This is a good excerpt for those who don't have time to read this:

The Center for Applied Rationality promotes double-cruxing, a specific technique that helps people operationalize arguments. A double-crux is a single subquestion where both sides admit that if they were wrong about the subquestion, they would change their mind. For example, if Alice (gun control opponent) would support gun control if she knew it lowered crime, and Bob (gun control supporter) would oppose gun control if he knew it would make crime worse – then the only thing they have to talk about is crime. They can ignore whether guns are important for resisting tyranny. They can ignore the role of mass shootings. They can ignore whether the NRA spokesman made an offensive comment one time. They just have to focus on crime – and that’s the sort of thing which at least in principle is tractable to studies and statistics and scientific consensus.

There's a nice general lesson from double cruxing that you can apply outside of one on one arguements if you care about holding consistent beliefs.

Always argue for your weakest crux. I.e. out of all the necessary premises of some position you hold, always keep the hardest to defend premise close to the front of your mind.

This is counterintuitive because people reflexively try to bury their weakest assumptions. What's more: we're rewarded for presenting strong arguments. But if there's some fact that, if disproven, would cause you to change your mind and you aren't really confident that that fact is true - you should care the most about finding out if it's false, or at the very least becoming more certain in your belief about it.

This is a very good point - as long as your goal is really and only to have the opinion that is closest to the truth, and you're completely open to changing it when new evidence comes. In other words, if you are really discussing because of the right reasons (which should of course always be the case).

But in many contexts, this is not the end goal. The end goal is to either make one feel better about its own beliefs, or to exert social pressure/gain social status.

You can often kind of tell who is really discussing to find the underlying truth based on this very observation.

I think it's useful to differentiate between "arguments" and "debates". An "argument" is a meeting of the minds, grounded in mutual respect, in which each side has an opposing a priori belief that they might be willing to change. A "debate" is a zero-sum game in which each person arguing is trying to change the mind of some third party^1. People often call interactions "arguments" when, in fact, they are actually "debates".

Doubele-cruxing can be useful in arguments, but the audience of a debate should approach any crux with incredulity. Anyone with half a mind toward "winning" a double-cruxed debate would choose an untenable position as their "crux". A practiced debater will find the scientific concensus and then work backwards to a crux. Not the other way around. Then they get the rhetorical benefits of acting "reasonable" without actually giving up anything useful to their opponent. In fact, if their opponent is clueless enough to accept the crux, they've just won the game. And if their opponent complains, well now the opponent is "meta-debating" which is apparently bad thing (and is a bad thing anyways because it makes you sound like an egghead).

So, double-cruxing is a great strategy for an argument between people who mutually respect one another. But audiences to a debate should be careful about whether they're being hood-winked by a rhetorical trick.

In short, a lot of this philosophizing about how to have a good argument really just boils down to "have the right argument with the right person". Two people who respect each other talking about something that both have fluid opinions on rarely devolves into a useless conversation.

--

^1: A debate in which there's no third party present might be called "a waste of time".

> So, double-cruxing is a great strategy for an argument between people who mutually respect one another.

That's a good point. The guide on double-cruxing[1] lists "epistemic humility" and "good faith" as pre-requisites for using the technique effectively.

[1] http://rationality.org/resources/updates/2016/double-crux

I dislike double cruxing along the lines of debating as a sport too, but I disagree that what you describe in the second half of your comment is a problem, in fact people should be encouraged to do what you describe.

The "double" part of double crux means that the crux you choose has to be a crux for both people, i.e. if it's established either way, that alone has to be sufficient to convince both people of the overall argument being true or false.

If you pick a crux that is a truly provably untenable position, and it turns out to also be a crux for the other person then they should happily change their mind on seeing the proof. If they don't it's not like they're committed to saying you've "won" against their will or anything, at worst it turns out that the crux they agreed on wasn't really a crux for them after all. At best, they discover that their belief rested on an untenable position.

By design it's pretty hard for a malicious actor to play double crux to win without also playing it to discover the truth, so long as they actually choose honest cruxes for themselves (and to some extent, even if they don't).

I'm unconvinced.

The rhetorical trick is to paint the opponent as unreasonable, pretentious, impractical, etc. if they don't agree with your double-crux. In this case, the resolution of the double-crux is not the strong argument (your opponent would never willinging agree to the double-crux)! The rhetorical characterization of your opponent is the strong argument. Again, it's just something you should watch out for as an audience member.

Also, inexperienced debaters will often agree to double-cruxes when they shouldn't because they don't understand the strategy that's being deployed agains them and the double-crux is presented in a "friendly" tone. And once it's deployed they realie that was a stupid thing to agree to. The truth we've discovered is that one of the debaters is inexperienced; we haven't learned anything about the underlying topic.

In practice, debates (acdaemic or out in the real world) are almost never searches for truth.

Again, as an audience member in an obviously zero-sum debate, I'm extremely skeptical of the double-crux. It's usually a steup for a rhetorical argument or a way of easily beating down an inexperienced person. It's rarely a geniune assertion that this one thing really is the fundamental point of contention.

In a friendly, respectful argument designed to search for truth, double-cruxes can be a great tool.

> Again, as an audience member in an obviously zero-sum debate, I'm extremely skeptical of the double-crux.

For some context, double-cruxing came out of the rationalist community (specifically CFAR), which commonly refers to persuasive rhetoric as the dark arts. They do not develop tools for use in the dark arts.

But the arguments on both sides would be somewhat crippled by removing the use of stats relating to gun control vs. crime.

Your quote may as well replace "gun control" with "religion" and "crime" with "morality". The arguments on both sides become superficial as you've removed the specific causes for each side to argue. You may as well continue this trend until both sides are arguing "good equals good" for differing values of "good".

This stuff isn't easily arguable by humans with opinions. Removing the example data that forms the opinions doesn't make the arguments on either side stronger or weaker, it makes the argument as a whole less relevant to society.

This is unfortunate because, as you quote, "that’s the sort of thing which at least in principle is tractable to studies and statistics and scientific consensus"

Breaking complex issues down to be "tractable to studies" is possible, but most techniques are fraught with errors of over-simplification.

> But the arguments on both sides would be somewhat crippled by removing the use of stats relating to gun control vs. crime.

In this case, the double crux was on crime prevention, so after agreeing on the crux they'd be only looking at gun control vs. crime statistics. Did you mean to say something else?

I think parent's point is that by searching for a double-crux you might obfuscate high-level generators of disagreement, so the conversation might progress but won't actually change anyone's mind even if there is a purely factual answer to the double-crus.

I think parent's point is made later in the paragraph after the section on double-cruxing:

> High-level generators of disagreement are what remains when everyone understands exactly what’s being argued, and agrees on what all the evidence says, but have vague and hard-to-define reasons for disagreeing anyway. In retrospect, these are probably why the disagreement arose in the first place, with a lot of the more specific points being downstream of them and kind of made-up justifications. These are almost impossible to resolve even in principle.

I.e., many people who have strong opinions on gun control would never agree to this sort of double-crux. And even if they did agree to it in the context of one conversation, and then "lost" the argument on that basis, they wouldn't actually go on to change their mind. They would return to the "High-level generator" and everyone just wasted their time.

The way I understand it, double-cruxing is a technique to be used (probably multiple times) during the debate, and isn't the entire debate itself. It kind of reminds me of "divide and conquer" strategies.

4. If you hold the conversation in private, you’re almost guaranteed to avoid everything below the lower dotted line. Everything below that is a show put on for spectators.

This is definitely not true. I think most people have social shaming arguments (another way of putting this is tribalism) so drilled into them that they believe it at a very core level and will socially shame you (in a less aggressive way) when speaking in private because it's core to how they think.

"I hate how you're always agreeing/on the side of X"

I don't usually put myself in a position to have private conversations with that type of person, and I suspect Scott doesn't either, but you're very correct to point this out.

This is unfortunately the case, but an audience still tends to exacerbate the problem. In other words, OP is correct if we change 'almost guaranteed' to something like 'considerably more likely'.

Douglas Walton has been my go-to on these topics for years. For those interested in a more professional presentation of some of the concepts used in this blog post, try this:

http://www.dougwalton.ca/papers.htm

Thank you for this! I've always wondered if there was anything similar being done.

I will say that this is quite a large collection of papers. Do you have any pointers as to which of these papers I should start with as a foundation?

I think this is a useful article. The bit that struck me as most important was the bit about Clarifying - I think many pointless online discussions, including most straw-men, could be rescued by that practice.

More specifically, if I were dang for a day, I'd edit the third guideline ("Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.") to add, "When in doubt, try paraphrasing the other side's argument in a way that they would agree with before responding to it."

It's no surprise that the internet is full of "meta debate" and "social shaming" - arguing about the terms of debate and who can participate, and not over any core issues. For debates to be productive, all sides need to agree on at least some facts, and come from a place of good faith. Most places online, anyone can walk in and add their comment. They don't need to share any assumptions with the rest of the audience, and they probably aren't invested in having a productive debate anyway. It produces drive-by commenters.

Productive debates are more likely to happen in places with 1. Moderation and 2. an invested community. That's what makes HN successful, in my opinion.

But we can't turn every comment section into HN. Moderation is expensive. And some sites aren't niche enough to foster a sense of community.

So we should probably remove most comment sections.

News sites are particularly bad. Anyone can just stop by, leave their shitty opinion, and walk away.

This is why I like code. Sometimes you don't have to argue, you can just make something work. Not arguing is hard. I'm bad at not arguing, but the older I get the more often I repeat, "Can I demonstrate? No? Then don't engage." If something can't be conclusively demonstrated maybe I can spend my time productively in a way that makes me happy and maybe gets a little bit closer to demonstrating something I care about.

Debate and criticism are defence, it seems to me; their value lies in averting heartache and war. For the purpose of changing the world, the ultimate argument is to create something new and substantial and then make progess with it, giving people somewhere to jump to.

Classify SSC as philosophical musings, with a vague basis in science. If philosophical musings aren't your thing, and they are not most people's thing, it isn't going to appeal to you. SSC posts are generally "the sausage being made", not a nicely-digested final product such as you might get in a school course.

I mean this as neither defense of SSC nor an attack on SSC. It is simply an explanation of what it is, and an observation that you may simply not be in the target audience.

The reality is that it's bad science and even worse philosophy. This stuff, like frankly all the rationalist nonsense, suffers from very highly motivated reasoning. The author isn't asking questions he's already decided on the answers and is now looking to justify his ideology. I suspect this is why rationalists are very careful to avoid actual philosophers. Philosophers make short work of this sort of simplistic thinking.

People who really want to understand, say, the meta-ethics of modern democracy and debate are much better of reading Plato, Foucault and Rawls. Then you'd understand that sophism cannot be so easily dismissed because it is in fact pee pure sophism to say that certain arguments are "social shaming" and therefore not good arguments. The entire construction here -- the assumption that there is a single right answer to every argument and it can be arrived at if both sides are just reasonable enough and set aside their social biases -- is, as Foucault would show, a highly suspect assertion born of a very privileged position. People who seriously buy in to these sorts of simplistic models are going to have a bad time. Try having a "rational" debate with a Jewish person about whether all Jews should be exterminated. You might dismiss the response as "social shaming" and accuse them off being "triggered" and emotional... but such a victory won't buy you much.

Fair enough. This seems to be a good view of it.

Despite the book title, there is no single form of "good writing": different readers prefer different things. For example, some people really like thick fantasy novels in the style of Robert Jordan.

I would be interested to see a survey of the reading speed of people who like/dislike SSC. It could be that the fans tend to skim texts and read more words per minute, so the posts don't feel as long.

Scott likes to give "epistemic" ratings to his essays to solve this very problem. They range from "basically complete speculation" all the way to "pretty darn sure." It would be nice if he were more consistent with them, though.

Or maybe to get real precision in very complicated things, you have to prioritize some things over "writing well," which is partially about making things easy for the reader. What if some things are just complicated enough that they can't be elucidated well in a short space? Some stories need a book, not a newspaper article.

I've found that this is not the case more often than not. But I'm no expert.

I feel like "or similar" is not fair. I don't know how much you've read of SSC vs. pattern matching it to related blogs, but I really enjoy his writing while I can't stomach most wall-o-text posts. He actually has a post on writing advice [0], which I liked, since his style resonates with me, but which I guess would be more like "things to avoid" for you!

[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/

Reference to William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. The first meta-narrative to treat religious practise as social phenomenon:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/621/621-h/621-h.html

And it's easy to see the parallel the author makes. Every minute aspect of modern living has become "religion". And there is a very public jockeying amongst a high priest class of prognosticating pundits all vying for influence and attention.

But in the most fundamental matters of import beginning with the categorical assumption is essential. Namely, that there exists for any given problem, an optimal answer. It is simply a matter of collecting empirical evidence and making the appropriate analysis.

Steven Pinker argues in his most recent book that if there were "no Hitler, there would be no nukes!" It was only the pressing war that goaded formerly peacefully inclined nuclear physicists to construct such technologies. With the resultant problems we now face of non-proliferation, cyber command and control, etc.

And the logical extension would then take the form: well the Five Eyes nations or G-7 that represent our democratic allies need to develop the next generation of weaponry. To maintain the balance of power shifted in our favor. And so the policy of "mututally assured annihilation" continues ad infinitum until someone happens on a doomsday apparatus ;)

But it is far from optimal. An optimal solution would be something akin to peaceful equilibrium throughout the planet. With space based deterrents against alien attack. But barring an actual concrete threat in that regard. We lack the foresight and will to make it happen.

Obviously I believe part of the solution is electing more scientists and rational thinkers in positions of power. Which brings us back to square one. How to effectively communicate and "nudge" an outcome that foments optimal solutions.

> It was only the pressing war that goaded formerly peacefully inclined nuclear physicists to construct such technologies. With the resultant problems we now face of non-proliferation, cyber command and control, etc.

But nuclear arms have essentially put an end to total war between developed nations. We've all agreed not to use them in conventional war, and disallowed chemical weapons as well, as those progressed from Lewisite and Mustard gas to terrifying V- and G- agents. In the absence of these technologies, pressing wars would have continued.

>An optimal solution would be something akin to peaceful equilibrium throughout the planet.

This is based on the notion that war is not necessary to maintain our species in optimal condition, which is an assumption that bears more examination. Why do we have war to begin with? Some species make war, many don't but some do, including us. But why do we do so? Doesn't it serve some beneficial or essential function for us?

  “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”
  [...]
  could be transformed into an argument like “Since it’s
  possible to get guns illegally with some effort, and
  criminals need guns to commit their crimes and are
  comfortable with breaking laws, it might only slightly
  decrease the number of guns available to criminals. And
  it might greatly decrease the number of guns available to
  law-abiding people hoping to defend themselves. So the
  cost of people not being able to defend themselves might
  be greater than the benefit of fewer criminals being able
  to commit crimes.”

I think the one-line quote would persuade people more readily than the 10-line quote.

> I think the one-line quote would persuade people more readily than the 10-line quote.

Sure, and "My opponent once made a tweet that could arguably be interpreted as racist" will persuade even more people.

But this article is not about persuading people. It's about two people with opposite opinions who recognize that they might be wrong, sharing the evidence that supports those opinions in hopes of learning something. Persuading people is what you do when you already know you're right.

You're right, but that reflects more on human psychology than the quality of the argument. I'd argue the problem with discussion of current events on social media is exactly this - quotes and arguments are selected for psychological potency, and not merit.

An argument is not always better just because it's more explicit, that's context dependent. People can deduce the chain of reasoning of the latter from the former, making the former a better argument if everyone is willing to think about each others' positions in good faith. Efficient and effective communication depends on shared understanding.

> I think the one-line quote would persuade people more readily than the 10-line quote.

Anyone who is thinking clearly, regardless of their position, can agree with "when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns," as it is simply a tautology. If you hear someone agreeing or disagreeing with the statement, they are really agreeing or disagreeing with a longer, implied argument like the one provided, or else they're confused.

This is because the one-liner is actually (sorry SSC) a valid logical template, relying on assumptions about rule of law to draw a deductive inference. We can see the template itself:

    "When X is illegal to possess under some jurisdiction's law, then the residents of that jurisdiction will be criminalized by their possession of X, and thus the only possessors of X in the jurisdiction will be criminals."

SSC probably doesn't like this one because it's definitional. People like to use "criminal" is a qualitative label for people who they feel have broken the law, but it is in fact definable as a quantitative label for people who have committed acts which are unacceptable as a fact of law.

We don't have to guess why Alexander disapproves the one-liner, as, after presenting the more thoughtful version, he writes:

"The original is a gotcha exactly because it doesn’t invite this level of analysis or even seem aware that it’s possible. It’s not saying “calculate the value of these parameters, because I think they work out in a way where this is a pretty strong argument against controlling guns”. It’s saying “gotcha!”."

That is one reason why poor arguments are common.

If an argument loses its persuasive power when its limitations and tacit assumptions are spelled out, then it wasn't that good an argument to start with.