Discussion about Disagreement on the Rationally Speaking Podcast

In Poor Survey Questions

In the interview, John Nerst expressed a frustration, which I have as well, at survey questions that are too low resolution:

I’m often very disappointed in how surveys are done, and the sort of questions that they have. Because as I said before, our beliefs are often very low-res, and survey questions are often extremely low-res. It’s often the fact that I’m thinking, “What does this even mean?”

This is something I experienced when reading The Hidden Tribes of America, a report on a survey which attempts to explore the phenomenon of binary partisan polarization. This is a subject that is very near and dear to my heart. For instance, the (not so subtle) subtext of my article on Margaret Sanger’s views on abortion is a prolonged criticism of binary polarization.

However, while I liked the intent and some of the broader conclusions of Hidden Tribes, I was frustrated that most of the survey questions were so low resolution that they were basically meaningless to me.² For instance, the report makes much of the fact that both “82 percent of Americans agree that hate speech is a problem in America today, but 80 percent also believe that political correctness has gone too far.” Hidden Tribes likes to contrast these results, but both of these propositions are so low resolution that it is anyone’s guess what the people who agreed with either proposition were thinking when they agreed.

When Hidden Tribes does formulate a question well, the question is high resolution enough to have actual policy ramifications. For instance,

… a full 85 percent also believe that race should not be considered in decisions on college admissions. By contrast, only 40 percent of Progressive Activists believe race should not be considered in college admissions decisions.

In contrast to lower resolution questions, this is perhaps indicative of a genuine split between those categorized as “Progressive Activists” and the rest of the country.

However, if someone were to ask me whether I agree with either “many people nowadays don’t take racism seriously enough” or “many people nowadays are too sensitive about things to do with race,” I would not answer the question, responding instead with my criticisms of the question itself.³ Indeed, such a question might actually make me angry at how the dumb the question is.

Differing Attitudes Toward

John Nerst and I would have agreed that in low resolution disagreements, people appear to be disagreeing not about the facts of any given matter, but about what ideologies and narratives to which they subscribe. However, we would have disagreed on how we deal with this.

In the interview, John Nerst took a conciliatory attitude. At the end of his “exploits workers” versus “creates wealth” example, he said:

… So we need to understand that proving that you yourself are correct, doesn’t mean that the other person is wrong, and vice versa.

Later, he explained further:

What I think one should do, and what I try to do, is to learn how to look at things in different ways. There is this model here, and it generalizes reality in this way, or compresses reality in this way; and there’s this other model that focuses on getting these very different features right. And when you’re trying to get different features and describe them accurately, you’re going to use a different set of rules, and abstract them in a different way.

There are many kinds of different belief systems that capture different parts of reality or the human experience, not as well. Some belief systems, they capture some things well and not others, and for other belief systems it’s the other way around. So that’s why you need to collect so many of them. You really should not have just one.

Thus, John Nerst looked at these low resolution disagreements as two different mental models interacting in a way that is incompatible, and his solution was to accumulate more low resolution abstraction so that he could use whichever mental model was best for the specific job at hand.

Therefore, if both sides took the John Nerst approach to the “exploits workers” versus “creates wealth” disagreement, they would have absorbed each other’s mental models as alternatives to the one they were using, then explored what the new mental model was good for.

This also informed John Nerst’s approach to survey questions:

I would like to work on ways to improve how surveys work. Write questions in such a way that you will make it possible for people with different sort of internal abstractions to answer them. And maybe write, “Oh this question does not match the structure of my head, it doesn’t fit into anything where I can produce a yes or no answer.” Because yeah, you can say if you agree or disagree with an issue, and with a question or a statement, or anything like that – and sometimes when you do political quizzes, you can also answer, “I think this is very important, or this is not important.” That’s also a big dimension that people have been ignoring.

I miss an option that says, “This question does not make sense to me.”

Thus, the main issue John Nerst took with low resolution survey questions is that they might not fit a particular respondent’s low resolution abstraction. I would guess he would be happy with the questions of Hidden Tribes since the questions seem to be created more as a test for alternative low resolution abstractions than anything else.

I take a decidedly different attitude toward low resolution abstraction. As might be guessed from my attitude toward generic thinking, to me, it is not that having different low resolution abstractions creates a problem, it is that low resolution abstraction is itself the problem. I think we should simply do away with low resolution abstraction, especially when it comes to social issues.

I think it is possible to police your own mind to check against generic thinking, and it is possible to be cognizant of when you are making a descriptive claim versus when you are expressing a normative sentiment. Perhaps this cannot be done with 100% perfection, but the impossibility of perfection should not be an excuse for contentment with something that is worse.

Furthermore, when I encounter people who do not practice such self-skepticism and instead have debates such as “the capitalist class is exploiting the workers” versus “we must let entrepreneurs create wealth for all of us,” I just want them to stop having such a facile debate and start thinking more rigorously. There is nothing about this way of thinking that makes me want to internalize it. My honest assessment is that I simply do not have anything to learn from such low resolution abstraction.

Redirection to “Win” a Disagreement

In particular, I found Buster Benson’s self-criticism over an incident in which he argued with his wife to be insightful. The high-level summary of the incident is that Buster Benson’s wife wanted him to contribute more to the parenting of their son. The disagreement began because Buster Benson’s wife felt like he was not “willing to pick up the slack” of parenting. However, in the process of arguing over this, the discussion diverged into an argument over whether it was illegal or not to leave their son at home when school was closed.

At first, Julia Galef expressed sympathy for this latter argument, saying:

But in another sense… it does seem not great to me if someone is arguing something that’s literally false, and they don’t care that it’s literally false. Your wife was wrong about the legal fact of the matter, right? It seems not great for someone to be saying, “It’s illegal,” when what they really mean is, “I wish you would pick up more of the slack.”⁴

Buster Benson’s explanation was refreshingly self-aware:

… I forced her into that corner. I brought up the legal aspect, because in my attempt to win, or my attempt to resolve the argument, I introduced this new argument that I could win.

Then she fell for it, and then I won, but by winning I only proved more so that I was not a good husband.

So, I think it’s my responsibility as well to not necessarily force people to have arguments that I’m advantaged at winning. After the fact we can resolve that, because it wasn’t really critical to our lives. Even if it was legal or not legal, it wouldn’t really change whether or not we should leave him at home.

But I have to take responsibility for the fact that I collapsed into something that I was better at winning. I think that’s what was hard for me to see until I saw it – and then I saw it everywhere, that we do this all the time.

If we are motivated to “win” an argument, we might try to redirect discussion into a true-or-false question that we have more knowledge about. However, doing so completely ignores the original disagreement and thus dodges whatever concerns led to the original disagreement.

There are many issues with this practice. I am skeptical of the motives of anyone who goes into a disagreement with a desire to “win” as if the disagreement were a high school debate competition. I am not sure what anyone “wins” in these kinds of encounters, but whatever is won is not something that I value.

But beyond this, there is the issue that a lot of disagreement is not due to disagreement over true-or-false questions. Indeed, Buster Benson’s wife just wanted him to contribute more as a parent. This is not a descriptive, true-or-false question, but a normative sentiment. Thus, the original disagreement was over a value judgment, and value judgments are subjective evaluations of goodness or badness of a state of affairs.

In disagreements over value judgments, it is not the case that one person is “right” and the other one is “wrong” like when two people have contradictory descriptive beliefs, but it is the case that two people feel differently about the same state of affairs. Before their discussion, Buster Benson was content with the level of parenting he was contributing to the family, and his wife was not content with his contribution.

This is a relatively minor disagreement in value judgments, but a similar phenomenon occurs with much more contentious issues, such as induced abortion of pregnancy, capital punishment, or slaughtering of animals for human consumption.

I occasionally encounter such comments. Sometimes other people respond to moral compunction at the killing of human fetuses as a method of fertility control with whatever developmental biology information they have picked up. Such individuals are the sort who start talking about the neurological capacity to sense pain or perceive the outside world or the viability of fetuses outside a womb, etc.

These are not genuine attempts to provide others with information. Implicit in most of these comments is the proposition that moral sentiments about killing fetuses should hinge or turn on the facts being shared, and unsurprisingly, the way this is framed is such that the information being volunteered leads to the conclusion that killing fetuses is fine. These are attempts to redirect a disagreement that is over value judgments into a disagreement over true-or-false, descriptive beliefs so that the person doing the redirection can “win.”

As it turns out, my moral sentiments are not contingent on whatever information these other people volunteer to me. (As it so happens, I, too, took developmental biology in university, so facts about gastrulation or notochords or whatever are things I have heard before.) Indeed, if my moral sentiments were contingent on such things, I would have long ago investigated the relevant information, so these comments are predicated on the assumption that I cannot myself find out information relevant to me.

Perhaps, though, that is the point of this tactic. Those who would volunteer information have the condescension that those who disagree with them in moral sentiments are ignorant, and if everyone would just learn the facts they know, then everyone would agree with their moral sentiments. I suppose this is easier to live with than to face the reality of moral disagreements occurring when different people have the same information.

This attitude, though, is just self-delusional, arrogant stupidity. I am self-aware enough to realize that my moral sentiments, like all value judgments, are just how I feel about matters, and others might feel differently about the same matters, even in light of the same information.

The only thing I really learn from encountering people with such an arrogant attitude that their reaction to a moral disagreement is to start volunteering information is that they are not self-aware enough for discourse on moral disagreement. Thus, I find it prudent to confine such discourse to individuals of the caliber of Julia Galef, Coleman Hughes, Jonathan Haidt, et al.⁵

Anger Loves Company

Another interesting point that came up in the conversation between Julia Galef and Buster Benson had to do with the emotional experience of disagreement. In particular, Buster Benson noted that he realizes sometimes his friends get angry at him for not getting angry when they get angry.

… I can come across as smug, I think. Because if I don’t get angry at the right times, then it can be like, “Oh, you don’t have to get angry? You think you’re better than me?” You know, that kind of thing.

Julia Galef found this curious, asking:

Oh, interesting. Do you mean like, in an argument where the person’s angry at you, or they’re angry about an issue in the world, they want you to be angry about too?

To this question, Buster Benson answered, “Both.” This was surprising to Julia Galef, who said:

Oh man. That seems really difficult, if a person interprets lack of anger as a sign that you think they’re better than them…

When asked by Buster Benson if she has never experienced this, Julia Galef replied in the negative, saying:

I think I just choose people for my life that… I just have various picky, idiosyncratic criteria for the kind of people who I would be close enough to, to get in an argument with.

This struck me as insightful because I had a similar reaction to Julia Galef: this behavior in which someone gets angry at you for not getting angry is frustrating to me to the point where I find it not worth engaging with such people. While this point came up in the context of interpersonal relationships, I found it helpful for understanding why I found protesting, both of the left-wing and right-wing varieties, so distasteful.

Indeed, I remember in my youth having my first substantial encounter with a protester. I was going to a local shopping mall, and apparently the Macy’s department store employees were on strike and picketing the store. In shopping malls in the United States, department stores are often considered the “anchor stores” of the mall and placed toward the exterior of the shopping mall. I was not going to shop at Macy’s, but I was going to stores or restaurants in the interior of the shopping mall. To do so, I had to walk through Macy’s to get to the inside of the shopping mall.

Macy’s at Stonestown by achesonblog is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 and is not modified.

Most people just ignored the protesters and walked by without acknowledging the protesters in any way. In my naivety, I thought I might have an intelligent conversation with them. As I walked by, one yelled at me something to the effect of “boycott Macy’s!” I remember stopping, turning toward the protester, and saying calmly, “I’m not going to Macy’s. I’m just going to the mall on the other side of Macy’s.” The protester just sneered back at me and turned away, preparing to yell at the next person walking by.

I remember very distinctly standing there for a moment really taken by the stupidity of this person. In retrospect, the protester was not interested in – and perhaps even capable of having – an intelligent conversation. This protester was just angry at me at for being someone who happened to walk by who was not part of the anger party.

This complete inability to communicate or behave like an intelligent life-form is a huge part of why protests are such a non-starter for me.⁶ In retrospect, I think it is a big part of why I have disconnected from social media, as well: the standards of discourse on social media are around the same impoverished levels of discourse I had with that Macy’s protester so many years ago.

I suppose I am more like Julia Galef and less like Buster Benson. Buster Benson believes that he is “definitely surrounded by people that are not, would not identify as being rational, logical people” and wants to maintain relationships with his friends. Whereas I, like Julia Galef, have “criteria for the kind of people who I would be close enough to, to get in an argument with” the ability to engage in an intelligent conversation.