jimrandomh comments on Deception and Self-Doubt - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Psychohistorian 11 March 2010 02:39AM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 11 March 2010 04:52:50AM 6 points [-]

If it isn't written down, it hasn't been through enough sanity checks yet. Spoken debates typically occur at a pace that guarantees some undetected falsehoods.

Comment author: MichaelVassar 11 March 2010 07:14:02PM 0 points [-]

I almost hold the opposite position. Written debate is necessarily relatively unresponsive and without response to individual disputed points debate takes forever. Email with every point addressed may be best, but taxes memory more than spoken debate. and in most cases not every point is addressed.

Comment author: jimrandomh 11 March 2010 07:22:20PM 2 points [-]

Sounds like your problem with written debates is not that wrong things get written, but that not enough gets written in total to cover everything - ie, higher quality per word, but fewer words total and potentially not enough. This is exactly the tradeoff one woul expect from adjusting the quality threshold below which people self-censor.

Comment author: MichaelVassar 14 March 2010 08:15:39PM 2 points [-]

Nope, it's that the wrong things get written. A written paper, to avoid weaknesses, has to develop every point to a fairly standard depth, but this implies developing sub-points in standard depth and indefinite length. A conversation is to writing as a chess program is to the exhaustive search of chess-space. Only the promising lines of inquiry get explored and they get explored in enough depth to resolve uncertainty to mutual satisfaction.