Thank you. Online discussion would be much more productive if everyone clearly laid out the principles on which their viewpoint was based.
Fundamentally, there are only a few ways honest people can disagree: Different principles, different information, different interpretation, or just plain misunderstanding. (Meta-meta: This is the principle that I believe and based this comment on.)
Much of what makes online (and offline) arguments so unproductive is confusion over where exactly people are disagreeing in the first place. There's no point in discussing whether someone did the right or wrong thing if you don't even agree on the principles by which that rightness or wrongness will be judged.
If I disagree with one of your principles, we need the discussion to be at that level, or more likely, we simply must agree to disagree. If I think there's another principle you aren't considering, we can debate its relevance. If you're missing key information, I can provide it. If you're misinterpreting something, I can offer my alternate interpretation and justification for why I think it's better. In any case, if I disagree, it's clear how to proceed because your line of reasoning is clear. We can engage in a productive discussion without talking past each other.
As it stands, I agree with you 100%, but more importantly, you have raised the bar for discussion on this contentious issue. Thank you again.
In addition to the (great) framework you listed, there is another big factor - incentives. You may be aligned in principles, have the same info etc. but if your incentives are misaligned it can be hard to agree.
Thanks for this comment - mirrors my thought/question. I think the understanding incentivisation is hugely important in understanding human behaviour and choices, and this seemed an obvious omission.
However, I was trying to process whether incentives are essentially part of your principles? i.e. if an incentive to do something against your principles is so strong that it wins out, doesn't that mean you've effectively abandoned (or changed) your principles along the way?
I think disagreement on incentives plays out as how prioritized something is viewed. I may agree that something is wrong, but not worth it for me to fix during a weekend because I don't get paid overtime for it. As an example.
This is a bit Pollyanna. People aren't logic robots that start from first principles and then derive all knowledge from logical reasoning. People are emotional, irrational beings. Those of us who fancy ourselves rational are constantly involved in irrational motivated reasoning helping us maintain that desired worldview.
Not to say we shouldn't try to live up to the ideal you set forth. We should do our best. But there's not some category of honest people among whom you can avoid human nature.
People are not robots, but in terms of reaching agreement between humans, "emotion" is more or less just a difference in priorities, which is one of the ways reasonable people can disagree.
If we agree on the facts and we agree on their implications, but we still disagree, it's likely because we weight things differently. Emotions are simply a large component for how we weight things.
emotionalism is strongly linked to irrationality. once someone is irrational I'm not following how that can be reduced to a "difference in priorities". I'm an open source maintainer of some very popular projects. more in the early days, I was certainly irrational on a few occasions where someone called out things that I did wrong and I refused to see it. It wasn't like I had de-prioritized "making sure the code is not completely broken". my own fear that I was going to have to rethink a whole huge set of assumptions (which of course I had to do anyway) prevented me from working with people.
But rationality (in the human sense) is completely governed by emotion. Curiosity about an unsolved problem? that's emotional regulation of the brain. Satisfaction that a problem is solved? also emotion. Beauty in a better solution? emotion.
This has significance, it's not just a restatement of "the problem" using different terminology. It's significant because the brain, like every other part of the body, evolved parsimoniously, and it does not have spare capacity lying around, so anything that "distracts" the emotional parts of the brain will diminish rational capacity. "Hangry" is not just a pun/quip about being hungry, it's empirically measurable, it affects outcomes.
Debating rational topics with your rational friends, whether at work, at school, or after hours over a beer, it's fun (emotion), can be frustrating (emotion) but does it ever not get heated (more emotion)?
The brain is an emotional organ. All the other organs are rational, they do what they do in entirely predictable and logical ways.
this does not negate the fact that a breakdown in rationality is also caused by emotion. the human brain is emotional throughout. however the part of it that has "rational debates" is not an intrinsic behavior. that part is based on cognitive skill which will perform to a greater or lesser extent based on current brain state. if the amygdala is active in a state of fear or anger, "rational debate" skill will be compromised, since that is not a useful skill in the traditional evolutionary situation that calls for fear or anger.
now this time I will employ simple restatement to help convey the point I'm making--and for you to be rational is for you to first simply understand what I'm saying; arguing back is not entirely rational, it's actually an additional emotional step:
think of rationality of the brain like a signed vs unsigned char in most implementations of C, basically a byte: you could think of a byte as 0-255 or as -127 to +126. The brain is an emotional organ. Rationality is the best possible outcome, but it's not the default state; the brain doesn't function from 0 to 255 rationality, it functions from -127 to +128.
I say it this way because you talk about rationality "breaking down" as if it's some sort of default. I don't think of it that way. Rationality is something we hope to build up to and are lucky to achieve, but our default state is animal passion.
I'm not trying to convince you to change what you think, just using some restatements to open your thinking to the way psychiatry views the brain.
> I say it this way because you talk about rationality "breaking down" as if it's some sort of default.
I'm sorry, can you please explain how you come to this conclusion based on what I wrote:
"however the part of it that has "rational debates" is not an intrinsic behavior. that part is based on cognitive skill which will perform to a greater or lesser extent based on current brain state."
I'm not really arguing with you, as your first point seemed to be some kind of "but what about...!" that didn't really negate what I was trying to say. However if you think I was saying something completely different, that would make more sense for whatever it is you're attempting to "argue".
> I was certainly irrational on a few occasions where someone called out things that I did wrong and I refused to see it.
I don't think that's a problem with the emotion itself, so much as which specific events trigger that emotion and how you chose to process them and react.
Having fear does not make you lash out at users. We all have fear, often about similar things. It's having fear associating with a person calling you out, and then failing to process that fear in a healthy way that caused you problems.
Very rational people still have lots and lots of emotions. They are not robots. They can just handle their emotions in a mature, mindful way.
I employ mindfulness on a daily / hourly basis in my own life and especially when dealing with the large number of requests I deal with every day.
In those times that I have not been able to respond politely or rationally, my lack of mindfulness as well as my own emotional reactiveness to certain stimuli (e.g. triggers) was at the core of it.
that is, if a request is not triggering strong emotion in me, I don't need to employ patience and mindfulness in order to have a reasonable and rational response. If a lot of requests are in fact triggering, this is what I would term "emotionalism", and I have to work much harder to have rational responses. Hence emotionalism is linked to irrationality especially for someone with fewer emotional maintenance skills.
emotion is not a "problem" any more than the urge to go to the bathroom is, however, both require proper training to be dealt with.
Life might be easier if emotions were that simple. :-) I've worked with several people to help them overcome emotional baggage. It is quite challenging. It's true that many emotional differences can be eventually distilled down to a difference in priorities, but helping someone discover the essence of an emotional issue can take years.
Even mature people often can't reason their way out of a conflict on their own. When people feel personally threatened, sometimes no amount of simple reasoning will bring them back to rational thinking. Most of the time, the solution is to be a genuine friend--for the long haul.
To the point of "honest people": I added "honest" in editing to distinguish from people who are just arguing because they like fighting and wouldn't agree if you told them 2 + 2 = 4. There are plenty of those online too, and their reasons for disagreeing clearly aren't covered by my "reasons people disagree" principle.
But as I understood you, point taken. The distillation of principles, information, and interpretation into an opinion does not actually occur as idealized in my breakdown. I wouldn't disagree with that.
I think the emotions and really the whole operation of the mental states is reasonable, but not internally logical. They arise in predictable patterns from experiences and so on, but they can very easily override logic. To understand your emotions, you have to see and admit you aren't the nice logical person you might have expected.
Decades ago, my coworkers and I would draw FSMs of our mgmt on the white board with cryptic lables. While they did get complicated they were understandable.
Thank you. Online discussion would be much more productive if everyone clearly laid out the principles on which their viewpoint was based.
Fundamentally, there are only a few ways honest people can disagree: Different principles, different information, different interpretation, or just plain misunderstanding. (Meta-meta: This is the principle that I believe and based this comment on.)
Much of what makes online (and offline) arguments so unproductive is confusion over where exactly people are disagreeing in the first place. There's no point in discussing whether someone did the right or wrong thing if you don't even agree on the principles by which that rightness or wrongness will be judged.
If I disagree with one of your principles, we need the discussion to be at that level, or more likely, we simply must agree to disagree. If I think there's another principle you aren't considering, we can debate its relevance. If you're missing key information, I can provide it. If you're misinterpreting something, I can offer my alternate interpretation and justification for why I think it's better. In any case, if I disagree, it's clear how to proceed because your line of reasoning is clear. We can engage in a productive discussion without talking past each other.
As it stands, I agree with you 100%, but more importantly, you have raised the bar for discussion on this contentious issue. Thank you again.