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This is: Conversational Cultures: Combat vs Nurture (V2), published by Ruby on the AI Alignment Forum.
You are viewing Version 2 of this post: a major revision written for the LessWrong 2018 Review. The original version published on 9th November 2018 can be viewed here.
See my change notes for major updates between V1 and V2.
Combat Culture
I went to an orthodox Jewish high school in Australia. For most of my early teenage years, I spent one to three hours each morning debating the true meaning of abstruse phrases of Talmudic Aramaic. The majority of class time was spent sitting opposite your chavrusa (study partner, but linguistically the term has the same root as the word “friend”) arguing vehemently for your interpretation of the arcane words. I didn’t think in terms of probabilities back then, but if I had, I think at any point I should have given roughly even odds to my view vs my chavrusa’s view on most occasions. Yet that didn’t really matter. Whatever your credence, you argued as hard as you could for the view that made sense in your mind, explaining why your adversary/partner/friend’s view was utterly inconsistent with reality. That was the process. Eventually, you’d reach agreement or agree to disagree (which was perfectly legitimate), and then move onto the next passage to decipher.
Later, I studied mainstream analytic philosophy at university. There wasn’t the chavrusa, pair-study format, but the culture of debate felt the same to me. Different philosophers would write long papers explaining why philosophers holding opposite views were utterly confused and mistaken for reasons one through fifty. They’d go back and forth, each arguing for their own correctness and the others’ mistakeness with great rigor. I’m still impressed with the rigor and thoroughness of especially good analytic philosophers.
I’ll describe this style as combative, or Combat Culture. You have your view, they have their view, and you each work to prove your rightness by defending your view and attacking theirs. Occasionally one side will update, but more commonly you develop or modify your view to meet the criticisms. Overall, the pool of arguments and views develops and as a group you feel like you’ve made progress.
While it’s true that you’ll often shake your head at the folly of those who disagree with you, the fact that you’re bothering to discuss with them at all implies a certain minimum of respect and recognition. You don’t write lengthy papers or books to respond to people whose intellect you have no recognition of, people you don’t regard as peers at all.
There’s an undertone of countersignalling to healthy Combat Culture. It is because recognition and respect are so strongly assumed between parties that they can be so blunt and direct with each other. If there were any ambiguity about the common knowledge of respect, you couldn’t be blunt without the risk of offending someone. That you are blunt is evidence you do respect someone. This is portrayed clearly in a passage from Daniel’s Ellsberg recent book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (pp. 35-36):
From my academic life, I was used to being in the company of very smart people, but it was apparent from the beginning that this was as smart a bunch of men as I have ever encountered. That first impression never changed (though I was to learn, in the years ahead, the severe limitations of sheer intellect). And it was even better than that. In the middle of the first session, I ventured--though I was the youngest, assigned to taking notes, and obviously a total novice on the issues--to express an opinion. (I don’t remember what it was.) Rather than showing irritation or ignoring my comment, Herman Kahn, brilliant and enormously fat, sitting directly across the table from me, looked at me soberly and said, “You’re a...
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