*Another* Double Crux Framework

byRaemon1y28th May 20187 comments


Epistemic Status: Untested hypothesis. Looking to operationalize better.

Followup to:

A problem with resolving deep disagreements is that there's a lot of finnicky moving parts to the dispute. It's easy to bring up 3 examples to illustrate a point, then you get fixated on one of the examples, and then bring up some adjaecent issues to those examples, and then hours (or months) later you've managed to go in circles three times and still not really resolve anything.

I just had an idea, which may or may not work but I'd like to try (and I have something like 3-5 outstanding deep disagreements with 3-4 different people so it seemed like an opportune time to flesh it out), which is to manage the deep disagreement via a google doc, divided into sections:

1. Common beliefs – What do we actually agree on?

2. Empirical Checks / Bets – What things you can go look at in the real world that'd resolve common cruxes?

3. Common cruxes – What do we agree that we disagree on? (that we have operationalized, such that we are confident we understand each other, and can think productively about how to empirically resolve them)

4. Passing Each Other's ITTEach person attempts to summarize each other's position as best they can, in succinct bullet point form. (Contains a subsection for each participant)

5. Amorphous exploratory discussion / ranting – Two large meandering sections that attempt to suss out the parts of the disagreement where you aren't actually sure what each other are saying. Still try to keep points to individual bullets.

This can be done in tandem with an in person discussion. But the main idea here is have an explicit goal that bullet points slowly get refactored into clearer versions of themselves, and move up the hierarchy. Amorphous rants should turn into ITT-passing arguments should turn into clearly identified common cruxes should turn into empiricism should turn into shared beliefs. (And, hopefully, a lot of disagreements dissolve under scrutiny such that empiricism isn't even necessary)

This would give you a clear sense of whether you're accomplishing anything – if the bottom sections keep getting bigger and don't eventually move to the upper sections, you're probably talking in circles, or making some kind of error mode. You might or might not get to the end (where all you have is common beliefs), because empiricism can be expensive, but hopefully at least you transmute things up into the common crux section.