Believing oneself to be an exceptional case was a common failure mode among the subjects of studies summarized in Yvain's article. When confronted with the experimental results showing how their behavior was influenced in ways unknown to them, they would either deny it outright or admit that it is a very interesting phenomenon that surely affected other people but they happened to be the lone exception to the rule.

That doesn't really preclude your introspective skills (I actually believe such skills can be developed to an extent) but it should make you suspicious.

So we'll start with class for example. I ask myself "Do I find class attractive?" and I can ask myself things like "Imagine a guy with lots of money asks me out. How do I feel?" and "Imagine a guy who has things in common with me asks me out, how do I feel?" If you ask enough questions for compare and contrast, you can get pretty good answers this way.

This type of hypothetical questioning is notoriously unreliable, people ofter come up with answers that don't reflect their actual reactions, If you read closely Yvain's article already gives several examples. It's also one of the methodologies that my psychology teachers highlighted as sounding good, but being largely unreliable.

To make sure I'm not just having random reactions based on how I want to feel, I come up with real examples from my recent past. In the last year or so, I have been asked out by or dated a lot of different people with varying amounts of income. There were a lot of guys who are making 6 figures - this is because I tend to attract well paid IT guys. I liked some of them but didn't like all of them. Some of the guys making 6 figures didn't attract me whatsoever. So income doesn't make me like a guy all by itself.

This is better, but between the general unreliability of memory and the number other factors that would need to be controlled for its still not that great. Particularly since you do feel attracted to men who are more dominate as debaters.

Um, I wouldn't call any of this arguing for the nonexistence of social hierarchies. More like arguing that hierarchies are unstable, context-dependent and, well, social.

If all of the IT workers decided to quit, what would happen to the poor workers? They'd still pick food, and they'd be fine.

Ah, but once the IT workers invent food-picking robots, poor people are screwed.

If all the poor workers stopped picking food, what would happen? It will spoil, and the IT people won't eat.

They can always eat whatever the striking food-pickers eat (and will win the competition to get it, if there's a scarcity problem). As a side-question, what does a food-picking job actually entail? (I'm not a native speaker)

The IT-workers vs food-pickers example doesn't really hold up very well and even if it did it wouldn't be an argument for the nonexistence of social hierarchies except under very narrow and artificial definitions of the word 'hierarchy'.

Different people are treated differently. Some are deferred to more than others. Some are regarded with suspicion more than others. Those differences tend to be stable over time within a given group. That's your social hierarchy. That those relations are different in different groups, that they can change rapidly in unusual circumstances and that ultimately they are determined by the contents of human minds doesn't mean they aren't a real phenomenon.

The poor people can't buy whatever they want, but they don't need the IT workers to survive.

Actually I'm pretty sure farmers across the world are better off with IT workers existing than not.

There's a limit to the power you can have that people can't take away from you (I believe one of the Name of the Wind books had a nice quote about that). If you want more power than a self-sufficient farmer, you have to rely on other people for that power.

For that matter, a lot of the things the IT guys want, the poor workers don't have. If something happens to those workers, the IT guys might drop down a few rungs on the hierarchy, say to just about where the poor workers are, or maybe still a bit higher. They're still no worse off than they would've been if they tried not to depend on anyone.

It's an infationary use of "illusory". "Social constructs" describe certain regularities in the real world, maybe not very useful regularities often presented in a confusing manner, but something real nonetheless. "Illusory" usually refers to a falsity, so its use in this case doesn't seem appropriate. Furthermore, being a bad fit, this word shouldn't be used in explaining/clarifying your actual point, otherwise you risk its connotations leaking in where they don't follow from your argument.

I agree. I think it's really important to be able to support a point when you really do have one. That some people were able to win debates - which takes a lot of skill - was required for humanity to progress. How else would we have left behind our superstitions? The problem isn't trying to win the opponent over to the truth, the problem is trying to win the opponent over for other reasons. If a person was very good at debate, how would you make the distinction? Especially if everyone else is trying to win for the sake of ego? It's not easy to tell the difference between a person who wins because they have more of the truth or are clever in the way they defending it, versus a person who wins because they're more tenacious than their competitor.

A person who does have the most complete understanding of the truth can be attacked to the point of tedium with logical fallacies until they get bored and wander away. A group of people who are all debating for the sake of ego will not only be likely to insist that the debaters who are best at defending truth are wrong, but they will project their own motives onto that person and insist that they, too, are debating for the sake of ego. Add to that the fact that nobody believes something that they think is wrong, which leads to everybody thinking that they're right, and it can get to be a pretty big mess.

This gets very confusing.

You should pay more attention to epistemic tools at this point and not particular points of debate. Disagreement should be parsed as being about the general reasoning tools you use, not the subject matter that triggered the problem. It doesn't matter whether you win a debate, you might learn or fail to learn something useful about general reasoning tools in both cases, so a focus on winning/losing debates is wrong if you are trying to fix that particular problem. If you don't pay enough attention to general reasoning methods, you may end up continuing to accept occasional defeats and celebrate frequent triumphs without getting significantly better at not generating new flawed arguments (that your opponents, given the general incompetence, won't be pointing out to you).

(You may learn something useful from the sequence on words. See also this post and its dependencies: A Rational Argument.)

I want to learn more during disagreements but I'm not because I keep winning.

I cannot wait until someone really kicks my ass.

Actually, you (you personally, not some general "you") often don't notice when you lose on this forum, because people give up on you and disengage, some explicitly, some silently. You might be misinterpreting this as winning, but, given that neither you nor they changed their minds, and since neither is better off, both parties lost.

You like metrics, so here is one. If you look back through your exchanges here, what is the ratio of the number of threads where people are convinced by your logic (or you are convinced by theirs) to the number of threads where people simply stopped replying or tapped out?

On Less Wrong, people mostly seem to prefer "discussing things to find out the truth" instead of "arguing to win." See this post here:

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ecz/whats_your_rationalist_arguing_origin_story/#comments.

My impression is that people will be more willing to discuss things with you, if you use the discussion style that's mostly used on this site.

My point is that you're busy talking about winning and losing debates, as if they were some sort of contest. That view is quite different than viewing debates as an opportunity to seek truth. It places incentives on things like protecting arguments you've made, even when they're wrong, and attacking your opponent's arguments, even when they're right. It lets you declare victory when you find a major flaw in your opponent's argument, even if they were right and you were wrong.

Would you notice if your opponent had a sound piece of logic, but didn't have the rhetoric to support it? Would you be able to extract that subset of their argument, and change your mind based on it, even if their conclusion was wrong? What if they evidence and argument they presented was enough to show that your position was subtly wrong, but you failed to notice because you were focused on the fact that their position was even wronger?

Would you notice if their logic and conclusion was flawed, but they had some evidence you hadn't looked at before, which made your position more tenuous? Would you stop to properly reevaluate your whole position, and reduce your certainty in it? Or would it just be one more argument against an army? Or would you not even get that far, because you attacked the obvious flaw, without looking at the whole argument -- because that one flaw was severe enough that it was the only thing you had to worry about to win?

I still maintain that winning and losing debates is about status, not truth-seeking. (Note that it's not a zero-sum game for the participants; a well-fought contest will be positive-sum, a poorly-fought one negative sum, even if one participant comes out better in either one.) And you know what? That's fine, and likely appropriate for getting what you want, in many contexts. But, if you're here, I'm hoping it's not all you want in every context. And I suspect that taking different approaches in different contexts will be epistemically hazardous; we don't compartmentalize nearly as well as we'd like, sometimes.