I’ve noticed a new interesting trend in online discourse that gives me a lot of hope. I’ve already mentioned Change A View a couple times here, which I continue to think is a direction with a ton of promise when it comes to increasing the productivity of disagreements online.

I also recently learned about the Adversarial Collaborations, which are described like this:

An adversarial collaboration is an effort by two people with opposing opinions on a topic to collaborate on a summary of the evidence. Just as we hope that a trial with both prosecutor and defense will give the jury a balanced view of the evidence for and against a suspect, so we hope an adversarial collaboration will give readers a balanced view of evidence for and against some thesis. It’s typically done for scientific papers, but I’m excited about the possibility of people applying the concept to to less formal writeups as well.

For example, a pro-gun activist might collaborate with an anti-gun activist to write a joint article on the evidence for whether gun control saves lives. We trust each person to make sure the best evidence for their respective side is included. We also trust that they’ll fact-check each other and make sure there aren’t any errors or falsehoods in the final document. There might be a lot of debating, but it will happen on high-bandwidth informal channels behind the scenes and nobody will feel like they have tailor their debating to sounding good for an audience.

I LOVE this idea, obviously. And have found someone willing to collaborate with me on an article about gun violence and gun policy. We were beginning to work on this in private when we discovered yet another super interesting campaign for Impossible Conversations.

Impossible Conversations is a competition to encourage difficult conversations in good faith. Winners receive a share of $2,500 in prize money, publication to Areo Magazine, and invitations to appear as a guest on several podcasts.​

To enter, simply have a written conversation on Letter before 3rd Nov 2019.

Letter.wiki is a new product that basically functions as a public pen pal site, where two people can have a conversation in public about any topic. It’s really well-suited for long-form, thoughtful disagreements, and I encourage everyone to sign up.

BJ Campbell is the fellow I’ve been planning this adversarial collaboration with, and we thought it would be interesting to have our conversation about it publicly. You can read it in full here. BJ is pretty well-versed in all the gun data and definitely comes from a different perspective from me, but there are already a couple examples of times where it’s become clear to me that we’re not battling each other, but rather working together towards collective understanding.

One was in letter #5 when he voluntarily corrected his own earlier statement about comparisons between violence in the UK and in the US:

I need to make some corrections to my prior letter. I've been digging into those violent crime rate numbers, which I admit I found unbelievable, and I think I sourced some of them sloppily. It appears that the UK number was based on…

Another was in letter #7 where he pointed out a flaw in my own calculations (where I referenced how the duct tape holding my argument together was beginning to thin) but then offered:

In the interest of offering solutions to the actual primary problem, which is male suicide, I want to hand you some extra duct tape to use, and we're going to find this duct tape from the other analysis perspective…

In my view, these are golden nuggets worth much more than points I might achieve by delivering zingers. A zinger is a pointed witty remark or retort meant to score some points with your own side. They’re less about increasing understanding across divides, and more about making the other side look bad. On the path towards learning how to have more productive disagreements, part of the challenge is finding these small rewards in a conversation that can feed us as we go along. There’s no denying that delivering zingers and gotchas is a powerful emotional motivator, because it feels good even as you push people further and further away from agreement. They’re funny. But they’re not helpful.

For those interested in trying to re-wire some conversational habits towards productive disagreement, I highly recommend testing the waters with an adversarial collaboration or impossible conversation with someone you respect but disagree with. If you do one, let me know about it!

Buster

Hello!

It’s been a while since my last post, but summer is now over, kids are back in school, and spontaneous vacations are much less likely to happen. Here are some things related to biases, disagreement, and related topics that were shared in my Discord channel during the last month or so.

1. WHAT IS MEANINGFUL? This is a great example of how arguments flare up when you mix up an argument about what is true with an argument about what is important/meaningful:

   

   People who consider themselves rational thinkers (myself included) often get stuck in this trap of getting too attached to undisputed facts, and missing the fact that the real disagreement being voiced is about urgency, priority, and creating a process for grieving/solidarity.
   
   Even in his apology he's refusing to acknowledge the fact that words are not just pure information, they also carry feelings, judgments, and power dynamics in them. And usually it's those in power who claim ignorance of this dimension of language.
   
   I've found that separating "what is true?" from "what is meaningful?" and sometimes "what is useful?" will almost always show you how an unproductive disagreement is due to mistaking one realm for another.
   
   The 3 realms of disagreement:
   🧠 what is true?

   ❤️ what is meaningful?

   ✋ what is useful?
   
   Once you notice start noticing these, you'll see them everywhere.

2. WHO ARE WE? I have a feeling that Wait But Why’s answer will be weird, in the best possible way. I must be in a self-reflective mood because this article, How Aging Shapes Our Narrative Identity, about how we use the symbols generated in our early lives to tell the story of our later lives, also resonated with me strongly. And this older article on Solitude and Leadership was worth a re-read.

3. IS AMBIGUITY MEANINGFUL? In this lovely essay by @sarahdoingnothing, I began to appreciate the many different ways we translate the ambiguous wilderness of the universe into something legible, but by doing this we also make it less profound.

4. WHAT REFLECTS YOUR BEST SELF? A lovely short post about Ani DiFranco (a recurring topic in the Discord) and the surprising joy of being seen, even briefly.

   

5. DO YOU LIKE POPPING BALLOONS? Probably not as much as this guy.

   Jan Hakon Erichsen@janerichsen

   Most people: I guess balloons are ok Me:

   August 11th 2019

   97,859 Retweets339,201 Likes

6. WHAT IS WORLDING? Worlding is basically imagining a new reality that you can believe in. This is a new obsession that has gripped a few people. Starting with this Ribbonfarm guest post by Ian Cheng, author of Emissaries Guide to Worlding, and this really beautiful post, The Form of Formats, by @dschorno.

7. CAN ADVERSARIES COLLABORATE? I believe they can. I’ve signed up to write an essay about guns with an adversary as part of Slate Star Codex’s Adversary Collaboration Contest. Speaking of experimental disagreement spaces, if you are interested in this idea and haven’t checked out Change A View yet, you should definitely sign up immediately. I have 2 Δ so far.

8. WHAT TIME IS IT? 10 ways to answer.

Thanks for reading. If this list of things isn’t interesting to you, you can unsubscribe here. If it is interesting, I’m always open to feedback and suggestions for improvement. If you’d like to join the Rickshaw Discord community where all these links were originally shared, just reply to this email and I’ll send you an invite.

Last question. HOW ARE YOU?

Buster

1. FLIP IT. Another way to look at the world, shared by Vicki, originally Tweeted by @MapScaping. All maps are flawed, but some are useful.

   

2. SHORTEN IT. Daryl Chen wrote a haiku every day for a week and wrote an article about it. It might seem silly, but that’s sort of the point.
   
   cat ate my haiku 
   he licked his chops and said, it 
   could have been much verse
   — Daryl

3. QUESTION IT. Based on this article about a idea of planting so many trees that the climate can’t help but recover, I asked on Twitter:

   Buster@buster

   What is the best case against this strategy?

   Richard McN Douglas@maitrereynard

   Yes yes yes. This doesn’t rely on new technology. It can be done right away. It shouldn’t be controversial - it should be really popular, across political and demographic divides. We need to make it happen, and we need to get on with it. https://t.co/jQRfvZ1vlC

   July 5th 2019

   4 Likes

   And got a bunch of great replies, including this informative article from Betony:

   Betony Jones@BetonyJones

   Climate change policies that work: a simple guide ⁦@buster⁩ Climate change policy can be overwhelming. Here’s a guide to the policies that work.A new book from veteran energy analyst Hal Harvey simplifies decarbonization.vox.com

   July 6th 2019

   1 Like

   Lesson learned: especially when something fits right into your confirmation bias sweet spot, instead of assuming it’s true ask “what’s the best case against this?”

4. CRITIQUE IT. This much-debated blog post by Mike Davidson criticizing Superhuman was a really great example (in my view) of how to provide direct feedback to a company without demonizing them. I annotated it with thoughts about the exact techniques he used, and why I thought they were so effective. One of those things is to not only criticise, but to also point super clearly to a path of repair, which, to their credit, Rahul and the Superhuman team seemed to be at least partially receptive to.

   

5. MINIMIZE IT. Who wants to buy a plot of land and order a bunch of micro pre-fab houses and found a new city? You can apparently get a house for $20,000 on Amazon with Free Shipping. If you prefer to pay closer to the cost of a real home, there are plenty of ways to do that too.

6. CONTINUE IT. There’s been a lot of discussion about this trend of life re-examination, and this story about Brian May (guitarist for Queen) finishing his PhD 37 years after he began it, is inspiring (hat tip to Nadja). One of the most active channels in the Rickshaw Discord community this week (reply if you want an invite!) has been in a new channel called #be-good-with-money. A few of us shared our work histories with salary numbers and have been comparing cost of living, mortgages, and all kinds of other weird numbers you normally wouldn’t share with strangers on the internet, except we’re all just having a mini-life-crisis/life-reevaluation together and it’s sorta fun. Here’s the first half of my career:

   

7. NOTICE IT. If you haven’t seen this amazing infographic, now you have (click to see the animation):

   

8. GET IT. Paul shared a link to this episode of Song Exploder, which is a really great podcast where musicians dissect songs they’ve written, letting people into the process that lead to their creation. The lovely episode with Big Thief’s song Cattails was relevant to a discussion because, in Paul’s words:
   
   “Starting around six minutes in, one of the band members, Adrianne, describes a moment in the recording process when she and the band barely knew the song well enough to get through it and they were still performing it with the emotion that comes with creating something new. And that take got recorded and released. And this all reminded me of the first time I heard someone describe this—Brandi Carlile was interviewed by Elisabeth Moss at SxSW and called this "the rock n roll moment... when you know the song just well enough to get through it, but not so well that you know how cool it is. It only happens once.”

Thanks for reading. If this list of things isn’t interesting to you, you can unsubscribe here. If it is interesting, I’m always open to feedback and suggestions for improvement. If you’d like to join the Rickshaw Discord community where all these links were originally shared, just reply to this email and I’ll send you an invite.

Have a great week!

Buster

1. 5 COLORS: You may or may not be aware of Magic: the Gathering. It’s a card game where you build a deck of cards and essentially play a very complicated version of War against one or more other players. One thing that makes it complicated is the fact that there are 5 colors, or suits, or philosophies, for playing the game. White wants peace, Black wants power, Blue wants perfection, Red wants freedom, and Green wants acceptance. Each has its own ideology for how the world should be, and sees the other colors as potential obstacles in the way of that vision. ANYWAY, the thing I want to share is this fascinating article about how it’s possible to represent these 5 colors in a color wheel that cover a wide swath of ideology in a pleasant way, but what does the wheel look like from within each color? Surely Black doesn’t interpret White as just wanting peace, but rather see the desire for peace as a flawed strategy for gaining and using power appropriately. And, while it’s nice to see the color wheel from above, we’re each in the wheel seeing it from our location on the wheel, interpreting other colors from that perspective and also blind to how others see it from other perspectives. If that’s interesting, you’ll also love this article by Magic’s head designer, Mark Rosewater.

   

2. WANING AMBITION: The 5 colors led to a discussion about age and ambition and Meep shared this Atlantic article. Many of us are somewhere in our late 30s to late 40s and are experiencing first-hand this feeling of career ambition losing its momentum. From the sampling of people in this group it seems like more of us are feeling this than have an outlet to talk about it.

3. LIFE-PLANNING SYSTEMS: Jon Bell shared this amazing work-in-progress titled Cadence, by William Van Hecke. William describes it as: a pamphlet about my personal productivity and life-planning system, tentatively titled Cadence and jokingly titled Fetting Things Done. I love things like this, and also appreciate not taking them too seriously.

4. ART-MAKING BOT: A question: “What if I wrote some code that would automatically make a square of art every hour? How could I make it interesting?” Jon got to work and called the experiment ArtBot.

5. LIVING IN SPACE: I’m reading Wool (which is great) and recently came across the author, Hugh Howey, on Twitter. He’s had a couple threads about space travel and colonization recently that are both super contrarian and seem to be obvious at the same time.
   
   Thread 1 (click on it and read it through):

   Hugh Howey@hughhowey

   ⛵️ A THREAD ABOUT SAILING ACROSS VAST DISTANCES ALONE ⛵️ I'm lying here on my sailboat in New Caledonia, having just sailed 800 miles across from Australia, and I figured I'd share some thoughts about going to sea alone.

   May 25th 2019

   269 Retweets939 Likes

   Then come back and click on Thread 2 and read it through as well:

   Hugh Howey@hughhowey

   I'm expanding on my thread about living in space for a blog post, and I'm realizing how very little of the argument against living in space has anything to do with the actual difficulties of living in space. Instead, it has to do with two great fallacies:

   Hugh Howey@hughhowey

   🚀 A THREAD ABOUT LIVING IN SPACE 🚀 We aren't going to do it. Not by the millions, and probably not even in the thousands.

   June 23rd 2019

   28 Retweets79 Likes

   Since he’s a science-fiction writer, I had to ask:

   Buster@buster

   @hughhowey Do you think science fiction has done an inadvertent disservice by relying on space travel and colonization as a given for so many stories? Or is there another reason why we collectively misunderstand the challenges of space?

   June 24th 2019

   1 Like
   Hugh Howey@hughhowey

   @buster Yes. I do.

   June 24th 2019

   Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction also creates strange truths sometimes.

6. HOW TOILETS WORK: We sometimes think we know how things work better than we really do. Read this article below and then actually look up how toilets work, it’s not uninteresting!

   Tim Harford@TimHarford

   Thread: On a scale of one to seven, how well do you understand how a flush lavatory works? My latest column is about Brexit and the illusion of explanatory depth... Subscribe to read | Financial TimesORft.com

   June 21st 2019

   187 Retweets320 Likes

7. WEEKNOTES It’s the Week of the Elephant 🐘 for me, and this week will be good if I write to 3 more people about potentially offering blurbs for my book, I get in some exercise, and I make some progress on 750 Words. Nothing too ambitious on the plate this week, which is nice. Full #weeknotes here.

8. BONUS: Oh, and I’m gonna finish watching Good Omens too. What a great show.

Thanks for reading. If this list of things isn’t interesting to you, you can unsubscribe here. If it is interesting, I’m always open to feedback and suggestions for improvement.

Have a great week!

Buster