mistakes (or to make anything at all), but together, it's a pretty successful team.
Sure, we poke fun at each other in the lunchroom, but it's all good-natured. Perhaps that's a better example of adversarial collaboration than a highly-polarizing gender studies paper...
In reality, there are many, many reasons that explain outcome disparities between groups and it's not safe to assume that disparities are caused by discrimination. Thomas Sowell has a great book on this topic, aptly named "Discrimination and Disparities".
How were life choices controlled for in these studies? I’m sure lots of black people in the pre-civil rights American South never applied for jobs only given to white people because not getting lynched is a pretty important “life choice.”
Put another, less stark way: if you see no one like you in a certain field, starting as a child, can you really say it was a “life choice” not to pursue, I.e, computer science?
However, a lot of folks let group mentality ruin otherwise great opportunities.
We don't need to accept individualism to accept that argument, we need to accept that people are blind and deaf to the world around them, and somehow make major life decisions without basing them on any sensory and social input.
Which is a much harder sell.
> How were life choices controlled for in these studies?
The studies would consider lynching as a form of discrimination. I can't recommend the book enough if you are curious about the topic, it cites numerous studies.
The overall conclusion is that we shouldn't expect equal outcomes even in a world devoid of discrimination. The most obvious example of that are the various minority, and discriminated against, groups that outperform majority groups (e.g. the Chinese in Malaysia, American Jewish, etc.).
Eh, psychology is sort of a soft science. It's actually pretty tough to find rigorous studies, firm conclusions, deeply informed analyses, etc.
The successful example cited is about gender bias. Gender bias is a difficult topic to sort out. It seems to lend itself to biased conclusions where two people seeing the same thing project a lot onto it and draw different conclusions with little hope of convincing the opposing view.
It thus seems malleable in some sense.