November 1, 2019 Climate Change Discussion in the Fallible Ideas Discord Chat

Kurapika(Mentally untouchable):
What do you guys think about the tree planting event going around on youtube?

JustinCEO:
No idea what you're referring to @Kurapika(Mentally untouchable)

JustinCEO:
Can u link?

Kurapika(Mentally untouchable):
@JustinCEO https://youtu.be/U7nJBFjKqAY

Kurapika(Mentally untouchable):
This is a trend on youtube.

JustinCEO:
Watched a minute of vid, seemed bad and dumb. Will say more later

JustinCEO:
They didn't explain who MrBeast is or why we should care. Or why this was a good project. Or alternate projects they considered. Or alternate ways of implementing this project they considered. They wasted much of first minute on playing music and showing ppl doing stuff in order to create a certain kind of social vibe and pull on the puppet strings of viewers. They figure their target audience will be more likely to donate if presented with a video with the right sort of vibe instead of leading with some kind of explanations. They're right.

StEmperorAugustine:

Watched a minute of vid, seemed bad and dumb.

Probably why you should not judge a book by its cover :). The video actually has a lot of cool explanations about trees and how to plant trees using drones. I thought it was not bad and not dumb :).

curi:
It’s part of a movement to destroy civilization tho

StEmperorAugustine:
How so?

curi:
Why plant trees?

StEmperorAugustine:
A nice way to reduce co2 and increase o2 :). It is volunteering work which is great for the soul and no coercion.

curi:
Why reduce co2?

StEmperorAugustine:
Save netherlands!

curi:
The narrative you haven’t said is global warming. The goals and meaning of the movement are well known. They want to shut down the modern economy with a scare story.

StEmperorAugustine:
I feel like that's true of some but probably not true of all. However, I haven't looked at it much, not to mention the science seems rather complicated so unless you're a climate science expert what do you do?

I know a lot of it is destructive especially if they intervene in the markets etc... but volunteer tree building seems fine to me. What are the downsides of tree planting?

curi:
They are doing video propaganda not just planting trees

curi:
They are wasting millions of dollars

curi:
The way ppl like volunteer work and charity is anti capitalist

curi:
You even implied that regular work is bad for the soul and coercive

StEmperorAugustine:
ugh it is :(. I think most people hate their jobs. Though coercive? eh Idk you can always leave but many people have limited options.

curi:
Re complicated science: the tree planters didn’t care about that. Didn’t research it or try to educate ppl about it. Just risked being wrong and dragging their fans with them

StEmperorAugustine:
They trust the scientists I suppose.

curi:
Which scientists? There are scientists on both sides

curi:
Seems more like they trust NYT CNN AOC imo

StEmperorAugustine:
Seems very one sided. https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

StEmperorAugustine:
those are not NYT CNN and idk what AOC is.

curi:
That's corruption and the NYT, CNN and AOC are part of the cause of it. AOC is the green new deal person.

curi:
It seems one-sided in part b/c of ongoing suppression of dissent.

curi:
In part because they're dishonest.

curi:
And in part because of the broader context of what the media has said.

curi:
And by one-sided you don't really mean one-sided, you mean that one side is more popular than the other. Popularity isn't truth as any real scientist would tell you.

curi:
These are the kind of people who crusade for minorities ... but not scientific or intellectual minorities, who they try to suppress. They prefer to focus on e.g. skin color.

StEmperorAugustine:
https://skepticalscience.com/97-percent-consensus-robust.htm

curi:
That is propaganda.

StEmperorAugustine:

These are the kind of people who crusade for minorities ... but not scientific or intellectual minorities, who they try to suppress. They prefer to focus on e.g. skin color.

StEmperorAugustine:
this is true

curi:
It's propaganda which isn't even about co2 or warming. It's tangential or meta propaganda.

curi:
It's not even trying to be about science. It should be put out by pollsters not scientists.

curi:
what does NASA know about polling? not their expertise.

StEmperorAugustine:
Isn't this confating two issues though? The science of climate change and the proposed solutions. I agree that there is a lot of non-solutions and opportunism from the left using climate change as an excuse.

JustinCEO:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/alexepstein/2015/01/06/97-of-climate-scientists-agree-is-100-wrong/amp/

curi:

Isn't this confating two issues though?

which statement is doing that?

StEmperorAugustine:

That's corruption and the NYT, CNN and AOC are part of the cause of it. AOC is the green new deal person.

StEmperorAugustine:
how do you know that nasa and all these other organizations are the propaganda but Alex Epstein is not?

curi:
how does that comment conflate "The science of climate change and the proposed solutions. " ?

StEmperorAugustine:
Isn't the green new deal a proposed solution? if we can even call it that.

curi:
yes but what's wrong with a statement telling you who she is? you asked.

StEmperorAugustine:
I thought you issue with these people were what they were proposing and their scare mongering and stuff.

curi:
you're losing track of context

StEmperorAugustine:
but anyway, how do you know that Alex Epstein is not the propaganda?

curi:
re how to tell what's right, in short you make a discussion tree and look at what arguments and questions have not been answered. https://curi.us/2229-discussion-trees-with-example

curi:
if you made a discussion tree of this discussion, it'd help you avoid losing track of the purpose and context of statements.

StEmperorAugustine:
I really rather not do that tbh. Seems like a lot of work. I am skeptical of all things related climate change. Too political. I err on the side of trusting the consensus for this one. I don't think a non-expert is in a position to understand this matter. Unless it is cases like with the green new deal or w/e its called in where a lot of the solutions have nothing to do with the climate, then you can call bs on that even as a layman.

curi:
you can't know what consensus exists, or what is a safe conclusion, without any rough approximation of the discussion tree

StEmperorAugustine:
By discussion tree you mean our discussion or you mean the climate science discussion.

curi:
climate sci discussion

StEmperorAugustine:
Yeah that honestly seems like a huge project to undertake, having a hard time seeing the upside.

curi:
if you don't want to undertake it you should, in the mean time, remain neutral

curi:
you should say you don't know and try to avoid doing things that would be evil if either side was right

curi:
that's very hard in this case b/c of the sweeping, clashing claims

StEmperorAugustine:
yea I am pretty neutral about it. Leaning on the side of scientific consensus. Which is why I trust vaccines, the earth is not flath kind of thing.

curi:
that's not neutral, it's believing propaganda. you're being a promoter of certain claims and ideas.

curi:
you are modeling the 97% consensus claim, or a similar claim, as basically true and unanswered in the discussion tree

curi:
this is a very partisan model

curi:
your sense of what's neutral is highly related to what the mainstream media says.

curi:
your positions on vaccines and flat earth are also not neutral.

StEmperorAugustine:
thats true

StEmperorAugustine:
btw is your position that there is no climate change happening? Or that it is not man made? Or that you don't beleive the predictions? or that you disagree with the solutions presented?

curi:
the prediction models are terrible. very unreliable. we don't have exact knowledge but there's presently no reason to be catastrophically worried. and the solutions are so bad they'd be bad ideas even if all the factual claims about the problem were true.

curi:
long range weather forecasts are very hard.

StEmperorAugustine:
I think you're right about the solutions. I hope you're right about the other stuff.

StEmperorAugustine:
Though if you are right, it would be terrible for public trust in our scientific institutions. So part of me hopes you're just really politically biased 😦

curi:

“You know, Dr. Stadler once said that the first word of ‘Free, scientific inquiry’ was redundant. He seems to have forgotten it. Well, I’ll just say that ’Governmental scientific inquiry’ is a contradiction in terms.”

curi:
Atlas Shrugged

curi:
our "scientific institutions" are already horribly broken and should not be trusted.

curi:
after massive intervention in the economy, the government has taken over as the primary funder of science, and the vast majority of scientific work done today is crap.

curi:
and that's part of where the global warming "consensus" comes from, btw: biased funding.

StEmperorAugustine:
That is terrible news. If you got cancer what would you even do, can't trust the scientific instiutions, doctors etc... what options are there? What a disaster 😦

curi:
our current cancer treatments are considerably better than nothing.

curi:
doctors give bad advice about many things

curi:
you should do your own research for anything important

curi:
i would research cancer a lot more if i had it

StEmperorAugustine:
how though. Can't trust the scientists that publish the research

StEmperorAugustine:
can't do your own

curi:
you can read papers

curi:
instead of trusting or not trusting the conclusions

curi:
you can figure out what the arguments about the issues are

curi:
what the data is

curi:
and think about it

StEmperorAugustine:
but you don't have any biomedical training do you?

curi:
you can discuss it and ask for criticism on FI. you can find other forums where some ppl may discuss some.

curi:
most papers can be evaluated with very little field expertise.

StEmperorAugustine:
You said most people in FI are programmers right?

StEmperorAugustine:
Oh I see

curi:
you can usually judge the quality of arguments without knowing the field, e.g. is it a correlation=causation type claim?

curi:
you can also learn some of the field.

curi:
how long does it take to get up to ~half the education they had? a month? their education was mostly wasting time.

curi:
if you're 10x or more better at learning and don't use school, you can catch up a fair amt quite fast.

curi:
maybe not half but u can be selective about which parts are relevant, leave out a bunch of stuff u don't need

curi:
like you can skimp on labwork skills if you wanna understand papers.

curi:
you may miss the occassional error about lab procedure but it's not a huge problem

curi:
i've had no trouble reading papers about neuroscience and serotonin without needing a month or even a day of study first.

StEmperorAugustine:
I think most people don't have the kind of time to do this sort of thing

curi:
you should make the time if you get cancer.

curi:
at least you should if it was just a time issue

curi:
most ppl don't have the skill for it. much bigger problem.

curi:
so, ought to learn philosophy before getting cancer.

StEmperorAugustine:
well yeah but you probably need to work as much as possible just to pay for that cancer treatment

curi:
ummm health insurance

StEmperorAugustine:
thats true

curi:
also if ur breadwinner ur spouse can look into it instead of you.

StEmperorAugustine:
I think the average person really has less choice, they kind of have to trust the experts

curi:
who gets to be labelled an "expert" and why?

curi:
that method sorta half-works for some things but is very bad for others like lots of political issues like whether minimum wage increases are a good idea.

JustinCEO:
http://justinmallone.com/2016/02/paul-krugman-is-terrible/

curi:
global warming is a political issue.

curi:
chemotherapy isn't

StEmperorAugustine:
many years of study and scientific literacy for one. Doctor goes through what, 4 years of Uni, 4-5 med, 7 of specialization. What does a waiter in East Florida do if they get cancer. Trust that Doctor seems like her option.

curi:
however i've researched some medical issues like birth control options and acutane side effects. expert doctor advice on those matters is very bad. they massively downplay risks, dangers and side effects, and play up effectiveness.

curi:
uni credentials are biased and corrupt. they aren't especially biased about cancer treatments but they are about politics. teachers and adminstrators push out students with certain ideas, punish them, falsify grades, deny funding, don't hire them, etc.

curi:
they encourage campus speakers with some ideas while suppressing others

curi:
and they will do this against majority viewpoints.

curi:
many of the positions getting this kind of biased use of power in their favor were minority positions when it started but are majority now due to decades of indoctrination from trusted authority figures.

curi:
in a free market system, which we don't have, if you got cancer you'd speak with several doctors before selecting one. just like you go talk to several lawyers about your case.

curi:
doctors vary quite a bit and blind trust in the first one you run into is unwise.

curi:
you claim doctors have scientific literacy. it appears that even medical researchers (only a fraction of them) create a majority of studies that don't replicate.

StEmperorAugustine:
THERE's NO HOPE 😦

curi:
there's lots of hope but it doesn't come from trust

curi:
gotta use your own mind, learn stuff, etc.

curi:
when you can't get to everything, you can form opinions about who has researched something with good methods already or what areas of our culture are less broken and more reliable.

curi:
for example i read Ending Aging by Aubrey de Grey and judged the argument and explanation quality in the book was good

curi:
so i have a positive opinion about his medical work and research in general, based not on trust but my critical judgment of his reasoning.

curi:
it's not that he has credentials but that i saw him do good thinking

StEmperorAugustine:
I see.

curi:
i'm sure some cancer doctors have good books or articles which are readable by advanced lay ppl, which could impress you, and which (if you had free choice of doctor) would be a much better way to choose a cancer treatment plan (consult that guy) than trusting a random doctor.

StEmperorAugustine:
What about like, before you cross a bridge. Do you trust the engineers that built it or do you have prior critical judgement of bridge builders in your area.

curi:
you, having read some of my articles, could expect me to be right about AdG without even reading his book, and you'd still have some judgment involved.

curi:
our bridge engineering standards aren't corrupt in ways that make our bridges collapse. that part of our culture isn't toooo bad. if anything i imagine they over-engineer. if a bridge was gonna collapse it'd prolly be b/c some shitty city govt hired dishonest contractors to actually build it.

curi:
btw i spoke with AdG about a paper he wrote as part of a debate with some guy about some scientific issue.

curi:
i agreed with him. he had good arguments

curi:
he believed that i was trusting his authority and reputation. he couldn't understand that i could actually evaluate the arguments in the debate myself, personally

curi:
he was unaware that they were actually 80% philosophy and more of what he wrote was in my field than his.

curi:
that kind of thing is common.

curi:
even if it was medical stuff, it's unreasonable for him to think i couldn't possibly have understood it. but it mostly wasn't and he didn't even know.

curi:
philosophy has logical priority for evaluating arguments in general. if the structure is "X implies Y, therefore I conclude Z" it doesn't matter what medical terms are contained in X, Y and Z.

curi:
scientists in all fields are inadequately trained in logic, philosophy, etc., so i can find errors like that throughout their papers.

curi:
they are always straying into my field, which they suck at.

curi:
to be fair, philosophers are, on avg, probably worse than physicists or mathematicians at such things.

StEmperorAugustine:
Interesting.

curi:
philosophy classes and professors are really fucking bad.

curi:
philosophy is the most important and most broken field.

curi:
so basically everyone in every science just wings it, improvises, dabbles in philosophy

curi:
they also trust some philosophy "experts" on some things like induction

curi:
but they also just make a bunch of philosophy claims of their own without thinking they should consult a philosopher for advice first, as they would consult a chemist if they made chemistry claims.

curi:
the situation is so broken ppl frequently don't recognize when they make philosophy claims (as they would recognize chemistry claims)

curi:
so, in short, i'm more qualified to read a paper on global warming than the author is

curi:
i'm missing less crucial expertise.

StEmperorAugustine:
Do you have any example of this?

curi:
i forget if i have one for global warming but there are several on my blog, in email archives. i analyze some serotonin stuff on YT.

curi:
i have a post on a grossly incompetent sam harris brain science paper

curi:
i've written about twin studies

StEmperorAugustine:
When I start reading a research paper. I just give up most of the time, they are written in such boring format and all the cite and numbers and math and graphs. Might as well be written in Chinese to me.

JustinCEO:
curi has read some on YT

JustinCEO:
U could watch and learn better approach

JustinCEO:
🙂

curi:
there's a generic skill of dealing with them which mostly works across fields. they aren't thatttt bad once u learn how to deal with them.

StEmperorAugustine:
awesome

curi:

Nevertheless, the existence of the expert consensus on human-caused global warming is a reality, as is clear from an examination of the full body of evidence. For example, Naomi Oreskes found no rejections of the consensus in a survey of 928 abstracts performed in 2004. Doran & Zimmerman (2009) found a 97% consensus among scientists actively publishing climate research. Anderegg et al. (2010) reviewed publicly signed declarations supporting or rejecting human-caused global warming, and again found over 97% consensus among climate experts. Cook et al. (2013) found the same 97% result through a survey of over 12,000 climate abstracts from peer-reviewed journals, as well as from over 2,000 scientist author self-ratings, among abstracts and papers taking a position on the causes of global warming.

curi:
this grossly ignores the possibility of systematic bias, suppression of speech and publication, etc., which is alleged by the other side. it's non-responsive to the counter arguments

curi:

In addition to these studies, we have the National Academies of Science from 33 different countries all endorsing the consensus.

curi:
you can see the argument quality from a statement like this. if 33 out of 33 academies endorse global warming, is that a good indicator 97% or more of more scientists agree?

curi:
as a first guess, i'd expect they endorse based on majority vote.

curi:
if 90% of scientists believe X, it'd be totally unsurprising for 100% of major, mainstream groups of scientists to have a majority that believe X.

curi:
i didn't read any other text from the page ( https://skepticalscience.com/97-percent-consensus-robust.htm ) and i already have enough info to judge they're dumb.

curi:
most ppl, when they argue, immediately make fools of themselves. doesn't take THAT much skill to see it IMO. you just think through what they say and mean and consider how it connects to their conclusion, and you look at some counter arguments and see how they handle them, and you check for bad logic and shit.

curi:
they link to this which claims earth getting warmer, blah blah

curi:
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf

curi:
the general context is we're at the tail end of an ice age. so i search the paper for "iceage", "ice age", "plei", "plio" and nada. maybe i have the wrong terms. one could try harder.

curi:
no "holo", one for "medie"

curi:

• Continental-scale surface temperature reconstructions show, with high confidence, multi-decadal periods during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (year 950 to 1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the late 20th century. These regional warm periods did not occur as coherently across regions as the warming in the late 20th century (high confidence). {5.5}

curi:
no "little"

curi:
it looks to me like they are failing to address basic facts. they just ignore them

curi:
no ceno, no Quaternary

curi:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene

curi:
2.6 million years of winter ended 0.01 million years ago. irrelevant! not worth mentioning!

curi:
how much of a joke they are speaks to how biased the whole system is

curi:
tried age, era and epoch. doesn't help.

curi:
checked every use of "million". done searching.

curi:
the illusion is surface deep. besides the bad logic front and center, i click one source from https://skepticalscience.com/97-percent-consensus-robust.htm and it's got this massive problem with the first issue i check.

curi:
further, near the top

curi:
from the IPCC

curi:

The degree of certainty in key findings in this assessment is based on the author teams’ evaluations of underlying scientific understanding and is expressed as a qualitative level of confidence (from very low to very high) and, when possible, probabilistically with a quantified likelihood (from exceptionally unlikely to virtually certain). Confidence in the validity of a finding is based on the type, amount, quality, and consistency of evidence (e.g., data, mechanistic understanding, theory, models, expert judgment) and the degree of agreement1. Probabilistic estimates of quantified measures of uncertainty in a finding are based on statistical analysis of observations or model results, or both, and expert judgment2. Where appropriate, findings are also formulated as statements of fact without using uncertainty qualifiers. (See Chapter 1 and Box TS.1 for more details about the specific language the IPCC uses to communicate uncertainty).

curi:
this is epistemology. it's philosophy of science. it's my field, not theirs.

curi:
how to evaluate ideas, how to attain certainty, whether certainty comes in degrees, etc. are major epistemology topics.

curi:
my largest original contribution to the field, IMO, is basically an explanation of why their approach is irrational. https://yesornophilosophy.com

curi:
what is the role of evidence? how do you use it correctly? should you use probabilities? this is all the sort of stuff CR addresses. but they don't know anything about CR and don't care.

curi:
are they experts on Bayesian epistemology instead? no not that either.

curi:
they just plain aren't experts, by any measure, on the issues in this paragraph.

curi:
did they consult experts to help them with it? no.

curi:
re learning to read and question scientific papers, you're welcome to post them to curi or FI with questions

curi:
you will find ppl can comment on most papers, in any field, rather than just needing to leave it to the experts.

StEmperorAugustine:
Good idea.

curi:
https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

curi:

curi:
this graph does one of the most basic ways of lying with statistics, which i read about in a middle school book report (yes, literally, not joking)

curi:
i went to the "Facts" menu, clicked "Evidence" to try to find out what is supposed to persuade me and get some scientific details, and i see this sort of propaganda instead

curi:
after that graph (anyone see the problem?) and one paragraph of text, their evidence page says:

curi:

curi:
that ain't evidence, it's appeal to authority

curi:

curi:
clicking on cite 4 does not improve things and does not lead to arguments, evidence or science for the claim that the change is driven largely by increased co2 and other human-made emissions.

curi:
this is just a propaganda website. no scientific rigor in sight.

curi:
and no need for climate science expertise to see this.

curi:
if you can find any claim which contradicts my position, and which does require climate science expertise to refute, i would be interested.

curi:
if you can't, perhaps you'll agree that says a lot about the debate.

curi:
i don't know one. i debate a lot of ppl and i've never found any pro-global-warming person who knows one.

curi:
these issues really don't take that long to deal with if u have the general purpose intellectual skills to deal with them at all

curi:
re hopeless: how easy it is to do better is very hopeful. 100 rational ppl could do so much.

StEmperorAugustine:
I am not in a position to know what claim contradicts your position so I likely would not find anything.

curi:
you're saying you're unable to find pro GW material that contradicts my claim their forecast models are unreliable junk

StEmperorAugustine:
Well I don't understand what would constitute reliable, nor understand their papers to tell the difference.

curi:
where did "reliable" come from?

curi:
o nvm

curi:
a good paper presenting a forecast model would say what standards to judge it with. it'd present standards and say how it meets them.

curi:
it'd solve your problem for you.

curi:
either self-contained or using a cite for more info.

curi:
if you can't tell – if you don't have the info to tell – that is their fault. they did it wrong.

curi:
they are supposed to present a persuasive case, not an incomplete, inconclusive case you can't judge.

StEmperorAugustine:
Do you have an example of a paper that meets that standard? could be in any field

curi:
DD's physics papers

curi:
this looks like it'd qualify http://web.gps.caltech.edu/~vijay/Papers/Chemistry/Donovan-Husain-70.pdf

StEmperorAugustine:
Anything easier to understand 😅 ?

curi:

curi:
first one i clicked

curi:
first search i did

StEmperorAugustine:

The marked difference in the chemical behavior exhibited by
the first singlet states of atomic oxygen and sulfur relative to
their ground states has been the subject of a large number of
investigations. However, data on the reactivity of the electronically excited states of other nonmetal atoms, particularly
those atoms that may lead to bond formation following reaction, are relatively limited. Historically, the work on atomic
oxygen and sulfur, principally in the ID2 state, followed extensive and detailed studies on photosensitization by metal
atoms in which the atoms, excited electronically by resonance
radiation, passed on their energy by collisions of the second
kind, thus being deactivated to the ground state or a lower
lying state.

StEmperorAugustine:
first like 3 sentences and my brain checked out already

StEmperorAugustine:
no idea what this is saying lol

curi:
the GW ppl claim, essentially, to have a bunch of papers like that on their side, and none against.

curi:
this is a lie.

curi:
their papers are much easier to read btw

curi:
if it were true, it shouldn't be that hard for you to find some such papers

curi:
they would presumably be shared and promoted

curi:
here's the first sentence of section 2 of the chemistry paper

curi:

Before proceeding with a detailed discussion of individual reactions it is convenient to summarize the general considerations necessary for a qualitative description of potential surfaces and the manner in which these influence the course of reaction.

curi:
in other words: b4 going into the details, we'll tell you how to judge read and think about the details. just the thing i said a good paper would have.

StEmperorAugustine:
oh

curi:
the paper is quite technical. it looks good tho and it doesn't appear to stray into philosophy.

curi:
so i have a positive opinion despite not knowing most of the technical stuff at all

StEmperorAugustine:
so compared to this paper, https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002

StEmperorAugustine:
where it doesn't have a bit in where it tells you how to judge and think about the details

StEmperorAugustine:
that's a bad sign

curi:
that paper is not science

curi:
they are straying into the field of pollsters

curi:
sentence 3:

curi:

A survey of authors of those papers (N = 2412 papers) also supported a 97% consensus.

curi:
the first half of the first sentence is notable

curi:

The consensus that humans are causing recent global warming is shared by 90%–100% of publishing climate scientists

curi:
they added a qualifier before "climate scientists" which you don't normally see

curi:
and there's this:

curi:

based on 11 944 abstracts of research papers, of which 4014 took a position on the cause of recent global warming.

curi:
doesn't mention the abstracts being by different ppl

curi:
anyway this issue is stupid and it's unscientific to be going around claiming popularity instead of truth

curi:
would be better to look at a paper related to climate and warming

curi:

An accurate understanding of scientific consensus, and the ability to recognize attempts to undermine it, are important for public climate literacy. Public perception of the scientific consensus has been found to be a gateway belief, affecting other climate beliefs and attitudes including policy support

curi:
god that's psychology. social science not hard science.

curi:

Consequently, it is important that scientists communicate the overwhelming expert consensus on AGW to the public

curi:
that's a political and moral conclusion, not a scientific one. it relates to values etc

curi:

From a broader perspective, it doesn't matter if the consensus number is 90% or 100%. The level of scientific agreement on AGW is overwhelmingly high because the supporting evidence is overwhelmingly strong.

curi:
that is an unargued assertion

curi:
you can't find out WHY ppl believe X by counting how many abstracts say they believe X.

curi:
as you can see, it's much easier to read this than the chemistry

curi:
they say lots of stuff you can understand without expertise about e.g. gasses

curi:
how many PUBLISHING scientists believe X is a dumb thing to count in an atmosphere where ppl denying X can get fired for it and papers denying X are often rejected or, more often, not funded in the first place.

curi:
ppl aren't even safe wearing MAGA hats

curi:
published papers with belief X says more about the beliefs of the ppl who run the journals than about the (other) scientists. (in this case, not for all journals, fields, issues). essentially they are just assuming, as an unstated premise, there's no bias here.

StEmperorAugustine:
Hmm. These are great points.

I have to go though. 😦 ttyl. Got a ton of HW to do🤢 . We are going on a trip 🤣 so I can't do it tomorrow or Sunday, and I've been procrastinating the heck of out of it.

StEmperorAugustine:
bye!

curi:
cu

Tips for tracking discussions well:

1. Write down a tree diagram (or, equivalently, a bullet point outline with nesting).
2. Whenever you write stuff and get a reply, note down anything you’d written which the reply didn’t address. Also note down stuff the other guy said which you didn’t answer. With this method, the open issues are the things on your list plus the stuff in the latest post. (This is simplest in a two person discussion where you take turns writing one message at a time.)
3. Get better at remembering stuff in discussions.

More on (1) and (3) below.

Trees and Outlines

Here’s an explanation of discussion tree diagrams with an example. And here’s another explanation below (actually written first, even though posted second):

Here’s an example tree diagram:

You can create tree diagrams with pen and paper or with various software options (some are mentioned in my other post on discussion trees).

Trees like this are always equivalent to outlines with nesting. Nesting X under Y in an outline is the same as drawing a line from X to Y in a tree (with Y below or to the right of X, depending on whether it’s a top-to-bottom or left-to-right tree). You can do both trees and outlines to get comfortable with how they’re the same. Both represent parent/child relationships (that’s standard terminology) where some things are attached underneath others. For discussion trees, replies are the children which you put under the thing they reply to. The “parent comment”, like on Reddit, is the thing being replied to.

Example outline which is equivalent to the tree:

• Family Thanksgiving
  • Plan Meals
    • Pintrest
    • Web Search
    • Old Favorites
      • Mashed Potatoes
      • Stove Top brand stuffing
      • Cranberry sauce
    • Traditions
      • Deep Fried Turkey
  • Go Shopping
    • Food Shopping
      • Turkey
      • Ham
    • Other Shopping
      • Table settings
      • Chairs

To outline well, you need to be able to write short summaries. E.g. take a three paragraph argument and condense it to one sentence for your outline. This is a skill you can practice by itself.

Remembering Stuff

With practice you can remember more stuff without writing it down. This isn’t automatic. It’s something you can work on or not. It helps to try to remember stuff, and to reread the conversation to look up stuff you did not remember. And it helps to consider it important when someone refers to something you’d forgotten, and go reread it and take note of your memory error (try to find patterns and causes for your memory errors).

A related thing to practice is remembering what you say or read in general. You can quiz yourself on this. After reading something, try to write down what it said without looking at it. Start with shorter stuff (or break longer things into parts, like reading one paragraph at a time). If you get good at this and find it easy, do it with longer stuff and/or do it after a delay (can you remember it 5 minutes later without rereading? 20min? 3 hours? 3 days? 3 weeks?). And do it with your own stuff too. After you write something, try to write the same thing again later. See how accurate you can be for longer stuff and after longer wait times. You can do this with spoken words that you hear or speak, but you won’t be able to check your accuracy unless they were recorded.

People often don’t clearly know what they just read, or can’t keep it in their head long enough to write a reply (e.g. if you spend 30min writing a reply, you need to either remember the text you’re replying to that long or reread it at least once to refresh your memory). People often partially forget, partially remember, and don’t realize the accuracy loss happened (and don’t realize they should selectively reread key parts to double check that they remembered those accurately).

It’s also good if you can clearly remember what you said 1-3 days ago, which someone just replied to. You’ll often get replies the next day after you write something. And to the extent you don’t remember, it’s important to realize you don’t remember, recognize you don’t know, and reread. It’s also good if you can remember details from earlier in the conversation, which could be a week or more ago – and if you don’t, you better review relevant parts of the conversation back to the beginning if you want to write high quality comments which build on prior discussion text.

It’s easier to remember, especially for older material, if you have notes. If you keep an outline, tree and/or notes on what was said (including copy/pasting key quotes to your notes file), it’s easier to remember. If you do that for a while, it’ll be easier to remember without the notes. The notes are partly like training wheels that help you learn to remember stuff (it helps you break the remembering down into parts – instead of remembering everything, you partly read your notes and partly remember stuff that isn’t in your notes, so this way you have less to remember, so it’s easier, which makes good practice because you’re working on part of the skill instead of the whole skill at once).

However, notes and outlines aren’t just like training wheels, they are also good things which you shouldn’t expect to ever entirely stop using. They’re useful for practice but also just useful. With practice, you may learn to use them less but still use them. Or you might use them more with practice as you get better at creating and using them. Remembering everything in your head, instead of using tools, is not necessarily a good thing. Remembering some stuff is useful but there is some stuff you shouldn’t be trying to remember. Remembering basically means temporarily memorizing. The anti-memorization ideas you already know about have some relevance.

Also, notes, trees and outlines are useful for communicating with others. You can use them in the discussion. If the other person gets lost and confused, or there is a disagreement about what happened in the discussion, you can share your outlines/trees/notes to communicate your view of what happened. This can remind the person and help them, or it can be compared with their outlines/trees/notes to figure out specifically where you differ (find somewhere your outline is different than theirs, go reread the original text, find and fix someone’s error).

Sharing discussion trees/outlines is a good way to help figure out what’s going on in difficult discussions that become chaotic. Most people don’t have the tree in their head, didn’t try to keep notes, and also can’t (don’t know how to) go back and create the tree for the current discussion. Sadly, people also commonly don’t want to review a discussion and create a tree. That’s because it’s work and people are lazy and/or think discussion should be much easier than it is. People have incorrect expectations about what it takes to discuss well, so if it’s not working with ease they blame the other person or they blame bad luck and incompatibility, but they don’t usually seem to think the thing to do is increase their skill and put in more effort.

Many people avoid resuming conversations after the first day – they want to talk a bunch at once (e.g. talk for an hour) and then never continue later. This is a really common way trying to discuss issues with people sucks and fails. It’s hard to get anywhere with people like this. A major cause of this problem is their bad memory skill. They don’t want to continue the discussion the next day because they forgot most of what was said. To be good at truth seeking, you need to be able to discuss things over time, which requires both memory and willingness to review some stuff sometimes.

More Complicated Discussions

This section is some more advanced and optional material.

A discussion tree can actually be a directed acyclic graph (DAG), not a tree, because one argument can reply to 2+ parents. In that case, a bullet point style outline won’t represent it. However, you usually can make a good, useful discussion tree without doing that.

Directed means the connections between nodes go in a particular direction (parent and child) instead of being symmetric connections. Nodes are places on the graph that can be connected, they are parents or children – specifically they are discussion statements. E.g. “Go Shopping” and “Cranberry Sauce” are nodes. Acyclic means the graph isn’t allowed to go in circles. You can’t have node A be a child of B which is a child of C which is a child of A.

A DAG can always be put in a topological ordering (linear order, 1-dimensional order, similar to an outline or list) which could maybe be useful. Cycles ruin that ordering but aren’t allowed because no statement in a discussion can be a child of a statement that was made at a later time. A child of node N is a reply to N. Because statements don’t reply into the future (and we can treat all statements as being added one at a time in some order), cycles are avoided.

Statements do reply into the future in a sense. Sometimes we preemptively address arguments. One way to handle this is to add a new argument, C, “A already addressed B preemptively”, as a child of B. This gets into the “last word” problem. Even if you preemptively address stuff, people just ignore you or make tiny changes to try to make a new comment required. The big picture way to deal with this is by criticizing their methodology – they are creating a pattern of errors which need to be addressed as a pattern instead of individually.

When you have a discussion, it’s important to understand what is a reply to what, and what didn’t receive a reply (especially direct questions that aren’t answered).

To track this, draw a tree diagram. Put the initial thing someone said on top, then connect replies below it. Then for the each reply, put replies to it below it and connect them. And so on. It looks like this (real discussion, then tree):

Use abbreviated versions of what was said. Treat this like an overview, outline or notes. Make it condensed so it’s easier to see the whole discussion at once. Notes (text that doesn’t represent what someone said) can be put in square brackets. The tree helps show the structure of the discussion while having only short notes about what was said.

If it gets too complicated, you can split it into multiple diagrams. Write “subtree [name]” as a reply, then make a second diagram with that name which represents that part of the tree. It’s just the same as if you had one giant diagram except you took a part of it and moved it to a separate piece of paper or computer document. You can make documents that zoom in on specific parts of the overall discussion tree. You can also make an extra-abbreviated summary tree which leaves a lot out, then make some more detailed trees for some parts.

You should do something to indicate who said what, e.g. put their initials or use different colors.

It’s good to mark what didn’t get a reply and non sequiturs (comments that aren’t responsive, don’t engage with what they reply to). You could also mark direct questions, or at least direction questions that weren’t answered.

In my example, a green outline is Jack Dorsey, red is me, and black is an anonymous poster named A. Bold indicates a direct question (I paraphrased some things as questions but only bolded if it was a question in the original text). Dotted lines are non sequiturs. Ovals are statements that were replied to and rectangles are statements that were not replied to.

You can keep a tree in chronological order if you extend the lines between replies. Each row can be a message someone sent. If someone replies to an old point, draw a long line from it down to the current row. You can draw horizontal lines the show the rows. This will help with complicated discussions. Look at how my example tree is organized in rows. You never see claims from the same person in the same row, and every row corresponds to a specific message (I wrote three messages in the discussion and I have three rows, same for A).

Trees help you understand the discussions you have. Practice making trees for many of your discussions until it’s easy. Also practice doing it with other people's discussions. (If other people's discussions are easier because you're less emotionally involved or biased, start there; if it's harder because you understand what's being said less, start with your own.) Mentally keeping track of trees like this is what people who are good at discussions do (except when they actually write notes). If you write them down a bunch of times, you’ll get way better at remembering them.

When you have a difficult discussion with someone, if you both share your tree diagrams, you can compare and see where you view the discussion differently. This helps clear up misunderstandings and other problems.

Tree Analysis

The tree diagram makes it easy to see that A wasn’t responding to most of what I said (look for the red rectangles and the dotted lines). You can also see the two things from A that I didn’t reply to. And you can see what happened with direct questions: first, no real answer, just a vaguely implied answer that doesn’t make sense (I asked the point of what he was saying and he implied no point) and then a non sequitur reply, that does not answer the question, to my followup question trying to ask the same thing again.

It’s hard to perfectly represent discussions as summary trees but you can represent a lot of information this way. It’s useful even if it’s not 100% complete. In this case, the tree leaves out an issue that helps explain why I didn’t reply to the claim that debates are irrational.

I said:

You haven't given reasons nor any way for me to learn that you're right and change my mind.

And A replied criticizing me for mentioning debate, saying:

learning from each other is what matters.

I had just complained about the lack of any opportunity to learn from him, and then he criticized me because, allegedly, I wanted to debate in a non-learning way. That’s unreasonable and it’s part of a pattern where he didn’t engage with any substantive thing I said (look at all the square rectangles, plus what happened with my direct questions).

Discussion trees are literally and technically equivalent to bullet point outlines with nesting (indenting). You nest/indent replies under what they reply to. That represents the identical information as a tree with lines indicating what is a reply to what. If you don’t understand this, practice creating both the tree and the outline until you do understand.

Making Trees

You can make tree diagrams with pencil and paper, art apps (FYI vector art apps like Affinity Designer make more sense than pixel or photo based apps like Photoshop, and more basic tools can work too, and there are mind mapping and diagramming apps), OmniGraffle, or Graphviz. For info on generating tree diagrams from s-expressions, see my email reply to Justin (who found a website which does it), sharing my Ruby script which converts s-expressions to Graphviz files. Here’s the s-expression I used to create the example tree:

("No political ads on Twitter"
    ("social status, favors, friends, pull"
        ("money shouldn't buy influence"
            "no info that could change my mind")
        (disagree
            "no reasons"
            ("debate?"
                "debates are irrational, aren't you a Popperian?")
            ("point?"
                ("[implied] there is no point"
                    ("purpose of contradicting me?"
                        "opinions are allowed here")))))
    "Less upward mobility"
    "Can't put money where mouth is"
    "Read Atlas Shrugged")

It’s worth learning to write trees as s-expressions. s-expressions are a general purpose intellectual tool. They’re a way of representing structured information/data.

---

Update:

See the Discussion Trees blog category for more tree examples.

See Mind Map software review for software choices.

How do I allocate attention? Here are some things I look for.

I prefer public, asynchronous, unmoderated, text discussion with permanent archives and no editing messages. This is available on my curi website and Fallible Ideas email discussion group. Discord, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and personal emails don’t qualify. This facilitates discussion over time. I don't want recency biases or discussions that automatically end in a day or two.

I prefer non-parochial discussion. That means I’m writing something of general interest. It’s best if the topic is general interest and what I say about the topic is easy to share, or easy for someone else to read, rather than mixed up in a bunch of back-and-forth discussion. I prefer discussion formats where I can easily link to things I wrote and can easily copy/paste parts of the discussion without the formatting being screwed up.

I prefer productive discussion with people who are making an honest, friendly, serious effort over time (e.g. 2+ months of regularly working on learning something and sharing what they’re doing so I can see the effort for myself and can critically comment on it).

I prefer discussing with high-initiative, independent people who have their own motor. I prefer people who are going to learn whether I help or not, and who will guide themselves. Then my help or comments are an extra bonus. I dislike helpless behaviors.

I prefer people who will brainstorm a bunch of ways of making progress, and try them. I don’t like people who get stuck easily and don’t have any ideas to get unstuck. It’s best if you’re self-sufficient enough that my comments can help you do better at what you’re already doing (and sometimes reconsider it and change projects), rather than my comments needing to somehow get you unstuck. It’s OK if you’re getting low on great ideas about how to proceed and starting to try some more marginal ideas and you want help. It’s bad if you have no ideas for proceeding on your own and gave up.

I prefer paying attention to people who have a significant writing or discussion history, e.g. a blog or dozens of past, reasonable, effortful messages. If you’re posting anonymously and have no past reputation, you should put some extra effort into making your message clearly worthwhile and nice to engage with. I also generally like people with websites, and people who write public things which are meant to still be read years in the future.

If you want to post anonymously, I prefer that you pick a pseudonym and use it for at least an entire conversation, preferably longer.

I prefer people who use quotes effectively (such as including relevant context so that their message is self-contained, while also excluding irrelevant text), format their posts well, respond to what I actually said, don’t talk past me, don’t put words in my mouth, don’t misquote me, don’t respond to something different than what I said, don’t straw man me, and don’t reply with non sequiturs.

I prefer talking with people who don’t do social pressure behaviors. I dislike people who treat discussion as a popularity contest and pander to the non-participating audience.

I prefer good questions which talk about what you already did to solve your own problem and where/how/why you got stuck. I prefer questions which build on something that’s already written (e.g. by me or Rand). I don’t like vague questions. I generally like questions that explain your perspective.

If you don’t ask a question, I can write about a topic without you. I can create my own generic writing prompts and questions without you. Your questions, to be useful, need to have an advantage over that. They need to add some upside for me. There are two main ways to do that. First, you can include information about your perspective, what you tried, how you got stuck and your own experience with the problem. Suppose you have a question about capitalism. You can e.g. tell me which specific sentences you didn’t understand from one of my articles about capitalism, and what’s confusing about them for you. That’s more useful to me than the question “So, how does capitalism work?”, which I already thought of myself and wrote about. Second, you can write a high effort, detailed, organized question. You can e.g. write about the current state of the field, what are the open questions, what is already answered and how, etc. You can do research or think about the best way to approach the issues. In that case, the upside for me is that you put work into the topic. So, to make a good question, give me information I don’t already have – either info related to your personal learning or info from doing some good thinking about the issue.

I don’t like questions which essentially ask me to start over and explain the issue from scratch in cases where I (or someone else like David Deutsch) already wrote a one-size-fits-many, generic explanation addressing the matter from scratch.

I don’t like being asked questions that I preemptively answered in an article or in a previous discussion message. I understand that you had trouble understanding, but be more specific than “I don’t get it” or “How does X work?”. It’s important to give me some information about what you don’t get – which part of my explanation don’t you get, what’s the problem, what do you think it says in your words, what’s your best guess at what it means, what seems wrong about it to you, what criticism of it do you see no way to deal with, something.

I prefer cooperative discussion. Adversarial debates are overrated. The main benefit of them is that they’re better than no discussion at all.

If you want an adversarial debate, it helps if you communicate your background and why you think you have the skill to keep up and potentially win. Even better, bring up stakes or tests – e.g. if you’re wrong about X (something relatively easy to objectively evaluate the correctness of, e.g. a factual matter), then you’ll do Y (concede some points, read and comment on some books and FI articles, be extremely appreciative, impressed, surprised, pay me money, behave differently in your career, whatever – the more the better). It’s important to have clear criteria for what’d satisfy you in a debate, to have clarity about what it’d take for you to concede, and to have ways to objectively test who is right instead of it all being evaluated with freeform judgment. And it’s important that there be consequences to the debate, something actually happens if a conclusion is reached (it should be something that has value for me if I’m right). It’s also good to say why the issue you want to debate is important, why it matters, why it’s worth debating. And tell me how I would benefit from being corrected about this.

For all discussions, and especially debates, I prefer people who are persistent about reaching a conclusion. And people who will slow down and stop skipping steps or jumping to conclusions, will clarify things, will put effort into making the discussion organized, and will deal with tangents and sub-issues.

Communicate goals you have that I’ll appreciate, e.g. to debate to a conclusion, or to learn philosophy. If your question is the first of 20+ questions you plan to ask over a period of months, that’s a good thing, tell me that. I don’t like the people who ask one question, get their answer, and leave with no comment. I prefer helping people with bigger goals than to get one answer to one thing. (The one thing is almost never very important on its own, it’s just good as a step towards bigger stuff.)

Don’t try to have it both ways with being a beginner who wants leeway and also an expert who is challenging my ideas and expects to win debates with me. You can’t simultaneously be both. And, in general, pick one and say which it is. If you think you’re my peer or intellectual equal, say so, and then I’ll hold you to the same standards I hold my own work to. If you don’t think you’re my peer and don’t want to be held to the standards for my own work, say that. If your thinking and claims are not being held to the same quality standards as mine, and it looks to you like I’m wrong, your default assumption should be that you’re missing something (or, at least, there was a misunderstanding), because your ideas are less rigorous than mine. If you don’t have a comparable amount of learning and studying activity in your past (compared to me), including public writing exposed to criticism, then you shouldn’t expect that the criticism or critical question you just thought of is new to me. It’s not literally impossible, but it’s a bad default assumption because I’ve already heard or thought of so many ideas before.

I like talking to reasonable, smart, knowledgeable people. And honest, especially honest. I dislike talking with people who assume I don’t have enough information to make judgments about them that I’ve made. I have a lot of knowledge about how to judge discussion statements which have been exposed to a lot of critical commentary and tested extensively. Lots of your behavior, which you’re blind to, is expressed in your words and is easy for me to judge as e.g. dishonest.

I like when people talk to people other than me and have discussions that I can comment on. I don’t like being a major participant in 90% of discussions at my forums. Practice discussing with others (both on my forums and elsewhere), try things out, share what happened, and ask for help with problems.

I prefer people who answer my questions or, in the alternative, say why they aren’t answering. It’s hard to deal with people who ignore direct questions. I also dislike ambiguous answers, including giving one answer to three questions (and not even specifying which one is being answered). I also want direct answers like “yes” or “no” when possible – if you want to explain your answer with nuance, you should generally give a direct answer as the first sentence of your answer, then give extra information after.

I also prefer people who ask clear, direct questions. If you say some stuff with no question, I’m less inclined to answer. Tell me what you want. Don’t imply them or hint. Don’t think a key part of your message goes without saying. Even a generic comment like “Does anyone have criticism of this?” or “I’d like criticism of this.” (which is fine despite not being a question or request) is much better than nothing. It takes away wiggle room (both honest and dishonest) where you could later say you didn’t actually think what you said was true, or weren’t looking for criticism, or some other excuse for why you don’t appreciate the criticism you received. Even better is to say something less generic about what you think or want.

I like people who care about errors instead of making excuses about why those errors aren’t important. I find people dramatically underestimate what errors matter and don’t understand how they matter, and mostly don’t ask or want to know, either.

If you value my attention, say so explicitly and act accordingly. Or pay for it (contributions, consulting, digital educational products). Money is good. Money is actually a lot easier to come by and provide to me than high-quality discussion messages are. I don’t mind helping some people who are bad at stuff, and paying customers have priority there (as do friendly, cooperative, honest people who appreciate the help).

It’s good to share your goals, intentions and plans for a discussion or for your learning. And how much do you care? What will you do about it? What resources are you allocating to this project and what will you do with them? What resources do you estimate the project needs to succeed? How hard a project is it? What have you done to build up to being ready to do it by doing a series of easier project successfully and sharing the results publicly on your blog? These are areas you should be interested in critical feedback on. Many learning projects fail because of project planning errors, e.g. people think something is a much smaller project than it is. Many people start discussions and quickly drop out. They weren’t really interested in the topic they asked about, don’t want to think or talk about it much, don’t want to take actions to learn more such as reading an article, and don’t want to discuss and learn from their error either.

I dislike when people ask for my help with a project which is already in progress and they won’t share or revisit the project planning. They want my help with goals they already decided, using an approach they already decided, but they want to exclude me from discussing or criticizing that stuff. Lame!

The more you do the above things, the more attention you’ll get. If you don’t do them, don’t expect much attention.

I wrote this post partly to help people deal with me better and partly to clarify this for myself. I’m trying to change to better follow these guidelines. Expect me to be less responsive than I’ve been in the past if you don’t follow the above advice. I plan to ignore more stuff that I think is low value.

But what if I make a mistake and ignore something important? What if I’m biased? What about Paths Forward? My Paths Forward Policy is still in effect as a backup so that mistakes can be corrected – it can be used if I don’t allocate attention to something that you think I should. And, along with this post, I’ve just written introductory questions people can use, made a How To Discuss blog post category, written an explanation of how debates and impasses work and how to conclude a debate, and written a new debating policy.

Are you looking for one reply, a small discussion, a big discussion, or a series of discussions?

Are you looking for help or to correct me? Are you trying or expecting to learn from me, or to win a debate with me?

Do you believe you’re a beginner, a skilled and knowledgable person, or my equal or peer?

How many relevant online articles have you written? How many words is that? Link your website with them. 5+ articles is preferred for beginners, 20+ is preferred for knowledgeable people, and 20+ is a hard requirement for peers (100+ preferred). I’m flexible if you have a good written substitute for online articles, e.g. a published book. Writing should be on your own website (either your own domain or your own account at something like WordPress, Blogger, or Medium, not Reddit comments, Quora answers, etc.)

What resources have you allocated to this project? The main ones are time (e.g. 1 hour, 20 hours, or 7 hours/week indefinitely) and money. If your allocations of both time and money are low, it’s hard to make much progress.

If you want to debate, are you planning to pursue the matter to a conclusion? And if you lose the debate (in your own opinion) will you thank me, pay me, or do anything else about it? If you want to learn, are you planning to pursue the matter until you’ve succeeded, or will you stop and try something else if it’s not quick and easy?

What have you already done to learn about this matter or develop the skills to deal with it effectively? Read books or articles (about the topic itself or about how to learn, think, discuss, study, etc.)? Studied them? Written notes? Discussed them? (Publicly? Link?) Watched YouTube videos? Read Wikipedia? Listened to podcasts? Asked experts? Gotten a degree? Worked in the field? Do you have much discussion or debate history/practice (link?)?

I ask these questions first because they’re relevant context for the discussion and second because they are areas where people commonly behave/communicate ambiguously or dishonestly.

Generally you can answer these questions just once and it’ll be fine for many discussions. People usually have similar answers for most or all of their discussions. But if the answers change significantly, you should communicate that.

I like long discussions or debates. You’re welcome to ask for that. Just say so. I don’t like e.g. people who try to debate me, anonymously, and they may stop replying at any moment (I have no idea), but before that they always demand I give them more answers or else they call me an irrational evader. Short questions are OK too if they’re clear about what they are, and they’re good, effortful questions. I don’t like people who bring up a topic so that it looks like the start of a substantial discussion but then don’t continue after they get an initial answer. The questions above help me know what to expect from a discussion.

This is a successful philosophy discussion, mostly with StEmperorAugustine. There's a brief discussion about dishonesty, then an extended discussion about whether people's interests are objective or subjective. PDF. (I cropped out some irrelevant parts. Depending on the software you use to view the PDF, you may see whitespace for partial-page removed sections. It's not broken.)

And this is a discussion about eating, calories and fatness. It was kind of a mess between JustinCEO and CallmeBigPopper (it's instructive to see what people do wrong in discussions and consider what you would do differently – and then actually test yourself in discussions), but then I wrote some good explanations at the end which everyone agreed with and which I wanted to share. PDF.

I read 5 chapters (17%) of No Time to Die by Kira Peikoff (KLP). Her father is Leonard Peikoff the Objectivist philosopher. She was named for Kira from Ayn Rand's novel We The Living.

The novel is unreadably bad. I'm not going to read further. And it has nothing to do with Objectivism. The acknowledgments (accurately, I guess) don't mention Ayn Rand, Objectivism, or Leonard Peikoff. They don't mention her mother either. I looked at KLP's website and also didn't see anything about Rand, Objectivism or her father.

KLP was homeschooled initially but then went to high school and university.

KLP did not read Atlas Shrugged until she was at college. Source:

Book that changed your life:

Atlas Shrugged. I read it in college, when I was living away from home for the first time and deciding whether to embrace the philosophy I was raised with. It was always important to me--and to my parents--that I come to my own independent conclusions. After I finished the book, I finally knew the answer.

How can you be "raised with" Objectivism but not read Atlas Shrugged until age 18+? And I see no signs of Objectivist thought in her novel. And in the same interview, the book she wants to be an evangelist for is Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson, a thriller involving amnesia and trust (and a bunch of sex fantasies, according to a negative Amazon review). She apparently doesn't want to be an evangelist for Objectivism.

What about the book, No Time to Die? The unlikeable main character wants to be normal and fit in, quit university over teasing, has mean parents, has a nice grandfather, and gets stressed or fearful easily. She's second-handed and nothing like Roark. She routinely tells social lies. She has a medical condition which turns out to be she stopped physically aging at age 14 (she's now 20, and the book has some sort of plot about anti-aging science). The scientific rigor level of the book appears to be that if you say that genes did it, that's intelligent science instead of fantasy magic. Meanwhile there is a criminal conspiracy to kidnap scientists for some reason.

The foreshadowing and setting up where the book is going are awful. I can't tell why most of the material in the book is relevant. It seems there will be some anti-aging science stuff but then we get a bunch of seemingly-pointless stuff about the main character personally.

On finding out she's physically (but not mentally) 14, the protagonist starts thinking of herself as 14 in ways that don't make sense. She just wants to grow up normally. Even the genius doctor makes a comment about getting parental consent because she's under 18. My takeaway is that the author of the book is unintelligent.

This post could use some book quotes to illustrate what it's like, but the book is unimportant and bad and I don't want to do that. What interested me most was that KLP was allegedly raised with Objectivist philosophy, but actually didn't read Atlas Shrugged until college ... at which point she claimed to embrace it, but didn't. I looked into it because of reversion to the mean. Leonoard Peikoff (LP) is far worse than his teacher, Ayn Rand, but still exceptional in many ways. And KLP is far worse than LP, she's normal, there are no signs of greatness.

Be clear and direct about questions or requests.

When asking a question, ask for the information you want. E.g. don’t ask “why” unless you want to know why. Give some basic, simple thought to what your question is and directly say it.

Saying, “If you do X, I will do Y” is not a request that the person do X. It’s giving them information about their options.

Saying “I want X” is not literally a request, even if X has to do with another person. Sometimes that wording may be clear enough, but other times it won’t be, and it’s hard to tell the difference, so don’t rely on it. A clear request is “Please do X”. Requests are often phrased as questions, e.g. “Will you do X?” When in doubt, say “I request (that you) X”. (The parentheses indicate optional words that fit some scenarios but not others.)

Use question marks for your questions. Do not use question marks on non-questions.

Don’t skip steps. E.g. don’t ask “Why do you think X?” if the person has not said they think X. Instead ask “Do you think X?”

Don’t ask a question which is answered by the words “yes” or “no” unless you want a yes or no answer.

If someone asks a question with a yes or no answer, start your answer with “yes” or “no”. If you want to say something else, say it after giving the direct answer. Don’t leave out the clear, direct answer.

In general with all questions, start your answer with the answer. Your first sentence should clearly and directly answer the question. If you want to explain extra details, put those after the answer. Don’t use “But” for the extra details. Don’t contradict your original answer. Phrase the answer to be correct on its own. You can add minor/tiny exceptions in the details (“unless zombie Hitler shows up and points a gun to my head”), but if your answer requires a major exception, your answer is wrong and you should change it. E.g. say “often” instead of “almost always” in your original answer if there are some major exceptions.

When you use strong words like “always”, “never”, “all”, “none”, consider if they are actually, literally true (don’t say it if it’s false) and consider if you have a reason to make such a strong claim. In general, when you want to make a strong claim like that, you shouldn’t. Instead, remove the qualifier. E.g. instead of saying “All cats have hair” say “Cats have hair”. Adding the “all” is a way of saying “there are absolutely no exceptions” which is false (in this example and in many cases) and is generally an unnecessary/irrelevant claim. Don’t say “Some cats have hair” either, that’s too weak and defensive, there’s no need to limit it to “some”, that doesn’t represent reality well (more than “some” cats have hair, it’s more common than that).

Don’t use intensifiers without a big reason. In general, just delete it every time you write “very”.

Don’t assert things which other people should judge for themselves or which are being debated in the discussion. E.g. don’t call one of your arguments “good” when 1) it’s other people’s job and privilege to decide if it’s good or not 2) you’re debating with someone who you can expect to disagree with your evaluation of how good it is. Instead, simply call it an argument.

Don’t assert things, without giving an argument, which other people will disagree with. In particular this comes up with claims about people. E.g. if Joe claims Sue is angry and gives some reasoning related to what she wrote, Sue saying “I am not angry” is not a counter-argument, it’s an unargued assertion. Sue should not assume her beliefs about herself are true. Sue shouldn’t expect Joe to believe her claims about her emotions, thoughts, motivations, and so on, just because she says so. Further, Sue herself shouldn’t believe her claims about herself unless she has arguments.

Don’t respond to questions with counter-questions. Don’t respond to arguments by raising new topics. Engage with what people say.

Occasionally you may switch to a higher level meta issue with logical priority. E.g. suppose you’re debating politics. If someone asks you a question about your views on government-run healthcare, or makes an argument about that, don’t respond with a question or argument about immigration or border walls. Don’t change the topic to something else about politics. However, it can be appropriate to change the topic to something non-political like “Hold on, the discussion is getting really chaotic. Let’s try to organize it and go one thing at a time. OK?” Or you could say you were losing interest and suggest dropping it or discussing why it’s interesting, important and productive enough to continue. Those tangents make sense because those issues come before and govern the political discussion. But switching from one political issue to another is non-responsive to what the person said and is a way people avoid explaining their position.

To a first approximation, all mistakes matter. Try not to make mistakes. When you do make a mistake, don’t make the excuse of saying you weren’t really trying. Take responsibility for your error and try to fix it and figure out what caused the error.

Be prepared for discussion topics to change from e.g. politics to non-politics like the thought processes behind the mistake you made about politics.

Be prepared to discuss how you think rational discussion works. Be prepared to disagree with people about that and have to explain your thinking. Don’t expect the methods of productive discussion to be something everyone agrees on and which goes without saying.

Be prepared for people to say things you consider rude, impolite, etc. If they do, it means they disagree with you about how to discuss. You can argue your case or be tolerant and broad-minded and not mind.

Be prepared to use references and for other people to use them. You don’t have to write out every idea you have. Some have already been written down (or audio or video was recorded), in the past, by you or by someone else. You can link, cite or quote stuff to avoid repeating.

Consider, when you claim something, if you think it’s a new, original idea, an uncommon idea, a reasonably well known idea, or an extremely popular idea. If you don’t know which it is, or where you got it, that’s a problem. That indicates you don’t know much about your own idea. If you do know basic info about the idea’s status in the world, that is relevant in some ways. E.g. if an idea is very popular and widely accepted, then someone should have already written the idea down in a good, high quality way. So quote that instead of writing shoddy, half-assed new arguments. If you can’t or won’t do that, why not? What’s going on? Wanting to practice explaining things yourself is one answer. Another thing that can be going on is that millions of people believed it without ever caring whether anyone ever wrote good arguments explaining the matter, which would be an important and relevant fact about the idea.

If you don’t know the purpose of every word you read, you don’t understand it. Don’t ignore or skip some words. Don’t try to give counter-arguments when you don’t understand it (at least not without a warning that you don’t understand it but you’re going to try to say something anyway, so people know the situation – lots of stuff that’s normally bad to do becomes OK if you clearly state what’s going on so no one will be misled). Try to figure it out and/or ask what the text means.

Rational truth-seeking discussion is about figuring out decisive answers to resolve issues. E.g. criticisms that refute, not weaken, ideas. It’s not about scoring points, it’s about finding (contextually) conclusive answers.

Try to keep track of your discussion so that you know which ideas have been refuted by which arguments, which are not-refuted, which ideas conflict with each other, what questions are open and unanswered, etc.

Discussion is cooperative. Don’t be biased. Don’t argue for “your” side. Contribute arguments, questions and ideas for all sides in an effort to find the truth. And feel free to ask for help from the other guy about anything – he’s your ally, not your enemy.

If something is too hard or confusing or overwhelming, just stop and slow down. State the problem and propose something to do about it or ask for suggestions on what to do about it.

When in doubt, deal with the doubt. Don’t ignore problems. Don’t try to focus on the main topic like physics or immigration. Bring up the problem with the discussion. Ignoring the problem will only break the discussion and confuse the other person who you hid the problem from. Hiding the problem from your discussion partner(s) is dishonest and it sabotages the discussion.

If you’re emotional, take a break from discussing or pause the main topic and communicate about the problem. (Unless the emotions are clearly and significantly positive, that’s OK. But don’t make the excuse that you don’t feel “bad” or it’s not “negative” emotions – if it’s anywhere near neutral plus strong enough that you’re noticing it, it’s a significant concern and you shouldn’t be confident of your understanding of it.) Like other problems, getting emotional during discussions is not something to try to ignore or hide. Do something to solve the problem yourself and take responsibility for it working or ask for help.

Don’t rush. Take as much time as you need. Don’t sit there worrying endlessly for no clear reason either. Take reasonable steps that aren’t careless and which follow your thinking and discussing methods. No more, no less.

It’s easiest to organize and keep track of a discussion, and follow up over time, on the curi forum. That’s easier than FI because you don't have to learn to use and format emails and because it puts the whole discussion on one page. And it’s easier than Discord because it’s easy to find and refer to everything instead of it getting scrolled way up.

Plan to follow up on your discussions over time until they reach a conclusion of some sort. Don’t just end them for no reason because you went to sleep or 24 hours passed or whatever. You can end discussions when you reach answers about the topic or when you have some reason to, e.g. you feel like you learned enough for now. When you end a discussion, explain your reason and be prepared to consider and discuss criticism of your reasoning.

Try to be extremely honest and expect others to be honest too.

Don’t form negative judgments of people until at least one negative claim about them has objectively reached a conclusion in discussion. E.g. you argued your case fully and completely and you think it’s adequate, covered everything, and there are no substantive counter arguments that you haven’t addressed (all the replies are just distractions and bullshit like the person putting effort into misunderstanding what you said, which you covered as a general category but not for each one individually). If you’ve never quoted someone’s error, explained a criticism, and addressed questions and counter-arguments in a way you think is objectively conclusive (should satisfy and persuade any rational person, including the person criticized, who is only resisting the claim due to bias, irrationality, dishonesty, evasion, etc.) then don’t be judgmental. Give people the benefit of the doubt and act with good will and in good faith until there is at least one clearly established reason to do otherwise.

If you don’t like something and don’t say anything about it, you are the one behaving badly, not them. If you just assume it’s bad, you’re dealing with a disagreement (they don’t think what they did is bad) by assuming you’re right, without arguing your case. That’s an irrational, not truth-seeking, way to handle disagreements.

See also these other discussion tips including more in the comments there.

PS This is all related to epistemology because thinking and discussing are largely equivalent. Rational discussion is externalized rational thinking, and rational thinking is internalized rational discussion. For a truth-seeking process that deals with disagreements between ideas, the number of people involved (one, two, more) and the format (text, voice, thoughts in your head) do not fundamentally change what makes it rational and effective.