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Mason Hartman 🏃🏻✂️ @webdevMason
, 14 tweets, 8 min read Read on Twitter
Towards more effective two person disagreements in real life
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BOOM. Spencer Greenberg thread.
(1) Avoid debates in front of others — if others are watching it tends to create unproductive social dynamics.

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(2) Stay on topic — very often the topic of disagreement will start to drift. Resist the urge to go down side tangents or to switch what the debate is about, or you’ll lose focus on the important core of the disagreement.

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(3) Investigate first, don’t attack — when someone says something we strongly disagree with, we can be tempted to immediately attack their position. However, doing so sets up the discussion as a war.

@juliagalef's Scout Mindset:

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(4) Clarify the other person’s claims — it’s surprisingly easy to have a long disagreement without fully understanding what the other person really meant.

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(5) Clarify definitions — language tends to be quite ambiguous. If the points you are making hinge on someone understanding your definition of a word, then take a moment to clarify what you mean by it.

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(6) Ask for the reasons underlying belief — don’t just stop at understanding WHAT the other person is claiming. If you actually want to make progress in the debate, you’ll need to dig into the reasons behind their beliefs.

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(7) Gently probe the reasons you’re given — if someone tells you that the reason they believe X is Y, don’t assume that if you were to change their belief in Y then belief X would change too.

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(8) Look for the critical points of disagreement — there may be a lot of reasons that you and the other person disagree, but they are unlikely to be equally important.

"Double crux" technique: lesswrong.com/posts/exa5kmvo…

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(9) Point out agreement — agreeing tends to make people feel closer to each other and to make a debate feel less heated and awkward, so it’s good to point out the things that you do already agree on.

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(10) Look for ways you can learn — one of the best things about a disagreement is that it presents an opportunity to make your own views more accurate.

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(11) Give credit when a good point is made — if the other person makes a good point, or changes your mind about something, tell them that.

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(12) Keep your ego out of it — if your ego is invested in coming out on top in the disagreement... then you are less likely to learn and more likely to turn the disagreement into a battle where the goal is winning.

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(13) Keep the other person’s ego out of it — make it as easy as possible for the other person to concede a point...

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Stubborn Attachments by @tylercowen IS OUT(!) This book finally knocked loose, with minimal pain, an ever-wiggling concern that Effective Altruism may only be part of the grand human story (though a critical one). smile.amazon.com/Stubborn-Attac…
EA is essentially about redistribution. It's very easy to find oneself (& everyone around) falling into well-worn political grooves at the mention of that word, often coalescing in a pit fight between that & The Economy, with "fairness" the conceptual gun nobody can keep hold of
Attachments argues that much of our "selfish" behavior contributes to economic growth & pro-growth norms, which ultimately make us better off in aggregate. But wise redistribution also does this, & insofar as we can make the world a greater cornucopia by moving money, we should!
Read 11 tweets
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Starting to think we're approaching a real breaking point in education. 15+ years of reform efforts have netted no gains in test scores, the only thing we seem to care about. On a cost-per-point basis, the US has the least cost-effective education system in the world.
It's incredibly silly to think the US can beat cram cultures like China or South Korea at the test score game, and parents watching their kids drag themselves through hours of soulless homework are starting to question whether that's the game we should care about winning.
I think if parents get more chances to see kids being generative — building real things, starting real companies, reading & theorizing w/o prompting, defining their own projects — they'll want that for their kids, despite the fear of losing the test score/college admissions race
Read 4 tweets
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The Art of Woke / Wokeonomics
In healthy communities, executing norm-enforcing punishments (e.g. shaming) tends to have diminishing returns. If you don’t do it too much, you do get some social capital, which makes it worth doing when it’s socially uncomfortable.
Diminishing returns on norm enforcement ensures that (a) aggressive people don’t rule the roost, and (b) there’s room for norms to fundamentally change if new ones become too commonplace to punish-for-reward.
Read 13 tweets

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