What Is Erisology

  • Erisology – the study of disagreement
  • Made up word for a discipline that does not yet exist
  • Study of the pitfalls in discussion and disagreement and how to avoid them
  • Multidisciplinary field, combining:
    • Cognitive biases – how thinking breaks down in particular ways
    • Traditional philosophy – how to categorize things
    • Data analysis – issues that data analysts run into when building statistical models of the world mirror issues that people have when they build intuitive models based off their own experience
    • Cognitive and perceptual psychology – how do we form concepts in the brain and how do those concepts affect our perception
    • Personality psychology – how do differences in personality types affect our perception of events
    • Post-structuralist theory – how do we deal with the fact that language has no inherent meaning, that words are what we make of them?
    • Rhetoric – the practice of using all these sciences to argue well
    • Anthropology – the things we take for granted aren’t obvious and are actually pretty arbitrary
    • Literary theory – narratives are not absolute truth
    • Epistemology – how do different people decide what is true
    • Sociology and history – look at how the design of institutions affects people’s behavior
    • Evolutionary psychology – understand how the environment our brains are adapted for differs from the environment we live in
    • Computer science – learn lessons from attempts to model reality in silico
  • The goal of erisology is to defuse unnecessary conflict while clarifying necessary conflict

Postmodernism vs. The Pomoid Cluster

  • What “postmodernism” means
    • Postmodernism comes in as a reaction to modernism
    • Modernism
      • Social order is distinct from the natural order
      • Social order is subject to reason, critique and change
      • This critique allows for progress
    • Postmodernism
      • Progress is not a given
      • Not all questions can be answered by science
      • No one framework can describe all of history and society
      • Not an ideology, so much as a rejection of ideology
      • For more information about what postmodernism is and isn’t, see Richard’s excellent presentation
  • We’re all postmodernists now?
    • For people who have grown up since 1979, the basic assumptions of postmodernism are taken as a given
    • There is no single framework or narrative that describes everything
    • We should gather partial narratives and switch between them as necessary
    • This gathering of partial frameworks is compatible with science
      • The world doesn’t make sense on human scales and human terms
      • Science can give us answers, but it can’t give us answers in a form that we find understandable and satisfying
    • However, we risk overapplying postmodernism’s lessons, especially in a world where it is taken as a given that science doesn’t have the ultimate answers
    • We risk confusing “Science doesn’t tell us everything” with “Science tells us nothing”
    • Pointing out the limitations of science is valuable as a corrective to a modernist naivete, but it is not viable as a stance in and of itself
    • Postmodernism seeks to temper science, not overturn it
  • Postmodernism as a snarl word
    • True postmodernists don’t build systems, they destabilize systems
    • By that logic, it is very curious that Marx is associated with postmodernist thought
    • Marxism a modernist way of thinking – uses dialectical materialism to construct a grand unified system of historical development
    • So then what do people mean when they use the term “cultural Marxism” to point at post-modernist thought?
    • Marxists and postmodernists have the following common characteristics:
      • Activist scholarship – more concerned with arguing for (or against) a particular ideological point than in establishing the truth
      • Identity politics – oppressed groups deserve allegiance because of their oppression, not because of the validity of their arguments
      • Favor subjectivity and intuition over objectivity and evidence
      • Favor abstraction over concreteness when thinking about reality
      • Everything is the result of power – scientific results are as much due to power relations are they are due to underlying reality
      • The structure of society is not a given – arguments for the status quo are merely those of privileged groups attempting to preserve their power
      • Social construction – behavior is created by categories, not the other way around
      • There is no such thing as human nature; social problems are caused by cultural and ideological factors
      • Individual wants are mediated by culture, and are therefore untrustworthy
      • Relationships are more fundamental than entities
      • Unwillingness to pass judgment on cultural practices (especially of those groups considered “oppressed”)
      • Labeling people is illegitimate – there should be no fixed categories, boundaries or roles in society
      • Subjective interpretations of communication are always correct – intent has no bearing on meaning
      • People’s conceptions of themselves are more important than their objective characteristics
      • The political and social implications of ideas are as important, if not more important, than their correctness
      • Images and appearance are more important than substance
      • Ideological criticism of scientific ideas is valid, even if there is no scientific critique of the ideas
      • No culture is better than any other culture (except for Western/universal culture, which is bad)
    • While the above characteristics aren’t inherently postmodernist, they are closely associated with postmodernist arguments
    • So let’s call those characteristics the pomoid cluster, to distinguish them from actual postmodernist theories
    • The problem is that from outside academia, it’s very difficult to distinguish the pomoid cluster from postmodernism itself
    • Getting angry about postmodernism being caricatured as Marxism misses the point
    • These caricatures exist, and we need to be able to talk about them
    • Insiders should understand that when outsiders use “postmodernism” they’re probably referring to the “pomoid” cluster of ideas

Partial Derivatives vs. Partial Narratives

  • A narrative of a set of events is like the derivative of a function
  • When a function has multiple variables, it has multiple derivatives, each of which takes a single variable as central
  • Similarly, when a set of events has many actors, it has many “partial narratives” each of which takes a single actor or trend as central
  • Example: Atlas Shrugged
    • The reason Atlas Shrugged is such a controversial work is because it is extremely partial
    • Takes one narrative of scientific progress (“all progress is made by lone heroic inventors”) and strips away all other nuance
    • If this narrative is important to you, then Atlas Shrugged seems pure – strips out all the noise and complication to show underlying reality
    • If this narrative is not important to you, then Atlas Shrugged seems like it’s oversimplifying and twisting facts
    • Heroic capitalists and inventors do have an important role to play in capitalism, but they’re far from the only element
  • The important thing to note is that disagreements can occur even when both sides agree on the facts
  • Different people can disagree on which facts are “important”
  • So is it all narratives? Is there no fundamental reality?
    • The important thing to note is that even though partial derivatives may seem to be at odds, they’re all derived from the same underlying function
    • Similarly, partial narratives, even though they may seem to be at odds, are derived from the same underlying reality
    • Unfortunately, we can’t hold this reality in our heads
    • We can approximate it with statistics and computer models, but our intuitions only accept very partial narratives with a few variables
    • Thus we need to accumulate partial narratives and switch between them as necessary
    • Not all partial narratives are equally true
      • All narratives simplify, but some simplify more than others
      • Narratives which simplify more are less true
      • It’s important to pick the narratives that only simplify as much as they need to
  • The nice thing about the partial narrative approach is that it reconciles multiple conflicting narratives with a single underlying truth

The Signal and the Corrective

  • Partial narratives give you a sense of “purity” - that all the “noise” has been stripped away from reality and that you’re left with the underlying truth
  • However, that noise contains signals of its own, and others may find those signals more important than your narrative
  • While reality can often support a large number of partial narratives, people often end up converging on two opposed ones
  • However, most people don’t support their narrative wholeheartedly – this can mask fundamental differences between people who appear to be in agreement
  • Example:
    • “Markets are fundamentally good, but have some side effects that need to be ameliorated with a governmental safety net”
    • “Markets are fundamentally exploitative, and the only reason we tolerate them is because they’re the least bad solution to running an economy”
    • The above two views are diametrically opposed, but proponents will probably agree on many actual policies
  • In the above example, both views consist of a signal (markets good/markets bad) plus a corrective (markets have externalities/other forms of economic organization are even worse)
  • Disagreements are overstated when they’re about general principles (because they’re about signals only) and understated when discussing actual policy (because policy is the result of signal + corrective)
  • This model can explain why sometimes you end up arguing for a position which you oppose – you’re discussing with someone who has the same signal as you, but less corrective
  • Zealots are people with little or no corrective
  • Groupthink is a situation where you’re not allowed to introduce correctives
  • If people’s signals and correctives lead them to endorse mostly the same policies, then why isn’t there more agreement?
    • Signal + corrective is not a balanced view
    • There is a difference between “the market is amoral, but it’s the best thing we’ve got” and “the market is the best thing we’ve got; but it’s amoral”
    • We insist that our signal be acknowledged first
  • When communications bandwidth is low, people tend to drop correctives before they drop signal
  • This is why Twitter is so acrimonious – character limit means that correctives disappear almost entirely
  • Emotional state matters too – when people are stressed they also tend to drop correctives
  • How to convince or alienate people
    • Complex disagreements are not about single facts, but rather narratives made up of abstractions and generalizations from many facts
    • People will admit that their signals need correctives, but won’t admit that their signals are wrong or invalid
    • It’s a lot easier to get someone to accept a corrective than it is to get them to give up their signal
  • In an ideal world, every argument would start off by stating its basic beliefs and then saying whether it’s meant as a corrective to a signal or a rejection of that signal
  • However, in the real world, when speaking to allies, denying the legitimacy of the opposition works very well

Conversations Going Critical

  • Oftentimes, a flamewar is the best case end for a conversation
  • The worst case is a conversation that never seems to end, and seems to encompass an ever expanding scope
  • These conversations often lead participants to continue to participate long after participation has ceased to be enjoyable, just to keep the other person or third parties from walking away with misunderstandings