51–59 of 59 posts
I still think Plato invented Socrates. If Socrates was so wise, why did he get himself killed in such a dumb way? We know today you can't just go around telling powerful people they're wrong.
The smart way to die?
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Much of openness is what you are born with. Seriously. You have a baseline and studies have shown it seldom changes much over your life. There are ways to "picking the lock" however, as another part. That's the basis of marketing and sales. The processes are very well defined though the results are stochastic rather than deterministic. Hence marketing and sales are "number games". But such techniques are merely tools…
> You have a baseline and studies have shown it seldom changes much over your life. Not all that long ago the very same thing could be said about a wide variety of things that we now take for granted/baseline, like basic competency in reading, writing, and arithmetic as one example. Unlike those things, thinking to a certain degree of competency is innate in human beings, but exceptionally skillful thinking in things…
> Not all that long ago the very same thing could be said about a wide variety of things that we now take for granted/baseline, like basic competency in reading, writing, and arithmetic as one example. Unlike those things, thinking to a certain degree of competency is innate in human beings
You seem to be conflating openness to persuasion as a component of personality, and openness as a learnable mental skill.
It isn't inconsistent to assert that being open to persuasion is in fact both.
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My rule is that I'm open to changing my mind, but on my own timetable and with no obligation to provide any feedback to the persuader. For instance, my time constant for updating my views is longer than one election or marketing cycle. Another rule is that you win by having the best idea, not by being the most skilled debater.
> Another rule is that you win by having the best idea, not by being the most skilled debater. A silly distinction - the most skilled debater is the one who makes you think their idea is the best.
The sarcastic question that popped into my head was, OK, then what are the preconditions for becoming open to being persuaded? How do people develop a higher degree of openness? Then I thought...maybe if you're not being bombarded with opinions that are aggressively trying to convince you of something, you'll explore the world in a more open way, looking constantly for the next informational morsel that will evolve y…
Well, for my part, I have a couple of things that have helped me here (determined by change in outcome post-intervention which I, unfortunately, cannot share): 1. I know Aumann's Agreement Theorem and the appropriate lemmas about information transfer and prior modification (i.e. if I start failing to modify my priors with repeated conversation, I am failing or the other person is failing, either of which leads to our…
How are those individuals identified by the extension?
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> You have a baseline and studies have shown it seldom changes much over your life. Not all that long ago the very same thing could be said about a wide variety of things that we now take for granted/baseline, like basic competency in reading, writing, and arithmetic as one example. Unlike those things, thinking to a certain degree of competency is innate in human beings, but exceptionally skillful thinking in things…
>> You have a baseline and studies have shown it seldom changes much over your life. > Not all that long ago the very same thing could be said about a wide variety of things that we now take for granted/baseline, like basic competency in reading, writing, and arithmetic as one example. Unlike those things, thinking to a certain degree of competency is innate in human beings You seem to be conflating openness to persu…
Most people I encounter find (heuristically) this belief/philosophy to be "wrong"/bizarre if not downright offensive, but I sincerely believe that this type of thinking (a bias towards conclusiveness and away from epistemic soundness and curiosity, and this is but one example among many) is one of the biggest root cause problems of problems on this planet. A prime example of where this is causing serious (life and death) problems is with vaccine hesitancy - people love to hate on anti-vaxxers, asserting that they "are" "stupid", but rarely have I encountered a "smart" critic who has the cognitive ability (openness) to even consider the possibility that their perception of the situation is incorrect (if not downright harmful from a causality perspective).
A (likely offensive, as a demonstration of my point) way to think about my stance/conceptualization that might help communicate my frustration: I feel as frustrated with pro-vaxxers (or, ~neurotypical ~Western human beings in general) as pro-vaxxers feel with anti-vaxxers...and ironically (or not), it seems at least as difficult to reason with them (which I believe well demonstrates the ubiquitous nature of the phenomenon).
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I don't know what it means. I can tell you that as I've become more conservative, I've been less able to express myself freely. I started off life as a liberal and spent most of my adult life not affiliated with a political party. Until recently, I felt like I could pretty much share my thoughts more or less freely. Socially speaking, I would say that conservatives were generally fair game to make fun of or put down…
Speaking as a liberal in a very conservative area, I'm in the same boat. I wouldn't really want to talk politics, but I'm absolutely not going to even if someone else does specifically ask. Liberals are made fun of and regarded as immoral and dangerous. (Which is kind of ironic, given that I have moralistic tendencies. Just Kantian rather than Biblical.)
I'm not too surprised that you find conservative arguments unconvincing. In general, purely based on reasoning, I find liberal arguments to be a bit better (on average). Sometimes, they are a lot better. The question for me, is how much weight to put on reasoning. How much value does reasoning have? My personal experience is that reasoning works well for writing software or fixing a bug. It doesn't work as well when I try to use it to decide how I should run my life. In fact, my own reasoning has led me into the pits of hell. That changed my perspective, quite a bit!
I truly hope that you and your friends and coworkers can keep peace and good will towards each other.
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> Another rule is that you win by having the best idea, not by being the most skilled debater. A silly distinction - the most skilled debater is the one who makes you think their idea is the best.
Given that most people are quite resistant to changing their minds, the most skilled debater is the one that gets the most people to change their mind, rather than the one that gets the most people to agree.
It seems possible that if stubbornness is a acquired trait, it is one because it confers a survival advantage.
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Well, for my part, I have a couple of things that have helped me here (determined by change in outcome post-intervention which I, unfortunately, cannot share): 1. I know Aumann's Agreement Theorem and the appropriate lemmas about information transfer and prior modification (i.e. if I start failing to modify my priors with repeated conversation, I am failing or the other person is failing, either of which leads to our…
> I have an extension that removes comment-threads started by low-information low-provenance individuals. How are those individuals identified by the extension?
The lament in this essay is that we're not open to persuasion in our politics. How about considering that politics itself is the problem. A person of a more libertarian bent, like myself, would assert that it's the conflation of government and society, the political and the social, that's the problem. They are separate spheres of human activity. That same sort of person would tell you that politics is a method for co…
"Politics" in general is how groups of people make collective decisions. If you move that decision-making out of the realm of government, those decisions will still be made, and still be made by politics, but will typically not involve some of the affected.