Epistemic status: Tentative. I’ve been practicing this on-and-off for a year and it’s seemed valuable, but it’s the sort of thing I might look back on and say “hmm, that wasn’t really the right frame to approach it from.”
In doublecrux, the focus is on “what observations would change my mind?”
In some cases this is (relatively) straightforward. If you believe minimum wage helps workers, or harms them, there are some fairly obvious experiments you might run. “Which places have instituted minimum wage laws? What happened to wages? What happened to unemployment? What happened to worker migration?”
The details will matter a lot. The results of the experiment might be weird and confusing. If I ran the experiment myself I’d probably get a lot of things wrong, misuse statistics and...
Are you familiar at all with the works of Christopher Alexander? He spent about 50 years exploring the objectivity of aesthetics in Architecture (and was highly influential across several fields, including software design). His book "The Timeless Way of Building" is available as an Audiobook and is approachable. It is also the closest thing I have ever read to the teachings of my Tantric Teachers in India.
Basically, the book is about a "Pattern Language" by which beautiful things happen. The hard part though is getting people to be ... (read more)