EA - Elements of Rationalist Discourse by RobBensinger

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Elements of Rationalist Discourse, published by RobBensinger on February 14, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I liked Duncan Sabien's Basics of Rationalist Discourse, but it felt somewhat different from what my brain thinks of as "the basics of rationalist discourse". So I decided to write down my own version (which overlaps some with Duncan's).Probably this new version also won't match "the basics" as other people perceive them. People may not even agree that these are all good ideas! Partly I'm posting these just out of curiosity about what the delta is between my perspective on rationalist discourse and y'alls perspectives.The basics of rationalist discourse, as I understand them:1. Truth-Seeking. Try to contribute to a social environment that encourages belief accuracy and good epistemic processes.Try not to “win” arguments using symmetric weapons (tools that work similarly well whether you're right or wrong). Indeed, try not to treat arguments like soldiers at all:Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back.Instead, treat arguments like scouts: tools for better understanding reality.2. Non-Violence: The response to "argument" is "counter-argument". The response to arguments is never bullets. The response to arguments is never doxxing, or death threats, or coercion.3. Non-Deception. Never try to steer your conversation partners (or onlookers) toward having falser models.Additionally, try to avoid things that will (on average) mislead readers as a side-effect of some other thing you're trying to do. Where possible, avoid saying things that you expect to lower the net belief accuracy of the average person you're communicating with; or failing that, at least flag that you're worried about this happening.As a corollary:3.1. Meta-Honesty. Make it easy for others to tell how honest, literal, PR-y, etc. you are (in general, or in particular contexts). This can include everything from "prominently publicly discussing the sorts of situations in which you'd lie" to "tweaking your image/persona/tone/etc. to make it likelier that people will have the right priors about your honesty".4. Localizability. A common way groups end up stuck with false beliefs is that, e.g., two rival political factions will exist—call them the Blues and the Greens—and the Blues will believe some false generalization based on a bunch of smaller, less-obviously-important arguments or pieces of evidence.The key to reaching the truth will be for the Blues to nitpick their data points more: encourage people to point out local errors, ways a data point is unrepresentative, etc. But this never ends up happening, because (a) each individual data point isn't obviously crucial, so it feels like nitpicking; and (b) worse, pushing back in a nitpicky way will make your fellow Blues suspect you of disloyalty, or even of harboring secret sympathies for the evil Greens.The result is that pushback on local claims feels socially risky, so it happens a lot less in venues where the Blues are paying attention; and when someone does work up the courage to object or cite contrary evidence, the other Blues are excessively skeptical.Moreover, this process tends to exacerbate itself over time: the more the Blues and Greens each do this, the more extreme their views will become, which reinforces the other side's impression "wow our enemies are extreme!". And the more this happens, the more likely it becomes that someone raising concerns or criticisms is secretly disloyal, because in fact you've created a hostile discourse environment where it's hard for people to justify bringing up objections if their goal is merely curiosity.By...