Musings on Double Crux (and "Productive Disagreement")

[-]sapphire8y170

I am genuinely confused by the discourse around double crux. Several people I respect seem to think of DC as a key intellectual method. Duncan (curriculum director at CFAr) explicitly considers DC to be a cornerstone CFAR technique. However I have tried to use the technique and gotten nowhere.

Ray deserves credit for identifying and explicitly discussing some of the failure modes I ran into. In particular DC style discussion frequently seems to recurse down to very fundamental issues in philosophy and epistemology. Twice I have tried to discuss a concrete practical issue via DC and wound up discussing utility aggregation; in these cases we were both utilitarians and we still couldn't get the method to work.

I have to second Said Achmiz's request for public examples of double crux going well. I once asked Ray for an example via email and received the following link to Sarah Constantin's blogpost . This post is quite good and caused me to update towards the view that DC can be productive. But this post doesn't contain the actual DC conversation, just a summary of the events and the lessons learned. I want to see an actual, for real, fully detailed example of DC being used productively. I don't understand why no such examples are publicly available.

[-]hamnox8y140

whperson's comment touches on why examples are rarely publicized.

I watched Constantin's Double-Crux, and noticed that, no matter how much I identified with one participant or another, they were not representing me. They explored reciprocally and got to address concerns as they came up, while the audience gained information about them unilaterally. They could have changed each other's minds without ever coming near points I considered relevant. Double-crux mostly accrues benefits to individuals in subtle shifts, rather than to the public in discrete actionable updates.

A good double-crux can get intensely personal. Double-crux has an empirical advantage over scientific debate because it focuses on integrating real, existing perspectives instead of attempting to simultaneously construct and deconstruct a solid position. On the flip side, you have to deal with real perspectives, not coherent platforms. Double-crux only integrates those two perspectives, cracked and flawed as they are. It's not debate 2.0 and won't solve the same problems that arguments do.

9Zvi8y

I also watched Constantin's Double-Crux, and feel that most of my understanding of how the process works comes from that observation rather than any posts including Duncan's. I also agree that her post of results, while excellent, does not do the job of explaining the process that was done by watching the process live. I wonder to what extent having an audience made the process unfold in a way that was easier to follow; on the surface both of them were ignoring us, and as hamnox says they were not trying to respond to our possible concerns, but I still got the instinctive sense that having people watching was making the process better or at least easier to parse. The topic of that Crux was especially good for a demonstration, in that it involved a lot of disagreements over models, facts and probabilities. The underlying disagreements did not boil down to questions of philosophy. I do think that finding out that the difference does boil down to philosophy or epistemology is a success mode rather than a failure mode - you've successfully identified important disagreements you can talk about now or another time, and ruled out other causes, so you don't waste further time arguing over things that won't change minds. It's an unhint: You now think you're worse off than you thought you were before, but you're actually better off than you actually were. It also points to the suggestion that if you're frequently having important disagreements that boil down to philosophy, perhaps you should do more philosophy!

-2Conor Moreton8y

Strong agreement that identifying important root disagreements is success rather than failure. If people on opposite sides of the abortion debate got themselves boiled all the way down to virtue ethics vs. utilitarianism or some other similar thing, this would be miles better than current demonization and misunderstanding.

[-]spiralingintocontrol8y70

For me, the world is divided into roughly two groups:

1. People who I do not trust enough to engage in this kind of honest intellectual debate with, because our interests and values are divergent and all human communication is political.

2. Close friends, who, when we disagree, I engage in something like "double crux" naturally and automatically, because it's the obvious general shape of how to figure out what we should do.

The latter set currently contains about two (2) people.

This is why I don't do explicit double crux.

[-][anonymous]8y70

I think there are dis-encentives to do it on the internet, even if you expect good faith from your partner, you don't expect good faith from all the other viewers.

But because if you change your mind for all the world to see, people with bad faith can use it is as evidence that you can be wrong and so are likely to be wrong about other things you say as well. Examples of this in the real world are politicians accused of flip-flopping on issues.

You touch on this with

instead of continuing to argue in public where there's a lot more pressure to no

... (read more)

8Zvi8y

We need public examples, agreed. I think this under-sells the difficulty here. In an argument or discourse worth having, a lot of the beliefs feeding in are going to be things that are: A) Hard to state with precision, or that require the sum of a lot of different claims. B) Involve beliefs or implications that risk getting a very negative reaction on the internet. There are a lot of important facts about the world you do not want to be seen endorsing in public, as much as we wish it were not so. C) Involve claims that you do not have a social right to make. D) Involve claims you can't provide well-articulated evidence for, or can't without running into some of A-C. In my experience, advanced actually-changing-minds discussions are very hard to follow and very easy to misconstrue. They involve saying things that make sense in context to the particular person you're talking to, but that often on the surface make absurd, immoral or taboo claims. I still think trying to do this is Worth It. I would start by trying to think harder about what topics we can do this on in public, that dodge these problems while still being non-trivial enough to be worthwhile.

5Raemon8y

There'd likely be a multi-step plan, which depends on whether your goals are more "raise the sanity waterline" or "build an intellectual hub that makes rapid progress on important issues." Step 1: Practice it in the rationality community. Generally get people on board with the notion that if there's an actually-important disagreement, that people try to resolve it. This would require a few public examples of productive disagreement and double crux (I agree that lack-of-those is a major issue). Then, when people have a private dispute, they come back saying "Hey this is what we talked about, this was what we agreed on, and this is any meta-issues we stumbled upon that we think others should know about re: productive disagreement." Step 2: Do that in semi-public places (facebook, other communities we're part of, etc), in a way that let's nearby intellectual communities get a sense of it. (Maybe if we can come up with clear examples and better introduction articles, it'd be good to share those). The next time you get into a political argument with your uncle, rather than angrily yell at each other, try to meet privately and talk to each other and share it with your family. (Note: I have some uncles for whom I think this would work and some for whom it definitely wouldn't) (This will require effort and emotional labor that may be uncomfortable) Step 3: After getting some practice doing productive disagreement and/or Double Crux in particular with random people, do it in somewhat higher stakes environment. Try it when a dispute comes up at your company. (This may only work if you have the sort of company that already at least nominally values truthseeking/transparency/etc so that it feels like a natural extension of the company culture rather than a totally weird thing you're shoving into it) Step 4: A lot of things could go wrong in between steps 1-3, but afterwards basically make deliberate efforts to expand it into wider circles (I would not leap to "try to get

[-]magfrump8y61

My first thought on reading the post on double crux was that it's not clear to me how much value it adds beyond previous ideas about productive disagreement. If I'm already thinking about the inferential distance and trying to find a place where I agree with my conversational partner to start from, then building from there, I'm not sure what extra value the idea of cruxes has and I'm not sure what circumstances I could use double crux that the naive "find a shared starting point and go from there" doesn't work.

Obviously a

... (read more)

3Raemon8y

One important thing is that Doublecrux is not about finding a "shared starting point" (or at least, depends a lot on what you mean by shared-starting-point and I expect a lot of people to get confused). You're looking for a shared concrete disagreement, and a related-but-different pattern is more like look for what things we agree on so we can remember we're on the same side which doesn't necessarily build the skill of productively, thoroughly resolving disagreements. I do think most of the time, if things are going well, that you'll have constructed your belief systems such that you've already clearly identified cruxes, or when debating you proactively share "this is probably my crux" in a way that makes the Double Crux be a natural extension out of the productive-disagreement-environment. (i.e. when I'm arguing with CFAR-adjaecent-rationalists, we rarely say "let's have a double crux to resolve this" but we often construct the dialog in a way that has DC thoroughly embedded in its DNA, to the point where it's not necessary to do it explicitly

5magfrump8y

I'm imagining a hierarchy of beliefs like: school uniforms are good (disagreement) because school uniforms reduce embarrassment (empirical disagreement, i.e. the crux) which is good because I care about the welfare of students (agreement) If I find the point of agreement and try to work toward the point of disagreement, I expect to come across the crux. If my beliefs don't live in this hierarchy, I'm not sure how searching for a crux is supposed to help (aside from telling me to build the hierarchy, which you could tell me directly). If my beliefs already live in this hierarchy, I'm not sure how searching for a crux does more than exploring the hierarchy. So I feel like "double crux" is sitting on top of another skill, like "build an inferential bridge," which is actually doing all the work. Especially if you are just using the "DNA" of the technique, it feels like everything being written about double crux is obscuring the fact that you're actually talking about building inferential bridges. Maybe my takeaway should be something like "the double crux is the way building an inferential bridge leads to resolving disagreements," and then things like the background of "genuinely care about your conversational partner's model of the world" filters through a chain like: double crux is useful because double crux is about a disagreement I care about it's use comes from letting me connect the disagreement to explicit belief hierarchies and explicit belief hierarchies are good for establishing mutual understanding So I'm starting to see double crux as a motivational tool, or a concept living within hierarchies of belief, rather than a standalone conceptual tool. But I'm not sure how this relates to the presentation of it I'm seeing here.

2Raemon8y

Part of my point with the post is that I think Double Crux is just one step in a long list of steps (i.e. the giant list of background skills necessary for it to be useful). I think it's the next step a chain where every step is necessary. My belief that Double Crux is getting overloaded to mean both "literally finding the double crux" and "the entire process of productive disagreement" may be a bit of a departure from it's usual presentation. I think your current take on it, and mine, may be fairly similar, and that these are in fact different from how it's usually described.

[-]ozymandias8y60

I feel like, as a contrarian, it is my duty to offer to double-crux with people so they get some practice. :P When I've moved up to the East Bay interested people should feel free to message me.

4Zvi8y

I too volunteer to double-crux with people to let them and myself get practice, either in-person in NYC or online, and encourage others to also reply and add their names to such a list.

[-]Qiaochu_Yuan8y50

I find that I never double crux because it feels too much like a Big Serious Activity I have to Decide to engage in or something. The closest I've gotten is having a TAP where during disagreements I try to periodically ask myself what my cruxes are and then state them.

[-]Raemon8y50

Some Meta-Data:

This took me about 5 hours to write.

My primary goal was to get as many thoughts down as I could so I could see them all at once, so that I could then think more clearly about how they fit together and where to go from there.

A second goal was to do that mindfully, in a way that helped me better think about how to think. What was my brain actually doing as it wrote this post? What could I have done instead? I'll be writing another post soonish exploring that concept in more detail.

A third goal was to prompt a conversation to help flesh o... (read more)

7[anonymous]8y

Datapoint: I'm okay with brain dumps.

3gjm8y

Me too, especially when (1) their authors acknowledge them as such and (2) there isn't any sign of a general tendency for everyone to post brain dumps all the time when a modest expenditure of effort would let them get their thoughts better organized.

3Raemon8y

Later on I'll be wanting to post brain dumps all the time, but I think the rate at which this will come to pass will roughly coincide with "people move their off-the-cuff posts to personal pages and then opt into the personal pages of people whose off-the-cuff posts they like"

[-]SilentCal8y40

This makes me want to try it :)

Would anyone else be interested in a (probably recurring if successful) "Productive disagreement practice thread"? Having a wider audience than one meetup's attendance should make it easier to find good disagreements, while being within LW would hopefully secure good faith.

I imagine a format where participants make top-level comments listing beliefs they think likely to generate productive disagreement, then others can pick a belief to debate one-on-one.

[-]Chris_Leong8y20

I see the technique of double-crux as being useful, although there will not always be a double crux. Sometimes people will have a whole host of reasons for being for something and merely convincing them to change their view on any one of them won't be enough to shift their view, even if they are a perfectly rational agent. Similarly, I don't see any reason why two people's cruxes have to overlap. Yet it practise, this technique seems to work reasonably well. I haven't thought enough about this to understand it very well yet.

3Raemon8y

Yeah - in the lengthy Double Crux article it's acknowledged that there can be multiple cruxes. But it's important to find whatever the most important cruxes are, instead of getting distracted by lots of things that sound-like-good-arguments but aren't actually the core issue.

[+]Said Achmiz8y-80

LESSWRONG
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Musings on Double Crux (and "Productive Disagreement")

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Possible Pre-Requisites for Progress

Building Towards Shared Norms