Debate About Biased Methodology | Corentin Biteau and Elliot Temple

Yes, it can be learned - and I had to learn that in engineering school. But I didn't like it. As I said, I found doing that sluggish, boring and not motivating. I can do it if I am forced to, but this makes me lose motivation - and keeping my motivation is very important for me to stay active. If learning about energy was purely abstract thinking, I simply wouldn't bother, even if it's important. So I prefer to play on my strong suits - that's more sustainable for me.

Not gonna debate this right now (unless maybe you wanted to focus on this topic instead of others) but I wanted to clarify: When I said it’s learnable, I meant learnable in a way that you like it, don’t have motivation problems, aren’t bored, it isn’t sluggish, everything works well. Those things you talk about are serious problems – they mean something (fixable) is going wrong. That’s what I think.

I made a little list of feedback based on the I read in your posts.

Thanks. I appreciate work people do that facilitates me getting along with more EAs better, so that I can better share potentially valuable ideas with EA.

You said that you won every debate, and your way of doing works, but I have no way of knowing that from the outside.

Yeah I don’t expect anyone to trust that or to look through tens of thousands of pages of discussion history (which is publicly available FWIW). And I don’t know of any way to summarize past debates that will be very persuasive. Instead, all I really want, is that at least one person from EA is willing to debate, and if I get a good outcome, then a second person should become willing to debate, and so on. And e.g. if I get to 5 good debate outcomes with EA people then a lot more people ought to start paying some attention, considering my ideas, etc. It should be possible to get attention from EA people by a series of debates without doing marketing, making friends, or other social climbing. And starting with one at a time is fine but I shouldn’t have to go through hundreds of debates one at a time to persuade hundreds of EAs.

I think that’s a reasonable thing to ask for even if I had no past debate history. But I don’t know of any communities (besides my own) that actually offer it. I think that’s one of the major problems with the world which matters more than a lot of the causes EA works on. Imagine how much more easily EA could do huge amounts of good if just 10% of the charities and large companies were open to debate, and EAs could go win debates with them and then they’d actually change stuff.

You could provide an example of something specific that could be improved in animal welfare advocacy by using the Popper method, showing why it is superior.

I don’t have any quick win for that. Just a potential very very long debate involving learning a ton of ideas which could potentially lead to EAs changing their mind about some of these beliefs. I have long, complicated arguments regarding other EA topics too, such as AI alignment (which again depends significantly on epistemology, so Popper is relevant). I’ve been interested in talking about AI alignment for years but I don’t know any way to get anyone on the other side of the AI alignment debate to engage with me seriously.

Don't try to sell a tool or a solution itself - show that you get better results this way (using examples). If it works, then some people will try to use the solution.

I often get results that I consider better, but which other people would evaluate differently, or wouldn’t know how to evaluate, or wouldn’t be able to replicate without learning a lot of the background knowledge I have. When people have different ideas, it often means the way of evaluating outcomes itself has to be debated/discussed – which partly means talking about concepts, abstractions, philosophy, etc. And then the specific evaluations can require a lot of discussion and debate too. So you can’t just show an outcome – there has to be substantial discussion for people to understand.

One of your post spent 22 minutes to say that people shouldn't misquote. It's a rather obvious conclusion that can be exposed in 3 minutes top. I think some people read that as a rant.

I’m highly confident that EAers broadly disagree with me on that topic, which is why I wrote that article. It’s not obvious. It’s controversial. And I believe it’s an ongoing, major problem on the forum that is not being solved.

It’s related to another article I’m considering writing, which would claim basically that raising intellectual standards would significantly improve EA’s effectiveness. Widespread misquoting, plus widespread not really caring about or minding misquotes, is one example of EA having intellectual standards that are too low. Low intellectual standards have negative consequences for having accurate views about the world and figuring out the right conclusions about various causes. And they also makes it extremely hard to have productive debates about hard issues, especially when there’s significant culture clash or even unfriendliness.

In general, you need either friendliness or high standards to have a productive discussion or debate. It’s super hard with neither. And friendliness towards critics with significant outsider/heresy ideas is rare in general. I think EA has more of that friendliness than typical but not nearly enough to replace high intellectual standards when dealing major differences in ideas.

Antagonizing people is easy, even by accident. I'm not saying you are doing that, but it's still very important, so I add that just in case.

I know that I often antagonize people by accident. I’m not going to deny that or feel defensive about it. It’s a topic I’m happy to talk about openly, but IME other people often don’t want to. I have sometimes been accused of being mean, at which point I ask for quotes, at which point they usually don’t want to provide any quotes, or occasionally provide a quote they don’t want to analyze. Anyway it’s a difficult problem which I have worked on.

What follows logically, then, is what is the most effective way of  making EA better? I don't have a good answer to that yet, but that 's what I will try to answer.

I don’t have a plan that I particularly expect to work, but I have a few things to try. One plan is getting people to debate or, failing that, to talk about issues like why debating matters. Another plan is to get a handful of people to take an interest, discuss stuff at length, learn more about my ideas, and then help change things. Another plan (that I’ve already been working on for 20 years) is to write good stuff – at EA or even just at my own websites – and maybe something good will happen as a result.

I think I’m aware of a bunch of problems and difficulties that you aren’t familiar with, which make the problem even harder. For example, I have objections to a lot of the psychology and marketing stuff you mention. But anyway, to summarize, I know something about debating issues rationally but less about getting anyone to like me or listen. One of the main problems is social hierarchies, and in very short I think any plan involving social climbing is the wrong plan. Eliezer Yudkowsky also has a lot of negative things to say about social hierarchies but unfortunately I don’t see that reflected in the EA or LW communities – I fear that no one figured out much about how to turn criticism of social hierarchies into action to actually create different types of communities.

Also, when you have conclusions that rely on different background knowledge than your audience has, it’s very hard to explain them in short ways, which are how people want and expect information, while also making it rationally persuasive (which requires explaining a lot of things people don’t already know, or else they should not find it persuasive without debating, discussing or studying it first to find out more).

Ok, this is a very good claim. I find that a very useful insight. Since it's "no one's job", everything is decentralized, it means it's hard for useful feedback to reach the ones that could use it. And there is no negative consequences for being wrong on some stuff, so it keeps going.

I really have trouble seeing how to fix that, however (are there some movements out there where this is the case?).

I haven't read the rest yet and might not get to it today, but I'll give a comment on this.

I think the solution is that anyone (who cares a lot) can take personal, individual responsibility for addressing criticism. I do that with my own tiny movement. There is no need to divide up responsibility. Multiple people can separately do this at once.

Isn't that too much work? To the extent that anyone else does something useful, it's less work. If the movement is tiny, then it's a ton of work. If the movement is pretty big, and a lot of people do useful tasks, then it's less work.

If you take responsibility, you don't have to do everything yourself. You can delegate to anyone willing to do stuff. You just have to monitor their work. If you endorse it and it's wrong, you were wrong. If it's partly wrong and partly useful, you can endorse just part of it and specify which part.

You also don't even have to delegate everything. People may do stuff without you asking them to. You can take responsibility even if you're not seen as a leader and have zero people who will do tasks at your request. What you do is figure out what usable, endorsable essays and other materials the movement has, and figure out what's missing, and fill in whatever's missing to your satisfaction. With a larger movement, many people's opinion would be that nothing crucial is missing, so their initial workload is merely reviewing what exists, learning about it, getting a kind of organized overview of it figured out, and being satisfied.

When critics come along and want to debate, maybe someone will answer them in a way you consider satisfactory. Or maybe not. If you take responsibility for these ideas and think they're true, then you should monitor to see that critics get answered in ways you're content with. If there are any gaps where debate or answers aren't happening to your satisfaction, then you need to fill in that gap (or, in the alternative, admit there is a gap, and say unfortunately you're too busy to deal with the whole gap, so not all criticism has been answered and debated yet, so you aren't confident you're right).

To fill in a gap where some critic is raising an issue, there are two basic scenarios, the easy and hard one:

easy scenario: the issue is addressed somewhere. the critic just needs to be provided with a link or cite. sometimes a little bit of extra text is needed to explain how the generic information in the article answers the specific information the critic brings up. i've called this bridging material. it's a type of personalization or customization. there are a lot of cases where a paragraph of customization can add a lot to a cite/link. you also may need to specify which part of a link/cite is relevant rather than the whole thing, and may need to give disclaimers/exclusions to go with the link/cite.

all of that is pretty fast and a pretty low amount of work. and it's something that people can contribute to a movement without being geniuses or great essay writers or anything like that. people who just read and liked a lot of a movement's materials can help by sharing the right links in the right places. if a movement has a lot of literature, then this will probably address over 80% of criticism.

hard scenario: the issue is not already addressed somewhere. new ideas/arguments/literature are needed. this is more work. if this comes up a bunch and it's too much work for you, and others won't help enough, then the movement isn't really fully fleshed out and you shouldn't be confident about being right.

this is how i do stuff with my own tiny philosophy movement. i monitor for issues that should be addressed but no one else addresses. i have some fans who will sometimes provide links to existing essays so i don't have to. I occasionally delegate something though not very often. since my movement is tiny i don't expect a ton of help, but on the other hand i can refer to the writing of dead authors to answer a lot of issues. i try to learn from and build on some authors i found that i think did good work. it'd be really problematic to try to do everything myself from scratch. if i tried to reinvent the wheel, i'd almost certainly come up with worse ideas than already exist. instead i try to find and understand the best existing ideas and then add some extra insights, changes and reorganization.

and i have a debate policy so if a critic will neither use nor criticize my debate policy (and someone has linked him to it), then i don't think i need to answer his criticism (unless i actually think he has a good point, in which case i'd want to that point even if it has no advocates who are smart, reasonable or willing to debate). i have a forum where critics can come and talk about my philosophy. EA has a forum too which is one of the main reasons I'm talking to EA at all. not enough movements, groups or individuals even have forums (which IMO is a major problem with the world).

(I do not count facebook groups, subreddits, twitter, discords, or slacks as forums. social media and chatrooms are different than forums. comment sections on blogs, substacks, news articles, etc., also aren't proper forums. having an actual forum matters IMO. Examples of forum software include Discourse, phpbb and google groups. I view forums as a bit of a remnant of the old internet that has lost a ton of popularity to social media. i think LW/EA partly have forums because the community started before smartphones got so popular.)