Previously: Keeping Beliefs Cruxy

When disagreements persist despite lengthy good-faith communication, it may not just be about factual disagreements – it could be due to people operating in entirely different frames — different ways of seeing, thinking and/or communicating.

If you can’t notice when this is happening, or you don’t have the skills to navigate it, you may waste a lot of time.

Examples of Broad Frames

Gears-oriented Frames

Bob and Alice’s conversation is about cause and effect. Neither of them are planning to take direct actions based on their conversation, they’re each just interested in understanding a particular domain better.

Bob has a model of the domain that includes gears A, B, C and D. Alice has a model that includes gears C, D and F. They’re able to exchange information, and their information is compatible,and they each end up with a shared model of how something works.

There are other ways this could have gone. Ben Pace covered some of them in a sketch of good communication:

Maybe they discover their models don’t fit, and one of them is wrong
Maybe combining their models results in a surprising, counterintuitive outcome that takes them awhile to accept.
Maybe they fail to integrate their models, because they were working at different levels of abstraction and didn’t realize it.

Sometimes they might fall into subtler traps.

Maybe the thing Alice is calling “Gear C” is actually different from Bob’s “Gear C”. It turns out that they were using the same words to mean different things, and even though they’d both read blogposts warning them about that they didn’t notice.

So Bob tries to slot Alice’s gear F into his gear C and it doesn’t fit. If he doesn’t already have reason to trust Alice’s epistemics, he may conclude Alice is crazy (instead of them referring to subtly different concepts).

This may cause confusion and distrust.

But, the point of this blogpost is that Alice and Bob have it easy.

They’re actually trying to have the same conversation. They’re both trying to exchange explicit models of cause-and-effect, and come away with a clearer understanding of the world through a reductionist lens.

There are many other frames for a conversation though.

Feelings-Oriented Frames

Clark and Dwight are exploring how they feel and relate to each other.

The focus of the conversation might be navigating their particular relationship, or helping Clark understand why ...

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