Earlier this week, @sweenesm published a post with techniques for making dialogue more productive. He opened it with the question, "How do we promote more of that in the world in general, where people seem less committed to rationality?"

That's a general theme I've been chewing on for a longer time. I believe discourse lies at the foundation of why our species became so powerful. And better discourse means more power, including the power to bring about more opportunity, creativity, life, and Everything Else.

But improving discourse feels so intractable! There seems to be a million obstacles--bureaucracy, finite attention, the advertising industry, politics, etc. Some days it feels like tilting at windmills.

So I spent some time Babbling on this issue, and surprised myself with some of the themes that emerged.

Productive Dialogue Skills Are Not Taught

• Existing institutions do little above teaching the mechanics of reading and writing at an early age. Later on, unless someone picks it up in college or university, things like argument or rhetoric or communication in general isn't taught--the emphasis has shifted toward teaching simplified literary criticism.
• Basically, I believe in a version of Bryan Kaplan's thoughts on how education is mostly signaling.
• If this is true, then the only way forward is to reform or circumvent existing institutions. Options here including lobbying, championing the introduction of eg. rhetoric, creating extracurricular workshops for kids & adults, or outright bribing English teachers to teach arguing and thinking.

Learning Productive Dialogue is Expensive

• It's not taught during mandatory education, so one has to self-study or enroll in classes. Perhaps organizing cheap/free workshops could meet this sort of demand (if it exists?)

There Must Exist Incentives that Keep Dialogue From Getting More Productive

• Who benefits from dialogue that's less productive than it could be?
• Who would benefit if the dialogue quality waterline was higher?
• Could the current level of quality be good enough? Why would anyone invest more if they get by in life with what they have?
• Are there simple physical bottlenecks at play? Could we overcome them more easily now, in the age of free & infinite digital goods--and tireless AI debate sparring partners? (tongue-in-cheek. LLMs appear too simple still).

People Must Be Unaware of the Benefits of Productive Dialogue

• Very weak signal, but it seems like certain subgroups of Jews and Protestants engage in more dialectical practice and enjoy higher rates of success in capitalist liberal democracies that allow them to exploit productive dialogue. Perhaps this is just a rehash of the Puritan Ethic.

Productive Dialogue Must Not Convey Enough Status

• Other status-conveying skills must be cheaper to acquire. Physical fitness, another language, a sport, or a hobby may satisfy status needs more easily than "thinking better."
• Putting on my Libertarian Hat on, why not pay people to engage in productive dialogue? Not the one-to-many sort that happens through the medium of intellectual magazines, but something anyone anywhere could engage in--like, upload a video of yourself having a solid argument, and our AI will scan it, and aware you DebatePoints that you can exchange for food or electronics.

Productive Dialogue Must Be More Costly Than The Alternatives

• It's cheaper to produce bullshit than to refute it.
• It's cheaper to appeal to emotions than to engage in healthy argument. The former is as natural as nose-picking is for a child; the latter requires conscious effort and some thousands of hours of practice.
• The workplace features many simplified techniques for productive dialogue. For example, tech companies often institute the practice of blameless post-mortems, which is basically a group introspection exercise. But these require regular care and championing to remain effective--otherwise, the quality level drops or engineers stop attending.

Productive Dialogue Must Provide a Meaningful Advantage on the Market

• A lot of business practices, like the aforementioned post-mortems, feel like highly structured and simplified modes of productive dialogue. When executed well, they appear to provide tangible benefits. In the software industry, post-mortems are a powerful way for teams to produce more reliable programs for cheaper compared to other practices, like pair-programming, formal verification, or employing QA engineers.
• Do such advantages ensure that practices will spread outside the business domain and into, for example, community organizing?

Where to go when there is no map?

These are beliefs I have about the world. Each one presents an opportunity to test hypotheses and explore why & how people do what they do.

I'm probably wrong about most of these things. Maybe I have the cause and effect wrong. Or the magnitude. Like, maybe education plays a negligible role here, so investing effort there would be wasteful.

But while the problem remains as wicked as ever, I can feel some hard edges to it now. Threads that an individual can pull on. Motion feels possible again. Where? I don't know--yet. Tsuyoku Naritai!