Epistemic Status: This is a collection of useful heuristics I’ve gathered from a wide range of books and workshops, all rather evidence-based (robustness varies). These techniques are designed to supplement basics of rationalist discourse, helping facilitate interactions—mostly with those unfamiliar with rationalist thought, especially on entry-level arguments. They may also be useful in conversations between rationalists on occasion. This is also a minimal viable product for an upcoming sequence that will dive into the analysis of well-managed disagreements. Details are intentionally left out.

Tl;dr: Rephrase, ask questions, do not presume your conversation partner shares your epistemology (i.e way of coming to conclusions, in general), ask them for real-world counter-examples, share personal experiences both ways as a means to get clearer, check what kinds of blindspots their own motivation presumes, dovetail interests with brainstorming, and also, all of what I’ve just said is merely pointing to a specific state of mind. You can get to this state of mind only with some form of introspection.

Arguing is sometimes wonderful. Yet sometimes it derails, or flat-out fails. Circumstances in which arguing fails tend to involve people who are not actively displaying rationality. LessWrong has done a lot to teach how to mutually progress on such disagreement. Yet this is only a very small community -the Rest of the World, aka People, still hasn't read the Sequences.

Unproductive disagreement with people can lead to poor impression, pig-headedness, stress, anger, and sometimes worse. There has already been numerous discussions, on this forum, of ways to avoid getting there: there is already a book review on How Minds Change, then I spent too much time breaking down good disagreements to teach how to do it. But there wasn't a short document that was summarizing the key takeaways. This serves as that document. 

Ethical Caveat: 
This post presumes that you follow ethical advice such as:
1-Being earnestly truth-seeking
2-Getting the consent of your partner beforehand to question their beliefs
3-Not harassing people who don't want to talk
4-Choosing the right context (most of the times, 1:1 conversations)
5-Choosing the right person (not a hierarchical subordinate, expect conversations to be harder with a family member) 
6-Choosing the right topic (probably not things that are subject to trigger warnings, such as the gender identity of the person, nor things displayed during the conversation itself, such as thoughts you interpret from their non-verbal cues)
7-Not Being a D*ck, in general.

Attention to the reader: Reading about tennis does not teach enough to actually fluently play tennis. Practice is key. In the same way, reading about Effectively Handling Disagreements will be less effective than training yourself at it. Workshops in the comments (feel free to suggest some).

0-Actually, maybe, don’t argue.

Arguing is a choice. It can be fitting or unfitting. It can be a good choice, or a bad choice. Argument is a virtue of rationalists, but it is a virtue because it coheres with all the other ones. When you discuss with a stranger, surrounding virtues such as evenness or curiosity might slip away. A good way to bring it back is to refrain from counter-arguing, and start with listening. The argument will still be there -but in a form that will make it softer and more pedagogical.

1-Rephrase, Rephrase, Rephrase

By Default, You Don’t Understand Your Partner. Understanding your partner does not take a large amount of pondering and ostentatious thinking as a first step: It requires at least repeating back, with your own words, then genuinely asking your interlocutor if this is what they mean, and if not, offering them to make a correction ("If I understood you right, and if this is not what you meant, feel free to correct me, you meant that.... is this right?). This is fairly basic, but it is worth practicing if you’re not accustomed to it yet. Remember that you probably don’t understand your conversation partner if you didn’t rephrase what they said.

Of interest: Smart Politics.

2-Ask More Questions

By Default, You Don’t Understand Your Partner. Worse than this -You Don’t Know You Don’t Understand Your Partner. Your partner, you might think, came to their conclusion because of claim X, or person Y, or argument Z. You might follow-up on those reasons without having pre-emptively checked they were even relevant to the discussion at hand. Cached as they are, your conversation partner will say counter-arguments. But they will not bother about whether said counter-arguments figure in their crux at all. This is a massive waste of time and rapport.

If anything, ask for a working definition[1] of the things you’re talking about. Ask for their reasons to believe, rather than presuming what those reasons are.

3-The Typical Method Fallacy

Your partner is not necessarily an empiricist. If they tell you that God exists, and that they do so because of personal experience, this does not mean they think (like I would personally do) that their experience is statistically significant. Their method is relying on a claim, and the claim is Personal experience is reliable (as understood in, "more reliable than science on topics where science challenges it"). You might think that this departs so much from sanity that the only dignified move is to impatiently frown your eyebrows and go talk to someone worth your time. But you might as well question the claim.

Of interest: Street Epistemology.

4-How to generate a good question, fast

Note: This one is a personal observation. Although it took reading scientific litterature to notice it, there aren't publications on it, to my knowledge. Addendum: I've replaced "personal experience is reliable" as an example with "Karm exists". See comments on LW.

Let's take the argument "Karma exists. For example, if I throw garbage out of the window of my car, then I'll break a nail within 24 hours". 

Questioning productively such a claim might sound like it leaves a lot of options open, but there is a rough-and-quick way to do it. 
Step 1: Identify the property that makes the inference valid in the eyes of your partner (here, the fact that the nail was broken after throwing garbage out of the window)

Step 2: Ask for an example of the same (super)class that has the same property, but does not lead to the conclusion. (here, “Could be there times where you break your nail, yet you haven't done anything bad prior to that?’’)

Step 3: If you get an answer (e.g, “Yes, that's an accident’), ask your partner how they distinguish said answer ("accident") from their initial answer ("Karma").

This is a rough outline of the process, which I’ll elaborate on in a future post. In short, ontological relationships form a socratic artillery. A true socratic move is one that helps your interlocutor have more than one hypothesis and apply an approximation of Bayes’ rule.

5-Personal experiences help clear out confusions.

If there is one thing I’d like you to remember and that is the most evidence-backed, and the most impressively efficient at solving disagreement, it is that stories help people understand what you’re actually talking about. This is mostly valid of short and to-the-point stories, so keep anything you refer to clear and concise. 
When offered to share a story, then hearing a story, people develop more trust, which helps with paying attention to the interpretation you have of it, the actual information you’re trying to convey. They get a lot more details and a fleshed-out example of what you are talking about. They actually get what you’re trying to convey in a way that theoretical arguments completely fail at.

This does not mean that you should use the emotional force of stories to sway your conversation partners around. It rather means that a story -and the emotions it generated in you- are crucial background information to understand what you mean. These two situations can be hard to discriminate, yet the telltale sign of being in an epistemically honest case is contrast: “You see, what I’ve just shared, this is what I mean when I say X’’.

Of Interest: Deep Canvassing.

6-Care about their underlying values.

Whatever your proposition is, it might well fit perfectly within your conversation partner’s values in some instrumental way, contrary to their own beliefs. Try to spot and bring up your partner’s motivations -say, an e/acc who cares about innovation- then, from there, point at whether the topic at hand fits with it -typically, AI Safety can be expected to contribute to innovation. Of course, do not say lies about how the topic at hand fits with it (“lies” here is understood broadly and refers to epistemic obfuscation in general).

Of interest: Motivational Interviewing.

7-Negotiate through Brainstorming

In the spirit of Ask More Questions, focus on your partner’s interests (or “needs” if you’re the CNV type), not positions (“Why do you want that ?” instead of “What do you want?”). You’ll get building blocks for brainstorming creative win-win solutions together. Note that in real-world situations, you’ll still need to spend a lot of time building positive rapport and getting your partner to think about the solution with you.

Of Interest: Getting To Yes

8-Heal yourself to get in the right Mindset

As she stirred and opened her eyes, I saw her differently. Her freckles were more obvious now, the colors of her face more vibrant. It was like I was seeing her in high definition for the first time.

-Chris Lakin, Learning to do *real* empathy.

Empathy isn’t just a series of scripted responses. I’ve been nudging you to imitate the ways in which the right mindset manifests -through questioning, rephrasing, narrating. Yet the mindset itself is the key. Getting in a mindset is a therapeutic act, it requires both practice, but also and mainly introspection, insight, and acknowledging denial. Getting in the right mindset does not only change your actions -it changes your perception.

Of interest: 
-Chris Lakin, How Unconscious predictions update
-VIEW Mindset
-Compassion Focused Therapy
-Focusing

 

Finally, a word of caution: 

What is shared here is not necessarily suited to all people and contexts. Of course, relying on conversation patterns also has a potential to fall within the Dark Arts -police yourself. My belief is that there is a subset of conversational attitudes that are in line with virtuous rationality. These attitudes have to be mastered in order to manage conversations with the rest of the world. Such conversations will happen regardless—so it’s best to be prepared.

Many thanks to Neil for suggesting me to write this post.

  1. ^

    Contested, see comments for discussion. My position is that people tend to focus on platonic definitions (as opposed to "working" definitions) way too much, even if it can be good in some instances.

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Workshops: 
https://deepcanvass.org/ organizes introductions to Deep Canvassing regularly. My personal take is that the workshop is great, but I don't find it entirely aligned with a truth-seeking attitude (it's not appalling either), and I would suggest rationalists to bring it their own twist.
https://www.joinsmart.org/ also organizes workshops who often vary in theme. Same remark as above.
There is a discord server accessible from https://streetepistemology.com/, they organize regular practices sessions. 
Motivational Interviewing and Principled Negotiation are common enough for you to find a workshop near where you live, I guess.

There's also the elephant in the room -my own eclectic workshop, which mostly synthesizes all of the above with (I believe) a more rationalist orientation and stricter ethics.

Someone told me about people in the US who trained on "The Art of Difficult Conversations", I'd be happy to have someone leave a reference here! If you're someone who's used to coaching for managing disagreements, feel free to drop your services below as well.

I have a lot of disagreements with this piece, and just wrote these notes as I read it. I don't know if this will even be a useful comment. I didn't write it as a through line. 'You' and 'your' are often used nonspecifically about people in general.

The usefulness of things like real world examples seems to vary wildly.

Rephrasing is often terrible; rephrasing done carelessly actually often leads to basically lying about what your conversation partner is saying, especially since many people will double down on the rephasing when told that they are wrong, which obviously infuriates many people (including me, of course.). People often forget that just because they rephrased it doesn't mean that they got the rephrasing right. Remember the whole thing about how you don't understand by default?

This leads into one of the primary sins of discussion, mindreading. You think you know what the other party is thinking, and you just don't. When corrected, many don't update and just keep insisting. (Of course, the corrections aren't always true either.)

A working definition may or may not be better than a theoretical one. Often times there really isn't a working definition that the person you are talking to can express (which is obviously true of theoretical at times too). People may have to argue about subjects where the definitions are inexpressible in any reasonable amount of time, or otherwise can't be shared.

Your suggestion for attacking personal experience seems very easy to do very badly. Personal experience is what we bootstrap literally every bit of our understanding of the world from. If that's not reliable, we have nothing to talk about. You have to build on some part of their personal experience or the conversation just won't work. (Luckily, a lot of our personal experiences are very similar.) It reminds me of games people play to win/look good, not to actually have a real discussion.

People don't generally use Bayes rule! Keep that in mind. When you are discussing something with someone, they aren't doing probability theory! (Perhaps very rarely.) Bayes rule can only be used by analogy to describe it.

Stories need to actually be short, clear, and to the point or they just confuse the matter more. If you spend fifty paragraphs on the life story of some random person that I don't care about, I'm just going to tune it out (despite the fact I am super long winded). (This is a problem with many articles, for instance.) Even if I didn't, I'm still going to miss your point, so get to the point. Can you tell this story in a couple hundred words? Then you can use it. No? Rethink the idea.

Caring about their underlying values is useful, but it needs to be preceeded by curiousity about and understanding of, or it does no good.

I do agree that understanding why someone wants something is obviously the best way to find out what you can offer that might be better than what they currently want to do, though I do think understanding what they want to do is useful too.

Something said in point 8 seems like the key. "Empathy isn't just a series of scripted responses." You need to adapt to the actual argument you are having. This isn't just true about empthy, but for any kind of understanding. The thing itself is the key, and the approach will have to change for each individual part. This isn't just once in attempting understanding, but recursively true with every subpart.

Hi! Thank you for writing this comment. I understand it can be a bit worrying to feel like your points might not be understood, but I'll give it a try nonetheless. I really genuinely want to fix any serious flaw in my approach.

However, I find myself in a slightly strange situation. Part of your feedback is very valuable. But I also believe that you misunderstood part of what I was saying. I could apply the skills I described in the post on your comment as a performative example, but I'm sensing that you could see it as a form of implied sarcasm, and it'd be unethical, so I'll refrain from doing that. There is a last part of me that just feels like your point is "part of this post is poorly written". I've made some minor edits in the hope that it accomodates your criticism.

My suggestion would be for you to watch real-life examples of the techniques I promote (say https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2WdbXsqj0M and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tdjtFRdbAo ) then comment on those examples instead.

Alternatively, you can just read my answers: 

Rephrasing is often terrible; 

Agree, I've added the detail on "genuinely asking your interlocutor if this is what they mean, and if not, feel free to offer a correction" (e.g. "If I got you right, and feel free to correct me if I didn't.... "). I think that this form makes it almost always a pleasant experience and I somehow forgot this important detail.

Your suggestion for attacking personal experience [...]

You're referring to point 4, not 5, right ? 
If yes, I think this is extrapolating beliefs I don't actually have. I admit however I didn't choose a good example, you can refer to the Street Epistemology video above for a better one. 

I'll replace the example soonish. In the mean time, please note that I do not suggest to "attack" personal experiences. I suggest to ask "What helps us distinguish reliable personal experiences from unreliable ones ?". This is a valid question to ask, in my view. For a bunch of reasons, this question has more chances to bounce off, so I prefer to ask "How do you distinguish personal experiences from [delusions]?", where "[delusions]" is a term that has been deliberately imported by the conversation partner. I think most interlocutors will be tempted to answer something in the lines of intersubjectivity, repeatability or empirical experiments. But I agree this is a delicate example and I'd better off pointing to something else.

Stories need to actually be short, clear, and to the point or they just confuse the matter more. 

This was part of the details I was omitting. I'll add it.

Caring about their underlying values is useful, but it needs to be preceeded by curiousity about and understanding of, or it does no good.

Agree. This was implied in several parts of the post, i.e "Be genuinely truth-seeking" in the ethical caveats. But I don't think it is that hard.

A working definition may or may not be better than a theoretical one.

Please note that I'm talking about conversations that happen between rationalists and non-rationalists on entry-level arguments. E.g. "We can't lose control of AI because it's made of silicon", not "Davidad has a promising alignment plan" (please note that I'm not making the argument to apply these techniques to AI Safety Outreach and Advocacy, this is just an example). I think we really should not spend 15 minutes with someone not acquainted with LessWrong or even AI to define "losing control" in a way that is close to mathematically formal. I think that "What do you mean with losing control? Do you mean that, if we ask to do something specific, then it won't do it? Or do you mean something else?" is a good enough question. I'd rather discuss the details when the said person is more acquainted with the topic.

There will, of course, be situations where this isn't true. Law of equal and opposite advice applies. But in most entry-level arguments, I'd rather have people spend less time problematizing definitions as opposed to asking to their interlocutor what are their reasons.

People don't generally use Bayes rule!

Of course. I'm not suggesting to mention Bayes' Rule out loud. Nor am I suggesting people actually use Baye's Rule in their everyday life. I'm noting that techniques I think are more robust are the ones that lead people to apply an approximation thereoff, usually by contrasting one piece of evidence under two different hypotheses. The reference to 'Bayes' comes from Bayesian psychology of reasoning, my model is closest to the one described in The Erotetic Theory of reasoning (https://web-risc.ens.fr/~smascarenhas/docs/koralus-mascarenhas12_erotetic_theory_of_reasoning.pdf) 

Something said in point 8 seems like the key.

It is the key, I thought I hade made it clear with "Yet the mindset itself is the key". 
However I don't want to make a post on it without explaining the ways in which it manifests, because healing myself made no sense, up until I started analyzing the habits of healed people. Some people who were already healed didn't want to "give the secrets away" or scoughed at my attempts. They came up to me as snob and preventing me to actually learn, I actually really got a lot out of noting down recurrent patterns in their conversations, if only because it allowed me to do Deliberate Practice.

Finally, please remember that this post is an MVP. It is not meant to be exhaustive and cover all the nuances of the techniques -it's just that I'd rather write a post than nothing at all, and the entire sequence will take time before publication.

If you feel like I completely misunderstood your points, and are open to have my skills applied to our very conversation, feel free to DM me a calendly link and we can sort it out live. I'd describe myself as a good conversation partner and I would put quite low the probability for the exchange to go awry.

PS: It would help me out if you could quote the [first sentence of the] parts you are reacting to, in order to make clear what you are talking about. I hope I'm right in understanding what parts of the post you are reacting to.