Edit (April 2, 2024): You can now join the Double Crux Bot's own Discord server here.

TL;DR:

We are releasing a beta version of our chatbot powered by GPT, designed for facilitating Double Crux dialogues between two users on Slack or Discord. We're hoping to receive user feedback to evaluate the bot's usefulness and further work required. You can get the bot for your Slack workspace here and for your Discord server here.

Introduction

Double Crux is a conflict resolution technique developed for the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) workshops, but it can be difficult to use because it might not apply to all problems, conversations can become emotional, or the participants might not have the requisite knowledge to embark on a double crux conversation themselves. Having a facilitator makes it easier, but facilitators aren’t readily available and are pretty much inaccessible outside of defined rationality workshops. There are also widely varying opinions on the best scenarios and strategies for approaching double crux. Our bot provides a low-effort way to engage in double crux for disagreements that people have in real-time, and it systematizes the method to an algorithm we have developed and continue to refine.

Example Scenario

Say you and your co-worker disagree about whether you should create a code of conduct policy for your organization. One of you is strongly against it, and the other one is strongly for it. Despite rehashing your reasoning multiple times, you cannot reach an agreement. The bot might help you to understand that your co-worker thinks a code of conduct policy might be counterproductive if it isn't enforced well, whereas you think that, even without enforcement, it has a positive net effect on overall culture. The double crux here might be whether conduct policies require enforcement. 

The double crux bot is intended to help resolve these types of action-oriented disagreements. The bot helps people make their reasoning explicit and reflect on the crux of the issue. The bot helps people build better inferences about each other’s motivations and frameworks so that they can come to a resolution by addressing those key points upon which most of the decision-making hinges. The chatbot does not let people negotiate or outline the solution itself but instead helps to lay the foundation for doing so.

The Double Crux Algorithm

Double crux has been introduced previously on the forum. Here is an outline of the process and some of its caveats. There is another explanation from the CFAR handbook here.  Here is the basic conversational pattern with a facilitator that we drew a lot of inspiration from. Rehashing these explanations seems redundant, so we avoid doing that.

The general scheme (similar to how it was explained to the chatbot): Say there is a scenario where Participant A holds Belief A, while Participant B thinks Belief A is false. Participant B’s belief is Belief B = ¬Belief A. The goal is to find a crux such that if Participant A believed the crux were true, they would meaningfully update Belief A (i.e. reverse their belief or greatly change their confidence in it). If Participant B believed the crux to be false, they would update their belief, Belief B. 

Use Cases

The bot works best for conversations where the participants are trying to build something together and they have an intangible disagreement about the thing they are building. Examples of this include:

• You disagree about which space you should organize an event in.
• You disagree about whether you should recycle or not.
• You disagree about the goals of your organization for the next year.

The bot is not as useful for conversations that are about:

•  conflicting needs or interests, rather than factual agreements.
• personal ethics and values.
• deeply technical or highly abstract topics.

Using the Bot

The bot is currently in open beta in Slack and Discord. 

• You can use this link to add the bot to your Slack workspace. After you have added the bot in your workspace, go to the channel you want to add the bot to and click on the channel name at the top of the screen. Under Integrations, you can add the bot to the channel.
• You can use this link to add the bot to your Discord server. By default, the bot is available in any channel it has access to.

You can start a double crux session with '/doublecrux' and then the names of the two participants. Use '/enddoublecrux' if you want to end the active session.

The bot is open-source, and you're free to host the bot yourself if you choose. If you do, we'd love to hear from you. The GitHub page of the project can be found here.

The privacy policy can be found here.

Contact & Feedback

Note that the bot is still in development, so expect potential bugs, downtime, and resets. However, we're committed to ensuring the beta phase is as functional as possible. We rely on user feedback to improve the bot.

You can reach us at doublecrux@epistea.org if you encounter confusion or have questions regarding the project.

Acknowledgments

This project was part of the Epistea Residency 2023. We would like to thank all of our mentors, teachers, friends, and funders. These include:

• Epistea for organizing the residency
• Jan Kulveit for mentorship
• Eli Tyre for advice
• Kaj Sotala for prompt engineering guidance and feedback
• John Steidley, Irena Kotikova, and Damon P-Sasi (Daystar Eld) for teaching us double crux