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Collaborative Truth-Seeking

11 Gleb_Tsipursky 04 May 2016 11:28PM

Summary: We frequently use debates to resolve different opinions about the truth. However, debates are not always the best course for figuring out the truth. In some situations, the technique of collaborative truth-seeking may be more optimal.

 

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Pete Michaud, Michael Dickens, Denis Drescher, Claire Zabel, Boris Yakubchik, Szun S. Tay, Alfredo Parra, Michael Estes, Aaron Thoma, Alex Weissenfels, Peter Livingstone, Jacob Bryan, Roy Wallace, and other readers who prefer to remain anonymous for providing feedback on this post. The author takes full responsibility for all opinions expressed here and any mistakes or oversights.

 

The Problem with Debates

 

Aspiring rationalists generally aim to figure out the truth, and often disagree about it. The usual method of hashing out such disagreements in order to discover the truth is through debates, in person or online.

 

Yet more often than not, people on opposing sides of a debate end up seeking to persuade rather than prioritizing truth discovery. Indeed, research suggests that debates have a specific evolutionary function – not for discovering the truth but to ensure that our perspective prevails within a tribal social context. No wonder debates are often compared to wars.

 

We may hope that as aspiring rationalists, we would strive to discover the truth during debates. Yet given that we are not always fully rational and strategic in our social engagements, it is easy to slip up within debate mode and orient toward winning instead of uncovering the truth. Heck, I know that I sometimes forget in the midst of a heated debate that I may be the one who is wrong – I’d be surprised if this didn’t happen with you. So while we should certainly continue to engage in debates, we should also use additional strategies – less natural and intuitive ones. These strategies could put us in a better mindset for updating our beliefs and improving our perspective on the truth. One such solution is a mode of engagement called collaborative truth-seeking.


Collaborative Truth-Seeking

 

Collaborative truth-seeking is one way of describing a more intentional approach in which two or more people with different opinions engage in a process that focuses on finding out the truth. Collaborative truth-seeking is a modality that should be used among people with shared goals and a shared sense of trust.

 

Some important features of collaborative truth-seeking, which are often not present in debates, are: focusing on a desire to change one’s own mind toward the truth; a curious attitude; being sensitive to others’ emotions; striving to avoid arousing emotions that will hinder updating beliefs and truth discovery; and a trust that all other participants are doing the same. These can contribute to increased  social sensitivity, which, together with other attributes, correlate with accomplishing higher group performance  on a variety of activities.

 

The process of collaborative truth-seeking starts with establishing trust, which will help increase social sensitivity, lower barriers to updating beliefs, increase willingness to be vulnerable, and calm emotional arousal. The following techniques are helpful for establishing trust in collaborative truth-seeking:

  • Share weaknesses and uncertainties in your own position

  • Share your biases about your position

  • Share your social context and background as relevant to the discussion

    • For instance, I grew up poor once my family immigrated to the US when I was 10, and this naturally influences me to care about poverty more than some other issues, and have some biases around it - this is one reason I prioritize poverty in my Effective Altruism engagement

  • Vocalize curiosity and the desire to learn

  • Ask the other person to call you out if they think you're getting emotional or engaging in emotive debate instead of collaborative truth-seeking, and consider using a safe word



Here are additional techniques that can help you stay in collaborative truth-seeking mode after establishing trust:

  • Self-signal: signal to yourself that you want to engage in collaborative truth-seeking, instead of debating

  • Empathize: try to empathize with the other perspective that you do not hold by considering where their viewpoint came from, why they think what they do, and recognizing that they feel that their viewpoint is correct

  • Keep calm: be prepared with emotional management to calm your emotions and those of the people you engage with when a desire for debate arises

    • watch out for defensiveness and aggressiveness in particular

  • Go slow: take the time to listen fully and think fully

  • Consider pausing: have an escape route for complex thoughts and emotions if you can’t deal with them in the moment by pausing and picking up the discussion later

    • say “I will take some time to think about this,” and/or write things down

  • Echo: paraphrase the other person’s position to indicate and check whether you’ve fully understood their thoughts

  • Be open: orient toward improving the other person’s points to argue against their strongest form

  • Stay the course: be passionate about wanting to update your beliefs, maintain the most truthful perspective, and adopt the best evidence and arguments, no matter if they are yours of those of others

  • Be diplomatic: when you think the other person is wrong, strive to avoid saying "you're wrong because of X" but instead to use questions, such as "what do you think X implies about your argument?"

  • Be specific and concrete: go down levels of abstraction

  • Be clear: make sure the semantics are clear to all by defining terms

  • Be probabilistic: use probabilistic thinking and probabilistic language, to help get at the extent of disagreement and be as specific and concrete as possible

    • For instance, avoid saying that X is absolutely true, but say that you think there's an 80% chance it's the true position

    • Consider adding what evidence and reasoning led you to believe so, for both you and the other participants to examine this chain of thought

  • When people whose perspective you respect fail to update their beliefs in response to your clear chain of reasoning and evidence, update a little somewhat toward their position, since that presents evidence that your position is not very convincing

  • Confirm your sources: look up information when it's possible to do so (Google is your friend)

  • Charity mode: trive to be more charitable to others and their expertise than seems intuitive to you

  • Use the reversal test to check for status quo bias

    • If you are discussing whether to change some specific numeric parameter - say increase by 50% the money donated to charity X - state the reverse of your positions, for example decreasing the amount of money donated to charity X by 50%, and see how that impacts your perspective

  • Use CFAR’s double crux technique

    • In this technique, two parties who hold different positions on an argument each writes the the fundamental reason for their position (the crux of their position). This reason has to be the key one, so if it was proven incorrect, then each would change their perspective. Then, look for experiments that can test the crux. Repeat as needed. If a person identifies more than one reason as crucial, you can go through each as needed. More details are here.  


Of course, not all of these techniques are necessary for high-quality collaborative truth-seeking. Some are easier than others, and different techniques apply better to different kinds of truth-seeking discussions. You can apply some of these techniques during debates as well, such as double crux and the reversal test. Try some out and see how they work for you.


Conclusion

 

Engaging in collaborative truth-seeking goes against our natural impulses to win in a debate, and is thus more cognitively costly. It also tends to take more time and effort than just debating. It is also easy to slip into debate mode even when using collaborative truth-seeking, because of the intuitive nature of debate mode.

 

Moreover, collaborative truth-seeking need not replace debates at all times. This non-intuitive mode of engagement can be chosen when discussing issues that relate to deeply-held beliefs and/or ones that risk emotional triggering for the people involved. Because of my own background, I would prefer to discuss poverty in collaborative truth-seeking mode rather than debate mode, for example. On such issues, collaborative truth-seeking can provide a shortcut to resolution, in comparison to protracted, tiring, and emotionally challenging debates. Likewise, using collaborative truth-seeking to resolve differing opinions on all issues holds the danger of creating a community oriented excessively toward sensitivity to the perspectives of others, which might result in important issues not being discussed candidly. After all, research shows the importance of having disagreement in order to make wise decisions and to figure out the truth. Of course, collaborative truth-seeking is well suited to expressing disagreements in a sensitive way, so if used appropriately, it might permit even people with triggers around certain topics to express their opinions.

 

Taking these caveats into consideration, collaborative truth-seeking is a great tool to use to discover the truth and to update our beliefs, as it can get past the high emotional barriers to altering our perspectives that have been put up by evolution. Rationality venues are natural places to try out collaborative truth-seeking.

 

 

 

Comments (17)

Playing offense

-4 artemium 30 November 2015 01:59PM

There is a pattern I noticed that appears whenever some new interesting idea or technology gains some media traction above certain threshold. Those who are considered opinion-makers (journalists, intellectuals) more often than not write about this new movement/idea/technology in a way that it somewhere between cautions and negative. As this happens those who adopted this new ideas/technologies became somewhat weary of promoting it and in fear of a low status decide to retreat from their public advocacy of the mentioned ideas. 


I was wondering that maybe in some circumstances, the right move for those that are getting the negative attention is not to defend themselves but instead to go on a offense. And one the most interesting offensive tactic might be is to try to reverse the framing of the subject matter and put the burden of the argument on the critics in a way that requires them to seriously reconsider their position: 

  • Those who are critical of this idea are actually doing something wrong and they are unable to see the magnitude of their mistake 
  • The fact that they are not adopting this idea/product has a big cost that they are not aware of, and in reality they are the ones making a weird choice  
  • They already adopted that idea/position but they don't notice it as it not framed in context they understand or find comfortable
In all of this cases it the critic is usually stuck the status competition that prevents them to analyse situation objectively, and additionally he feels safety in numbers as there are a lot of people who are similarly criticising this idea.

So lets start with Facebook.

When Facebook was expanding rapidly and was predicted to dominate social media market (2008-2010) it became one of the most talked about subject in the public sphere. And the usual attitude towards Facebook from the 'intellectual' press and almost everyone who considered himself an independent thinker was usually negative. The Facebook was this massive corporate behemoth who is assimilating people in its creepy virtual world full of pokes, likes and Farmvilles. It didn't help that its CEO was the guy who had "I am a CEO bitch" written on his business card and walked in his flip-flops to the business meetings. 

I remember endless articles with titles like "Facebook is killing real life frendships", "Facebook is creepy corporate product which wants to diminish your identity ", "Why I am not on facebook", "I left facebook and that was the best decision ever!" At that time everyone who said "Actually I am not on facebook" was a sure way to gain a high status, as someone who refuses to become another FB drone. And those who were on facebook always felt the need to apologize for their decision "Yeah, facebook sucks, l am only there to stay in touch with my high school pals" 

The climax was reached with the "Social network", movie which presented Mark Zuckenberg and founding of facebook as some kind of Batman villain origin story (and it was grossly inaccurate for anyone who actually knows the facts). 

But then Fahrad Manjoo published an article that asked a simple question "Why are you not on facebook?" In it he reversed the framing of the story and presented facebook as something that is the new normal and being a holdout is a weird thing that should get a strange looks. His message was something like: "Actually it is you people who are not on facebook have to explain yourself. Facebook won, it is convenient tool for communication, almost everyone is there and you should get over your high horse and join the civilized world." 

The site has crossed a threshold—it is now so widely trafficked that it's fast becoming a routine aid to social interaction, like e-mail and antiperspirant.


In others words, if you are not on facebook in 2010, you are not brave intellectual maverick standing up against an evil empire.  You are like a cranky old man from 1950s who refuses to own a telephone because he is scared of the demon-machine. And this is making very inconvenient for his relatives to contact him. 

There is probably a lot of whats wrong with Manjoo's approach, some of it would fall under the 'dark arts' arsenal. And to be fair a lot of criticism of Facebook has a point especially after Snowden affair. But I really like Manjoo's  subversive thinking on this issue and the way he pierced the suffocating smugness with a brazen narrative reversal. 

I wonder that this tactic might be useful for other ideas that are slowly entering public space and are similarly getting a nasty look from the "intellectual elite"

Lets look at the Transhumanism and its media portrayal. 

It is important to notice that there is a difference between regular "SF tehnology is cool" and transhumanism. Everyone loves imagining a future world with cool gadgets and flying cars. However, once you start messing out with the human genome or with cybernetic implants things get creepy for a lot of people. When you talk about laser pistols you get heroic rebels fighting stromtroppers with their blasters. When you talk about teleporters and warp drives you get brave Starfleet captain exploring the Galaxy. But when you talk about cybernetic implants you get the Borg, when you talk about genetic enhancement you get Gattaca and when you talk about Immortality you get Voldermort. For the average viewer, technology is good as long it doesn't change what is perceived as 'normal' state of human being.

You can have Star Wars movies where families are watching massive starships destroying entire planets with billions of people but you are not supposed to ask a why is Han Solo so old in the new episode. They solved faster-than-light travel and invented planet-killing lasers but got stuck on longevity research, or at least good anti-aging cosmetics? (yeah I know that it would be expensive to make Harrison Ford look younger, but you get my point)

Basically the mainstream view of the future is "old-fashion humans + jetpacks" and you better not touch the "old fashion" adjective or you will get pattern matched into a creepy dude trying to create utopia , which as we learned from the movies and literature, always makes you a bad guy.

But then in a real world you have a group of smart people who seriously argue that changing the human biology with various weird technologies would actually be a good thing and that we should totally work on reliable ways to increase longevity, intelligence and other abilities and remove any regulations that would stop it. And in response you have much larger group of intellectuals, journalists, politicians and other 'deep thinkers' who are repulsed by this idea and  will immediately start to bludgeon someone who argues that we should improve our natural state.  (I am purposely not mentioning those who question feasibility of transhuman ideas, like if the genetic enhancement is even possible, as this is not relevant here.)

From the political right and religious groups you will instantly hear standard chants of "people playing God" and "destroying the fabric of society ", from the political left you will hear the shouting about "rich silicon valley libertarians trying to recreate feudalism through cognitive inequality and eugenics " and even from political center you will get someone like Francis Fukuyama accusing transhumanism of being "the most dangerous idea of the century" that might "destroy liberal society". Finally you have entire class of people called "bio-ethicitist" whose job description seems to be "bashing transhumanism".   

At best transhumanists are presented as a "well intentioned geeks who are unaware of the bad consequences of their ideas" at worst they will get labeled "rich, entitled Silicon Valley nerds with a bizarre and dangerous pseudo-religious cult " or they can be dismissed altogether from serious conversation and turned into a punchline on "Bing bang theory".

So when transhumanist receive this kind of criticism they would naturally try to soften their arguments and backtrack on their positions, After all many people that are optimistic about the future and sometimes positively talk about human enhancement don't label themselves as transhumanist. But should they do that? What if they "own" their label and go on a offensive? How would narrative reversal look in that case?

Well they could make exact copy of the Manjoo's facebook method and throw "Why are you not a transhumanist?" to their critics. But they can use third method and confidently say: "You are transhumanist too. Actually majority of people are transhumanist but they are not aware of it."

It might sound crazy at first, I mean majority of people usually find tranhsumanist ideas weird and uncanny when they are presented in the usual form. "Designer babies? Nanotech robots inside my body? Memory chips in the brain? Mind uploading??? That is crazy talk!!"

But lets stop for a moment and try to understand what is basis of transhumanism, to reduce it to its core idea. One of the best article ever written about transhumanism is E. Yudkowsy short essay "Simplified humanism". The beauty of this essay is in simplicity, there are no complicated moral theories or deep analysis of various disruptive technologies but just a common sense argument about what are the fundamental values that humans should strive for and how to achieve them . 
 
As far as a transhumanist is concerned, if you see someone in danger of dying, you should save them; if you can improve someone’s health, you should. There, you’re done. No special cases. 

And it is hard to argue with it. I mean I can't imagine normal person arguing with this statement. But then it gets more interesting

You also don’t ask whether the remedy will involve only “primitive” technologies (like a stretcher to lift the six-year-old off the railroad tracks); or technologies invented less than a hundred years ago (like penicillin) which nonetheless seem ordinary because they were around when you were a kid; or technologies that seem scary and sexy and futuristic (like gene therapy) because they were invented after you turned 18; or technologies that seem absurd and implausible and sacrilegious (like nanotech) because they haven’t been invented yet. 

And at this point we reach the the crux of the issue. It is not that the the values are the problem, but our familiarity of the tools we are using in order to protect our values.

So we can finally define difference between transhumanist and non-transhumanist. Transhumanist is a person who believes that science and technology should be used to make humans happier, smarter and able live as long as possible. Non-transhumanist is usually a person who believes the same except that he technology used in that process should not be too strange compared to the one he is already used to.

Using this definition the pool of people that fall in the transhumanist group whether they admit it or not should rise significantly. 

But actually we can go better then than that. How many people would honestly define themselves as non-transhumanist in this case?

Imagine that you have a lovely 5-year old daughter that got struck by a horrible medical condition. The doctors says to you that there is no cure and that your daughter will suffer severe pains for the several months before she finally dies in agony. 

While you are contemplating the horrible twist of faith another doctor approaches you and says: 

"Well, there is potential cure. We just finished the series of successful trials that cured this condition by using revolutionary medical nanobots. They are injected in the patient bloodstream and then they are able to physically destroy the cancer. If we have your approval we can start the therapy next week.  

Oh... before you answer, there are some serious side-effects we should mention. For the reasons we don't completely understand, the nanobots will significantly increase the hosts IQ and they are able to rejuvenate old cells, so in addition to curing your daughter's disease they will also make her super-smart and allow her to live several hundred years. Now many people have some ethical issues with that, because it will give her unfair advantage over her peers, and once she becomes older it might create feelings of guilt of being superior to everyone else and might make her socially awkward because of it . I know that this is a difficult decision. So what will it be.. horrible death in pain after few months or long fulfilling life with occasional bout of existential angst for being superhuman and feeling unease for being unfairly celebrated for getting all those Nobel prizes and solving world hunger?"

Do you honestly know a single person that would choose that their child would die in pain instead of nanobot therapy? Well I admit that this example is super-contrived but it still represents general idea of transhumanism clearly. The point is that EVERYONE is transhumanist and will quickly dismiss any intellectual posturing when push comes to shove, and when they or their loved ones face the dark spectre of death and suffering .   

And don't forget, if you go to the past just several generations compared to them we are the transhuman beings from utopian future. Just a few centuries ago average human lifespan was only half of what it is now, and on almost any objective measure of well-being humans from the past were living horrible and miserable lives compared to the life we now take for granted. If someone is willing to argue against transhumanism he should also in principle be against all of the advances that made us more healthier, intelligent and wealthier then our ancestors by using technologies that from the point of view of our ancestors were looking more crazy then many SF transhumanist technology would look from our perspective. 

So next time someone starts criticising transhuman beliefs, don't defend your self by trying to retreat from your position and trying to avoid looking weird. Ask him to prove that he isn't transhumainst himself by present transhuman idea in it basic form as stated in the Yudkowsky essay. Ask him why he considers trying to use technology to improve human condition should be considered a bad thing, and let him try to define at which point it becomes a bad thing. 

Playing offense might also work in other domains. 

Effective altruism

Criticism: You are using your nerdy math in a field that should be guided by passion on strong moral convictions.

Response : Actually it is you who should explain why you are not effective altruist. EA has proven track record of using the most effective tools to improve outcomes in charity work on the level that surpasses traditional charities. How do you explain your decision to not use this kind of systemic analysis of your work that would result in better outcomes and more lives saved by your charity? 


Smartphones

Criticism: you are using smartphone only as status symbol. They are unnecessary 

Answer: On the contrary I am using it as useful tool that help me in my everyday activities. Why are you not using smartphone when everyone else recognised their obvious value? Are you aware of the opportunity costs of not using smartphone like being unable to use Google maps and translate in your travels ?


We on LW and in larger rationalist community are used to having a defence posture when we are faced with a broad public scrutiny. In many cases that is correct approach as we should avoid unnecessary hubris. But we should recognise circumstances when we are coming from a position of strength and where we can play more offensive game in order to defeat bad arguments that might still damage our cause if they are not met with strong response.

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