The most important tip for online arguing, for anything which you expect ever to be discussed again, is to keep a canonical master source which does your arguing for you. (The backfire effect means you owe it to the other person to present your best case and not a sketchy paraphrase of what you have enough energy to write down at that random moment; it's irresponsible to do otherwise.)
For example, if you are arguing about the historical Jesus and your argument does not consist of citations and hyperlinks with some prepositional phrases interspersed, you are doing it wrong. If I'm arguing about brain size correlation with intelligence, I stick the references into the appropriate Wikipedia article and refer to that henceforth. If I'm arguing about modafinil, I either link to the relevant section in Wikipedia or my article, or I edit a cleaned-up version of the argument into my article. If I'm arguing that Moody 2008 drastically undermines the value of dual n-back for IQ on the DNB ML, you can be sure that it's going into my FAQ. If I don't yet have an article or essay on it but it's still a topic I am interested in like how IQ contributes to peace and economic growth, then I will jus...
Don't Straw Man Fellow Arguers, Steel Man Them Instead
Be careful with this one. I've been in arguments where in attempting to steel-man their position only to discover that they don't agree with what I thought was the steel man.
Author's Notes
I wrote this to be accessible to a general audience. I didn't announce this at the top of the post, like previous posts of this type have done, because I thought it would be weird for a member of the general audience to see "this was written for a general audience" or "share this with your friends" at the beginning of a post they were about to read.
However, it's not just for a general audience; I'm hoping it will be useful for Less Wrong users who realize they haven't been following one or more of these tips. (Like so much on Less Wrong, think of it as a list of bugs that you can check your thinking and behavior for.)
I realize the position I'm taking on holding back downvotes is somewhat extreme by current standards. But the negative externalities from excess downvoting are hard for us to see. My best friend, an intelligent and rational guy whose writing ability is only so-so, was highly turned off by Less Wrong when the first comment he made was voted down.
If we really feel like we need downvoting for hiding and sorting things, maybe we could mask the degree of downvoting by displaying negative integers as 0? I think this is what reddit does for s...
I agree that downvoting new people is a bad idea - and every comment in the Welcome Thread should get a load of karma.
However, I think people should aggressively downvote - at the very least a couple of comments per page.
If we don't downvote, comments on average get positive karma - which makes people post them more and more. A few 0 karma comments is a small price to pay if there's a high chance of positive karma.
However, we don't want these posts. They clutter LW, increasing noise. The reason we read forums rather than random letter sequences is because forums filter for strings that have useful semantic content; downvoting inane or uninsightful comments increases this filtering effect. I'd much rather spent a short period of time reading only high quality comments than spend longer reading worse comments.
Worse, it can often be hard to distinguish between a good comment on a topic you don't understand and a bad one. Yet I get much more value spending time reading the good one, which might educate me, than the bad one, which might confuse me - especially if I have trouble distinguishing experts.
Downvotes provide the sting of (variable) negative reinforcement. In the long run, well kept gardens die by pacificism.
However, I think people should aggressively downvote - at the very least a couple of comments per page.
If we don't downvote, comments on average get positive karma - which makes people post them more and more. A few 0 karma comments is a small price to pay if there's a high chance of positive karma.
We should expect comments on average to get positive karma, as long as the average member is making contributions which are on the whole more wanted than unwanted. Attempting to institute a minimum quota of downvoted comments strikes me as simply ridiculous. If the least worthwhile comment out of twenty is still not an actual detraction from the conversation, there's no reason to downvote it.
If we're just concerned with the average quality of discourse, it would be simpler to just cut off the whole community and go back to dialogues between Eliezer and Robin,.
It seems to me that arguments between scientists are productive mostly because they have a lot of shared context. If the goal of arguing is to learn things for yourself, then it's useless to argue with someone who doesn't have the relevant context (they can't teach you anything) and useless to argue about a topic where you don't know the relevant context yourself (it's better to study the context first). Arguments between people who are coming from different contexts also seem to generate more heat and less light, so it might be better to avoid those.
Arguing logically works on a much smaller proportion of the populace than generally believed. My experience is that people bow to authority and status and only strive to make it look like they were convinced logically.
It seems someone should link up "Why and How to Debate Charitably." I can't find a copy of the original because the author has taken it down. Here is a discussion of it on LW.. Here are my bulleted summary quotes. ADDED: Original essay I've just learned, and am very saddened to hear, that the author, Chris, committed suicide some time ago.
Good article. The 6 techniques seem quite useful. I think I use 'isolate specific disagreements' the most-it feels like at least 80% of all arguments I get into consist of me trying to clarify exactly what we disagree on, and often finding out half the time that we don't actually disagree on anything of substance, just vocabulary/values/etc.
If your belief inertia is low and you steel-man everything, you'll reach the super chill state of not having a "side" in any given argument. You'll play for all sides and you won't care who wins.
I've actu...
Rule one: Have a social goal in any given conversation. It needn't be a fixed goal but as long as there actually is one the rest is easy.
Don't Straw Man Fellow Arguers, Steel Man Them Instead
Can you provide some specific tips on this one? I've tried to do this in discussions with non-LW people, and it comes off looking bizarre at best and rude at worst. (See also: this comment, which is basically what ends up happening.) Have you been able to implement this technique in discussions, and if so, how did you do it while adhering to social norms/not aggravating your discussion partners?
These tips seem designed for cases where everyone has read them and everyone wants to reach the truth. An important case, certainly, and what we're trying (probably pretty successfully) to achieve here.
I can't help suspecting that an argument containing someone like this and someone arguing to win will either go nowhere or conclude whatever the arguer-to-win went in thinking. Clearly no good.
Any ideas how to deal with that (rather common) case?
TBH the #1 rule should be: set a limit of time for arguing with individuals or groups of individuals who are dogmatically sure in something for which they don't even provide any argument for that could conceivably been this convincing to them. E.g. "why you are so sure exactly 1 God exist", "well, there's a book, which i agree doesn't make a whole lot of sense, it says it was written by God..." what ever, clearly you aren't updating your beliefs to '50% sure god exists' when presented with comparable quality argument that god doesn't ...
Actually, I have two tips, which sound unfriendly, but if followed, should minimize the unproductive arguments:
1: Try not to form strong opinions (with high certainty in the opinion) based on shaky arguments (that should only result in low-certainty opinion). I.e. try not to be overconfident in whatever was conjectured.
2: Try hard not to be wrong.
More than half of the problem with the unproductive arguments is that you are wrong. That's because in the arguments, often, both sides are wrong (note: you can have a wrong proof that 2*3=6 and still be very wron...
This is a list of tips for having "productive" arguments. For the purposes of this list, "productive" means improving the accuracy of at least one person's views on some important topic. By this definition, arguments where no one changes their mind are unproductive.
Sometimes the onlookers will change their position. When arguing with someone sufficiently mind-killed about a topic (and yes there are people like that on lesswrong), that's the best you can hope for.
We've all had arguments that seemed like a complete waste of time in retrospect. But at the same time, arguments (between scientists, policy analysts, and others) play a critical part in moving society forward. You can imagine how lousy things would be if no one ever engaged those who disagreed with them.
This is a list of tips for having "productive" arguments. For the purposes of this list, "productive" means improving the accuracy of at least one person's views on some important topic. By this definition, arguments where no one changes their mind are unproductive. So are arguments about unimportant topics like which Pink Floyd album is the best.
Why do we want productive arguments? Same reason we want Wikipedia: so people are more knowledgeable. And just like the case of Wikipedia, there is a strong selfish imperative here: arguing can make you more knowledgeable, if you're willing to change your mind when another arguer has better points.
Arguments can also be negatively productive if everyone moves further from the truth on net. This could happen if, for example, the truth was somewhere in between two arguers, but they both left the argument even more sure of themselves.
These tips are derived from my personal experience arguing.
Probably the biggest barrier to productive arguments is the desire of arguers to save face and avoid publicly admitting they were wrong. Obviously, it's hard for anyone's views to get more accurate if no one's views ever change.
If someone suggests something you find implausible, start asking friendly questions to get them to clarify and justify their statement. If their reasoning seems genuinely bad, you can refute it then.
As a bonus, doing nothing but ask questions can be a good way to save face if the implausible assertion-maker turns out to be right.
Be careful about rejecting highly implausible ideas out of hand. Ideally, you want your rationality to be a level where even if you started out with a crazy belief like Scientology, you'd still be able to get rid of it. But for a Scientologist to berid themselves of Scientology, they have to consider ideas that initially seen extremely unlikely.
It's been argued that many mainstream skeptics aren't really that good at critically evaluating ideas, just dismissing ones that seem implausible.
Stick to one topic at a time, until someone changes their mind or the topic is declared not worth pursuing. If your discussion constantly jumps from one point of disagreement to another, reaching consensus on anything will be difficult.
You can use hypothetical-oriented thinking like conditional probabilities and the least convenient possible world to figure out exactly what it is you disagree on with regard to a given topic. Once you've creatively helped yourself or another arguer clarify beliefs, sharing intuitions on specific "irreducible" assertions or anticipated outcomes that aren't easily decomposed can improve both of your probability estimates.
You might think that a productive argument is one where the smartest person wins, but that's not always the case. Smart people can be wrong too. And a smart person successfully convincing less intelligent folks of their delusion counts as a negatively productive argument (see definition above).
Play for all sides, in case you're the smartest person in the argument.
Rewrite fellow arguers' arguments so they're even stronger, and think of new ones. Arguments for new positions, even—they don't have anyone playing for them. And if you end up convincing yourself of something you didn't previously believe, so much the better.
This is often called losing an argument, but you're actually the winner: you and your arguing partner both invested time to argue, but you were the only one who received significantly improved knowledge.
If you're worried about losing face or seeing your coalition (research group, political party, etc.) diminish in importance from you admitting that you were wrong, here are some ideas:
Some of these techniques may seem dodgy, and honestly I think you'll usually do better by explaining what actually changed your mind. But they're a small price to pay for more accurate knowledge. Better to tell unimportant false statements to others than important false statements to yourself.
It's actually pretty rare that the evidence that you're wrong comes suddenly—usually you can see things turning against you. As an advanced move, cultivate the ability to update your degree of certainty in real time to new arguments, and tell fellow arguers if you find an argument of theirs persuasive. This can actually be a good way to make friends. It also encourages other arguers to share additional arguments with you, which could be valuable data.
One psychologist I agree with suggested that people ask
If folks don't have to drag you around like this for you to change your mind, you don't actually lose much face. It's only long-overdue capitulations that result in significant face loss. And the longer you put your capitulation off, the worse things get. Quickly updating in response to new evidence seems to preserve face in my experience.
If your belief inertia is low and you steel-man everything, you'll reach the super chill state of not having a "side" in any given argument. You'll play for all sides and you won't care who wins. You'll have achieved equanimity, content with the world as it actually is, not how you wish it was.