= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
endoself comments on Find yourself a Worthy Opponent: a Chavruta - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (74)
I have a very different impression of the mental consequences of debating than you; I didn't think that debating always provides a very strong incentive to rationalize, depending on context, the relationship between the participants, etc. Am I incorrect?
Well, I can tell you about my own experience: I participated in organized debate in high school and at university for a total of 6 years. After a while, rationalization came naturally, and I couldn't tell the difference between rationalization and non-rationalization. In early 2011 I started re-reading the Core Sequences (I read them for the first time in mid-2010), and some of the posts on rationalization really "clicked" the second time around. I gradually realized that I had to make a deliberate effort to not rationalize, and I tasked myself with double-checking as many of my own thoughts as possible. Since then I've improved somewhat, and I can sometimes catch myself in the act of rationalizing. But I've got a long way to go, and I think that's partly a result of training myself to accept a randomly assigned conclusion and manufacture arguments to match.
I agree that some kinds of debates do discourage rationalization, but I'm worried that as soon you give up your bottom line, you put yourself at a great deal of epistemic risk.
The kind of debate one would use with a rationalist chavruta should be defending a point that you actually believe using the reasons that actually cause you to believe it. Maybe the word 'debate' has the wrong connotations, especially in the context of debate clubs, which are epistemically horrible, but I think humans can try to convince each other of things without rationalizing.
I completely agree; though there would still be rationalization for social reasons, as JoshuaZ points out below, if both partners were being completely honest with each other then there is significantly less cause for concern.
I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Do you think that many LWers could maintain a high enough level of honesty for this to work? I think that we could, though some people are more competitive and less truth-seeking in these types of scenarios, so I wouldn't recommend it for everyone.
As long as there is nothing incentivizing people to be anything other than completely honest (like there is in an organized debate) then I'm much less concerned (but not entirely unconcerned). And I agree that not everyone is capable of being entirely honest.
If we can't be entirly honest, then what are we doing here?
We don't always know our true rejections; sometimes we even invent rejections during the debate. This is a bias that should be reduced as much as possible, but it can't always be eliminated.
I participated in organized debate for some time and was quite good at it. I am not convinced that I learned anything other than sophistry and selective reasoning from the experience. Worse, I'm not convinced that that wasn't the point.