TL;DR: I’m offering to help people productively have difficult conversations and resolve disagreements, for free. Feel free to email me if and when that seems helpful. elitrye [at] gmail.com

Facilitation

Over the past 4-ish years, I’ve had a side project of learning, developing, and iterating on methods for resolving tricky disagreements, and failures to communicate. A lot of this has been in the Double Crux frame, but I’ve also been exploring a number of other frameworks (including, NVC, Convergent Facilitation, Circling-inspired stuff, intuition extraction, and some home-grown methods).

As part of that, I’ve had a standing offer to facilitate / mediate tricky conversations for folks in the CFAR and MIRI spheres (testimonials below). Facilitating “real disagreements”, allows me to get feedback on my current conversational frameworks and techniques. When I encounter blockers that I don’t know how to deal with, I can go back to the drawing board to model those problems and interventions that would solve them, and iterate from there, developing new methods.

I generally like doing this kind of conversational facilitation and am open to doing a lot more of it with a wider selection of people.

I am extending an offer to help mediate tricky conversations, to anyone that might read this post, for the foreseeable future. [If I retract this offer, I’ll come back and leave a note here.]

What sort of thing is this good for?

I’m open to trying to help with a wide variety of difficult conversations, but the situations where I have been most helpful in the past have had the following features:

1. Two* people are either having some conflict or disagreement or are having difficulty understanding something about what the other person is saying.
2. There’s some reason to expect the conversation to not “work”, by default: either they’ve tried already, and made little progress etc. or, at least one person can predict that this conversation will be tricky or heated.
3. There is enough mutual respect and/or there is enough at stake that it seems worthwhile to try and have the conversation anyway. It seems worth the time to engage.

Here are some (anonymized) examples of conversations that I’ve facilitated in the past years.

• Two researchers work in related fields, but in different frames / paradigms. Try as they might, neither person can manage to see how the other’s claims are even plausible.
• Two friends are working on a project together, but they each feel inclined to take it in a different direction, and find it hard to get excited about the other’s proposal, even having talked about the question a lot.
• John and Janet are EAs. John thinks that the project that Janet has spent the past year on, and is close to launching, is net negative, and that Janet should drop it entirely. Janet feels exasperated by this and generally feels that John is overly-controlling.
• Two rationalists Laura and Alex, are each in some kind of community leadership role, and have a lot of respect for each other, but they have very different takes on a particular question of social mores: Laura thinks that there is a class of norm enforcement that is normal and important, Alex thinks that class of “norm enforcement” behavior is unacceptable and corrosive to the social fabric. They sit down to talk about it, but seem to keep going in circles without clarifying anything.

Basically, if you have a tricky disagreement that you want to try to hash out, and you feel comfortable inviting an outside party, feel free to reach out to me.

(If there’s some conversation or conflict that you have in mind, but don’t know if it falls in this category, feel free to email me and ask.)

*- I’m also potentially open to trying to help with conflicts that involve more than two people, such as a committee that is in gridlock, trying to make a decision, but I am much less practiced with that.

The process

If everyone involved is open to a third person (me) coming in to mediate, shoot me an email at elityre [at] gmail.com, and we can schedule a half hour call to discuss your issue. After discussing it a bit, I’ll tell you if I think I can help or not. If not, I might refer you to other people resources that might be more useful.

If it seems like I can help, I typically prefer to meet with both parties one-on-one, as much as a week before we meet together, so that I can “load up” each person’s perspective, and start doing prep work. From there we can schedule a conversation, presumably over Zoom, for all three (or more) of us to meet.

In the conversation itself, I would facilitate, tracking what’s happening and suggesting particular conversational moves or tacts, and possibly recommending and high-level framework.

[I would like to link to an facilitation-example video here, but almost all of the conversations that I’ve facilitated are confidential. Hopefully this post will lead to one or two that can be public.]

Individual cases can vary a lot, and I’m generally open to considering alternative formats.

Currently, I’m doing this free of charge.

My sense of my current level of skill

I think this is a domain in which deep mastery is possible. I don’t consider myself to be a master, but I am aspiring to mastery.

My (possibly biased impression), is that the median outcome of my coming to help with a conversation is “eh, that was moderately helpful, mostly because having a third person to help hold space, freed up our working memory to focus on the object level.”

Occasionally (one out of every 10 conversations?), I think I’ve helped dramatically, on the order of “this conversation was not working at all, until Eli came to help, and then we had multiple breakthroughs in understanding.”

(I’ve started explicitly tracking my participants’ estimation of my counterfactual impact, following conversations, so I hope to have much better numbers for assessing how useful this work is in a few months. Part of my hope in doing more of this is that I will get a more accurate assessment of how much value my facilitation in particular provides, and how much I should be investing in this general area.)

Testimonials

(I asked a number of people who I've done facilitation work in the past to give me a short honest testimonial, if they felt comfortable with that. I included the blurb from every person who sent me something, though this is still a biased sample, since I mostly reached out to people who I expected would give a "positive review".)

Anna Salamon:

I've found Eli quite helpful with a varied set of tricky conversations over the years. Some details:

- It helps that he can be tracking whether we are understanding each other, vs whether it is time to paraphrase;

- It helps that he can be tracking whether we are speaking to a "crux" or are on an accidental tangent/dead-end (I can do many of these things too, but when Eli is facilitating I can trust him to do some of this, which leaves me with more working memory for understanding the other party's perspective, figuring out how to articulate my own, etc.)

- It helps that he can help track the conversational stack, so that e.g. if I stop to paraphrase my conversation partner's point, that doesn't mean we'll never get back to the thing I was trying to keep track of.

- It has sometimes helped that he could paraphrase one or the other of us in ways the other party couldn't, but could then hear [after hearing his paraphrase];

- I have seen him help with both research-like/technical conversational topics, and messy cultural stuff.

- He can often help in cases where many folks would intuitively assume that a conversation is just "stuck," e.g. because it boils down to a difference in aesthetics or root empistemological perspectives or similar (Eli has a bunch of cached patterns for sometimes allowing such topics to progress, where a lot of people would not know how)

- I can vouch for Eli's ability to not-repeat private content that he says he won't repeat.

- I personally highly value Eli's literal-like or autistic-like tendency to just actually stick with what is being said, and to attempt to facilitate communication, without guessing ahead of time which party is "mature" or "right" or to-be-secretly-sided with. This is perhaps the area in which I have most noticed Eli's skills/habits rising above (in my preference-ordering) those of other skilled facilitators I've worked with.

- He responds pretty well to feedback, and acts so as to try to find out how to actually aid thinking/communication rather than to feel as though he is already doing so.

Scott Garrabrant:

I once went to a workshop and participated in a fishbowl double crux on the second to last day. That day went so well that we basically replaced all of the last day’s schedule with continuing the conversation, and that day went so well that we canceled plane tickets and extended the workshop. This experience made me very optimistic about what can be accomplished with a facilitated double crux.

Later, when asked to give a talk at a different workshop, I declined and suggested that talks were boring and we should replace several talk slots with fishbowl double cruxes. We tried it. It was a failure, and I don’t think much of value came out of any of the resulting conversations.

As far as I can tell, the second largest contributor to the relative failure was regression to the mean. The first largest was not having Eli there.

Evan Hubinger:

I really appreciate Eli's facilitation and I think that the hard conversations I've had with Eli facilitating would have been essentially impossible without good facilitation. I do think that trusting the facilitator is very important, but if you know and trust Eli as I do, I would definitely recommend his facilitation if you have a need for it.

Oliver Habryka:

I've asked Eli many times over the years to help me facilitate conversations that seemed particularly important and difficult. For most of these, having them happen at all without Eli seems quite difficult, so simply the presence of his willingness to facilitate, and to be reasonably well-known to be reasonable in his facilitation, provided a substantial amount of value.

He is also pretty decent at facilitation, as far as I can tell, or at least I can't really think of anyone who is substantially more skilled at it.

It's kind of hard for me to give a super clear review here. Like, facilitation isn't much of a commodity, and I don't think there is a shared standard of what a facilitator is supposed to do, so it's hard for me to straightforwardly evaluate it. I do think what Eli has been doing has been quite valuable to me, and I would recommend reasonably strongly that other people have more conversations of the type that Eli tends to facilitate.

Mathew Fallshaw

In 2017 I was engaged in a complicated discussion with a collaborator that was not progressing smoothly. Eli joined the discussion, in the role of facilitator, and the discussion markedly improved.

Other people who have some experience with my facilitation style, feel free to put your own thoughts in the comments.

Caveats and other info

As noted, this is an open research-ish project for me, and I obviously cannot guarantee that I will be helpful, much less that I will be able to resolve or get to the bottom of a given disagreement. In fact, as stated, I, personally, am most interested in the cases where I don’t know how to help, because those are the places where I'm most likely to learn the most, even if they are the places where I am least able to provide value.

You are always welcome to invite me to try and help, and then partway through, decide that my suggestions are less-than helpful, and say that you don’t want my help after all. (Anna Salamon does this moderately frequently.)

I do my best to keep track of a map of relevant skills in this area, and which people around have more skill than me in particular sub-domains. So it is possible that when you describe your situation, I’ll either suggest someone else who I think might be better to help you than me, or who I would like to bring in to co-facilitate with me (with your agreement, of course).

Note that this is one of a number of projects, involving difficult conversations or facilitation, that I am experimenting with lately. Another is here and another is to be announced.

If you’re interested in training sessions on Double Crux and other Conversational Facilitation skills, join my Double Crux training mailing list, here. I have vague plans to do a 3-weekend training program, covering my current take on the core Double Crux skill, but no guarantees that I will actually end up doing that any time soon.

Questions welcome!