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Adversarial Collaboration

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Re: Adversarial Collaboration

#161

Post by bombcar »

agumonkey wrote: post #134
Digory wrote: post #58

Kahneman hedges just a bit in his talk: " To a good first approximation, people simply don't change their minds about anything that matters." Trying to explain the small number of people who do change their minds, David McRaney has an interesting book out called How Minds Change.[0] And I imagine there are people who change minds, even outside his model. People who change their minds when it doesn't seem to help them…

I've seen a strange case, where someone argued blindly, but the next day advocated for the change. He didn't say it was his own idea but he didn't told he changed his mind :)

You will find this again and again in the business world, and you can use it to your advantage.

If you're arguing for a course of action, answer the objections well and then drop it. Often the person arguing against you (especially if they're "the boss") will come back a few days later and present it as basically their idea.

People get emotionally tied to what they came up with, and it can take a few nights to disconnect enough to move on (even if they never admit they were "wrong").

Re: Adversarial Collaboration

#162

Post by agumonkey »

bombcar wrote: post #161
agumonkey wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a strange case, where someone argued blindly, but the next day advocated for the change. He didn't say it was his own idea but he didn't told he changed his mind :)

You will find this again and again in the business world, and you can use it to your advantage. If you're arguing for a course of action, answer the objections well and then drop it . Often the person arguing against you ( especially if they're "the boss") will come back a few days later and present it as basically their idea. People get emotionally tied to what they came up with, and it can take a few nights to disc…

People are so strange. They don't see the waste and friction due to these reflexes :)

But about the 'drop' aspect, I think there's a reflex for other to argue someone to infinity if it become a belief confrontation, a kind of domination to impose their view. But if the other party drops the fight, it kills that aspect and the other person can accept the idea for its core value.

Re: Adversarial Collaboration

#163

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

jiggawatts wrote: post #83
eloff wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm uncommon in this aspect, but I don't feel like I'm a member of many groups. I'm not religious, but don't really consider myself an atheist. I'm not for any particular party. I don't care about sports. I'm Canadian, but don't live there and don't feel like I belong there either. I suppose you could say I'm part of the group of Caucasian males by birth or part of the group of software engineers by trade, but…

Same here. Something I always find hilarious is conversations with people who's opinions are very polarised due to their membership in groups. For example, I have a friends that are variously: a Christian priest, libertarian, anti-vaxxers, and Trump supporters. Invariably, in every discussion, they'll trot out this sentence: "You people always think ". For example: "You Liberal party voters always support lowering ta…

You're lucky to have avoided encounters with the more advanced tribalists then. Most of the more engaged members of these groups will already have a prepared retort that insinuates that anyone not an active member of $THEIR_TRIBE is by necessity part of $OTHER_TRIBE.

Re: Adversarial Collaboration

#164

Post by achenet »

drekk wrote: post #72
ekianjo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social justice is not an innocent word. It is charged with a political agenda.

Of course justice involves political agendas. How do you think poll taxes and literacy tests were eliminated? We don't even have to go that far back -- the legal recognition (& protection) of same-sex marriages is something even zoomers have a memory of. People opposed to social justice aren't apolitical or morally neutral. Banning books, getting educators fired, and forcibly de-transitioning children are all charged…

Banning books and firing teachers is one thing, and I agree we should protect free speech.

However, I'm not sure I'm okay with the idea that feeding complex hormones to children who are not old enough to vote, drive, or get tattoos and/or piercings, or as you so put it is wise, and if this is what you mean by "forcibly de-transitioning children", then I'm actually okay with it.

Hormone therapy, like tattoos and/or piercings has a very permanent effect of the body. I believe such long term changes should only be allowed if the person is old enough to take the decision as an "informed adult".

Put more bluntly, if all of a sudden some new condition is discovered called "un-inked skin skin dysphoria", where not having a tattoo is believed to cause deep psychological trauma, I'd still make my kid wait to be a legal adult before they get a tattoo.

Re: Adversarial Collaboration

#165

Post by bombcar »

AstralStorm wrote: post #113
christophilus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read anything Charlie Munger writes on the topic. He said something to the effect of “A year in which you fail to kill at least one of your cherished ideas is probably a failed year.” Anyway, he has a lot to say on the subject and on incentives and human psychology broadly.

Nice platitude, but sometimes cherished ideas are actually true. A better way to phrase it would be a year when you don't challenge your idea is probably a failed year. It might still win the challenge.

I think the idea is you have many cherished ideas, and so many are actually false that you shouldn't have much difficulty killing one.

Or, another way of looking at it, your knowledge of so many areas is superficial and a deep dive into any one would let you know how you weren't even wrong, as the saying goes.

You can find people doing it in any HN thread about almost anything - often shows up as "why didn't they just do X". A non-domain expert with a "obvious solution" is almost always missing something major.

Re: Adversarial Collaboration

#166

Post by still_grokking »

JackFr wrote: post #154
still_grokking wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes? The easiest way to get killed by people in rage is to tell them the naked truth. That's a hard rule since humanities dawn.

I don't think that is true. People claiming to be brutally honest, are often far more interested in being brutal than in being honest.

That may be true. But I didn't say it goes this way.

It makes a big difference whether someone only claims to be honest or is actually honest.

Re: Adversarial Collaboration

#167

Post by marcosdumay »

eloff wrote: post #130
marcosdumay wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not religious, but don't really consider myself an atheist. Oh, an agnostic. There is something to be said about groups of people that hold similar ideas because their similar way of thinking lead them to similar conclusions. It's a very important exception to the OP's description, where the group came first, and may even be the most common kind. (Of course, the question to answer is why do those people think i…

I probably inherited some values from the group of software engineers, but it's not a well defined group. Can you point to any values we might have in common? I would say a love of logic and the scientific method, but even that isn't universal. I don't find software engineers much more logical than other people of comparable intelligence.

Yep, some adoration of logic and control, even if not applied. But those were probably there first.

You probably also have some abhorrence towards formal chaos (the ones that causes unpredictability; many are not even able to accept it exists) and want to improve every system (simple or not) you see.

On the more traditionally politics kinds of thing, you probably value freedom of expression to a very high amount, like other highly educated groups, but also probably value personal freedom and personal initiative. Those often come in an intensity that leads to some bullshit levels of belief in self-determination (like in not believing you share group values) and personal responsibility; but beliefs change faster than values, and many people tame those down with time.

Re: Adversarial Collaboration

#168

Post by bombcar »

safety1st wrote: post #63
bigmatto wrote: post #3

One of the most disappointing things that I have learned is that most people hold opinions in order to be part of some group. If someone is a member of a group, it is almost not worth listening to their arguments, especially arguments in support of views held strongly by that group. They are arguing in order to maintain their group membership, not to find the truth. It appears this is true of academic and scientific…

There's some truth to this but it's a pessimistic and ultimately counterproductive take on people. Rather I would say that high agreeableness (and maybe to some degree conscientiousness or extroversion) [1] is correlated with the likelihood that someone will change their opinions in order to conform with a group. So if you don't like that personality trait, you can seek out less agreeable people, there are plenty of…

> There is survivor bias among groups - if a bunch of people all have different opinions and aren't willing to modify them, they're unlikely to remain a group for long.

I suspect this is why over time all members of a political party become near carbon-copies of each other. Even if the party started "big tent" over a single issue, natural forces will cause it to coalesce into "same thought on all issues".

One solution for the individual is to forcefully prevent yourself from associating with the group, but this often requires drastic action and gets you shunned by all groups. Compare the vitriol against someone who "votes wrong" vs "votes third party" vs "refuses to vote at all".

Re: Adversarial Collaboration

#169

Post by bombcar »

waynesonfire wrote: post #48
bigmatto wrote: post #3

One of the most disappointing things that I have learned is that most people hold opinions in order to be part of some group. If someone is a member of a group, it is almost not worth listening to their arguments, especially arguments in support of views held strongly by that group. They are arguing in order to maintain their group membership, not to find the truth. It appears this is true of academic and scientific…

why don't you find people who are in a group that don't subscribe to this approach?

Because it's too hard to work everything out all the time, it is much easier to rely on others, which causes the group dynamic.

The best you can do may be to find a group that is based on something entirely outside everything else, but that's quite hard to locate.

Re: Adversarial Collaboration

#170

Post by dredmorbius »

dang wrote: post #133
robot_head wrote: post #89

Somewhat surprised to see Jeffery Epstein's "charity" still showing up on the front page of HN

(Edit: I interpreted your comment as asking why we'd allow this post to stay on HN's front page. The answer to that is below. If that wasn't your point, please ignore.) On HN, we generally go by article quality, not site quality: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... , and generally try to avoid guilt by association. These points both follow from the principle of intellectual curiosity that…

Bad call, dang.

In this case, I was unaware of the Edge Foundation's Epstein links. The information is salient and useful. Edge itself certainly doesn't make the information evident. C.f., a site search for "Epstein" which ... conspicuously omits any prominent results for a disclosure or apology:

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Aedge.org+epstein&ia=...>

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