How to Step Back to Go Forward

Debate is a game. It's something most people don't quite understand, or don't apply.

If you're in a disagreement and you don't want it to turn into a fight, you both need to move towards treating the discussion as a debate, which is a game. That can be difficult, especially for a big issue, but if you can't, it's best to put the discussion aside for now.

Let me bring in a pretty typical definition of game. A game is a finite contest with rules, an experience you can win or lose, but the consequences are negotiable.

Russian Roulette has rules: put one bullet in a revolver, spin the thing, point the gun at your head, and pull the trigger. If it was a live chamber, you're probably instantly dead, and you've lost. If it was a blissfully empty chamber, you've won. But see, the consequences are not negotiable: either you're dead or you're alive at the end. So while Russian Roulette resembles a game, it is not.

Debate, on the other hand, is a game.

Many people very understandably don't want a discussion to be just hot air—they want to get something done with it—and by driving at that purpose too hard, they lose the value of discussion.

The value of discussion is that it's virtual. The words are only words. Your debate is a little virtual world of words, where you're trying to follow the rules of logic and evidence—you want the debate to have bearing on actual life. Yet the consequences of the debate are very much negotiable. What does it mean to win or lose a debate? Maybe nothing. Maybe something. That's all TBD by the participants afterwards. Nothing is set in stone. And, as I said, that is the actual value of debate. If you had to move all the bricks physically into different arrangements while debating architectural choices, civilization would still be in the stone age today.

The virtuality of conversation, and debate, is its greatest strength. And then people go and forget that, or never quite understand it and its implications.

Some people understand debate is a game, whether they would use that word or not. And they are usually much more pleasant and engaging to discuss controversial topics with. This doesn't mean they have no beliefs or don't consider the topics important, or even critical. It's just that debate is a game. You don't solve global poverty in your chit-chat with your housemate over dinner. So stop acting like you do, and if you have a particularly good round of debate, you might actually be somewhere at the end that you weren't at the beginning.

That's how it works, and it really truly does work.

* Note: just because it's a game doesn't mean you have to be goofy, though that's often a very useful approach. Taking the pressure off allows people to speak more freely and think more creatively together. But you can also be very serious. Debate that's a game can still get heated, but it never gets personal. The feminist "everyone's perspective is valid" approach is also a great way to make a debate a game. Goofy, spirited but not personal, listening while perspective-taking—all of these are ways to make debate do its job, and they share the same principle. To the extent they would ever get a little intense or combative, everyone understands that this is sparring, and nothing to do with liking or disliking each other. May the best idea win.

** The definition of game and the Russian Roulette example I'm pretty sure both come from the book Half-Real. My copy went to a good friend 6 years ago before I went into a big surgery I thought I might not survive (statistically, there was a 1% chance I wouldn't, which makes a very big and relatively safe revolver for Russian Roulette, but that's a smaller revolver than for most surgeries, and it was a 5 hour procedure that left me with 55 staples and now a 13-inch scar, so maybe I wasn't being that dramatic). I hadn't finished reading it, but it has the best definition of game I've ever seen anywhere, by a long shot. Most books on game studies start out defining game (yawn). This one, though, makes that triply worth your while to read.

We Should VOB (Vote Our Best)

For better democracy, we shouldn't be voting on whether or what we think we can win today. That force distorts public deliberation and saddens outcomes. We should always feel emancipated to vote with our best sense. This way, votes in total contain the most true information. The advantage that arrives on the same boat is exactly how and why democracy succeeds. Wherever humans aren't empowered to vote strictly on best information, we have our work cut out for us.

Leapfrog Photos

Someone who is 100 today... imagine when they were born. The roaring 20s are just starting. A newborn baby. Can you imagine it, at least a little? Take your time. Good. Find a seat there in a black and white photo. While we're at it, make it a color photo. Nah, make it real. You're there. Here. Ok. Now that we're situated, imagine someone who is 100. Maybe this person is related to the baby, maybe not. Whatever you want. Just imagine. From this birth in 1920, we only need 3 more life jumps, and we're in Shakespeare's time.

100 years ago, it's 1920.

Jump One: 100 years before that, it's 1820.

Jump Two: 100 years again, and it's 1720.

Jump Three: 100 years more will take us to 1620.

Ok, well darn, I lied slightly. Shakespeare is already dead. He died 4 years ago. But many people he knew are alive, and we've landed about when the first complete edition of his plays is published. We'll have to wait 3 years. But we'll wager it's on more than one person's mind already to put the works together for publication. Dozens of original first editions are still around in 2020, studied microscopically.

Within living memory, we are only 3 similar jumps away from living memory of Shakespeare's own acting.

Within one longer lifespan, history and even language change considerably.

Breadcrumbs

The real economy is energy. Money is a marker. Energy is what's actually going on.

If the two disagree, the answer is ready. It's energy. Follow the money? Well, if you want. Ok. But really, you'll follow the energy.

Wild ecosystems do not engage in any monetary trade, yet they are massively active and complex economies.

Capitalism is not the only economy that works. Wilderness is an economy that works. It's more brutal than capitalism. And capitalism is more brutal than whatever will replace it or augment it.

What we must learn from wild ecosystems is that energy is the foundation, not human law, not philosophy, not divine commandments, not physical strength, not market valuations.

It's energy arranged as information.

That cannot change. Everything else can.

Representative Art

I'd like to nudge representative democracy away from the popularity contest without removing contests or popularity. Does that make sense?

It may sound contradictory, but I believe it isn't.

How many introverts are going to run for public office? Does that mean we should have much less political say? Does it mean we have much less to say? Does it mean the world can do without all of our insights? Or these must always be whispered in the ear of a particularly generous extravert?

Reflect on the assumptions in our system for a while.

Many experts—not all, not necessarily even a majority, but certainly a strong contingent—are introverts. (I haven't verified the claim it's a majority. Either way, there are many introverted and extraverted experts.)

Expertise is very obviously and painfully underrepresented in republics.

Now you have an idea why: experts should not be expected to be the same people winning popularity contests. Some experts are popular, some not, and it has little or nothing to do with their level of expertise. If your angle is "Well if it's all the same, then why can't we just make everyone happy and get photogenic, popular experts in here?" then I hope you understand that's a bias.

Decisions by and/or for the group should be made based on knowledge, skill, ability, results, and sharing. The best answer should rise to the top every time, not by suppressing other answers or flattering a crowd but by succeeding on its merits.

We are so far from this vision that it hurts.

If you've been blotting, please stop blotting out the realization that representative democracy needs a big update.

Economic and social and environmental problems, issues with government corruption and inefficiency and overreach—all of these can be addressed by an improved process. Without improving the process, where is the hope?

You can't keep fixing a TV by hitting it. At some point, you need an upgrade. You need to go out and get a rethought version of the same implement.

If one doesn't exist yet, guess what?

Nobody is stopping you from coming up with a better way.

How would you know? How would you test it?

You can't know, and you can't test it, if you don't even try.

As I once heard a professor of philosophy say to a student: "Confusion!? Wonderful! Confusion—is the first step on the path to understanding."

You have to be willing not to know, willing to feel stupid, willing to get confused. Then you start your search. You'll find something new and useful if you stick with it.

I promise.

How

If democracy means "Give everyone an equal vote and that's how you decide absolutely everything," then I don't think I'm for it. Life would be much easier and probably better if that worked well; I'm still waiting for evidence that it does.

Besides, complete equality in all decision-making is anti-meritocratic. You don't earn being right on a topic just by stepping into the room. Conversely, though, anyone could be right—credentials don't make you right, either. Arriving at a good answer by a sound process: whoever you are, that makes you right this time.

If democracy means "The larger population has the best questions and the best answers, because it has all the available information," then I'm for it, because that's a true statement. No one's got even a hundredth of everything known. But take the entire population, and it knows everything known. The total crowd has all the brains. And it has all the heart.

The tricky bit is how to extract the best answers from all the answers.

Good democracy is less about "one man, one vote" (though universal suffrage would be a good thing) than about needles and haystacks. The needle's in there. How do you find it and get it out?

You just might have picked up on my belief that how we've been doing this is suboptimal in a big way.

I know that rubs people's patriotism the wrong way, but it has to be said.

I'm far less interested in convincing you of a particular answer than in getting you to ask the question, and often: How can democracy work better?

Bowtie Pasta

Capitalism doesn't just work out of the box. It isn't an Apple product! Whether it should be is a separate question.

Complicated but dependable systems need very careful design and constant testing. They won't keep working out of the box if the box holds the original prototype.

Ownership, exchange, currency, and freedom: all are critical in a healthy society. But it's also critical that we persist in crossing out "might makes right." Keep crossing it out as it comes up. Cross it out, cross it out, cross it out. Meritocracy equates to neither might nor financial demand. What it equates to is skill and wisdom in the right place: people doing what they're good at, getting better at what they can get better at, saving and advancing and beautifying lives and society. Demand backed by wallets is a splendid mechanism insofar as it brings this about. But it doesn't always, and it is sometimes profoundly undermining or damaging.

"What people will pay for" is important in a business model, but it is not truth from on high. As powerful as it is, it's still only temporary desire. It's a set of evolved signals responding to beliefs about a person's (and a group's) surroundings. We know that the most popular thing is by no means always the best, but we go on believing that capitalism just works out of the box.

And no, I don't personally believe that having money proves that you know better, and therefore your greater clout (in the tally of demand) indicates proportionally more wisdom. That's another partial fallacy that's only one step behind the more glaring one.

"Money knows what to do with money" is a piece of an answer, nonetheless. It makes decent sense. The founder of Amazon is probably not such a bad person to lend money! What I'm calling a partial answer is actually a principle very closely related to why Google searches are so effective. The PageRank algorithm gives the links from one site, say the Mercedes homepage, an importance that depends on how many pages link to the Mercedes site, and how influential they are in turn. This is quite similar to the way the transactions of a rich person have more influence on society because more dollars are sent to the rich person. Still, we do not make arguments like: "This hit came up higher than the other one in the search results, so I will cite the one that is higher up, because it must be better." We should not be so rote about matters of economy either.

In both cases it would degrade the process. If people start going to the Mercedes page and linking to it only because it's higher up, then it will climb further in the search results for no good reason. And the more this happens, the more overrated the site will get in the rankings, and the less sense those will make. Likewise, should we really give rich people and rich corporations our money, preferentially, because they are already rich? If the reason is only that they are already rich, then to do so will actually degrade the economy.

What I worry has been happening for decades is a series of false dilemmas. Either you are for precisely how we do things, or you are against freedom and against markets and against success and against democracy.

Not really.

Actually, not even slightly.

And that goes on and on in many forms.

While it's reasonable to suppose that people who make it their career to understand, respond to, and perhaps even alter markets know what's going on and how to fix problems, it's also reasonable to suppose that experts have blind spots, just like everyone else. It isn't just reasonable, it's well established that experts tend to have biases that come along with being experts.

Experts will discard some ideas out of hand pretty much automatically. It's part of what makes them so skillful and efficient. But some of what they discard out of hand would actually work, or else with a little tweaking and development it would—and could even work better.

The tendency to get what we might call "too efficient" as you gain skill in an area is called "automaticity." It's a double-edged sword. We need one of those edges. The other... we just need to be aware it's there.

I'm not sure what counteracts automaticity best... or its close relative "functional fixedness," which means making too many snap assumptions about how tools work or could work. I've never been entirely sure there's a difference, ever since I learned about these in some detail in a cognitive psychology class. It's probably fairest to say that functional fixedness is one kind of automaticity. Another closely related term is the "expert blind spot," which appears in the context of teaching. Often a teacher can't see what a student wouldn't know yet, but has to know in order to understand. Not everything we know was ever made explicit, and even if it were, we forget how much we've learned.

A good amount of understanding is intuitive filtering, which can difficult or impossible to put into words, at least until you've done some deep diving and practiced expressing it.

For example, after studying geometry, you know that when you see two lines crossing in a diagram, you can assume that they intersect at precisely one point and the lines are perfectly straight and extend infinitely. All of those are completely non-obvious assumptions you have to learn to make. They are conventions about how the diagrams are drawn and interpreted. You had to get used to them. And eventually you'll forget that you learned the assumptions. Similarly, if you read a problem about someone driving 62 miles per hour for 2 hours, you are trained to assume it's exactly 62 miles per hour (not 62.00000000000003, 62.000959, or any of an infinite number of similar values within the margin of error) with no acceleration or deceleration, for exactly 2 hours, in a perfectly straight line. Without the training, none of those is at all obvious, and in fact, all of those assumptions are going to be false. We learn particular ways it's helpful to be wrong. If we're skillful enough at that, we can make excellent predictions. Obvious?

So how do we get past these blind spots as to how things work, or could work? One thought that would look random anywhere but here is that adventure games (ie, interactive stories that unfold through realistic-ish puzzles involving objects and conversations) have always seemed to be a nice exercise. You end up really wracking your brains to see how the few items available to you could be used in ways you hadn't considered yet, and normally never would consider. You basically make believe that you're MacGyver, only it's usually not quite that intense. Nobody lives like MacGyver.

Encouraging newbies (and everyone else) to speak up brutally honestly in safe "Braintrust" meetings works for Pixar and other companies. Then experts are primed both to think out of the box and to listen to feedback from people who, yes, might not know what they're talking about, but then again might have an excellent angle. If you suspect the Braintrust approach only applies where stuff doesn't have to stand up to harsh reality, it also works at Frank Gehry's company—an architecture team famous for bizarre and wonderful buildings that look like they should fall down, but don't. Material suppliers often question them or say it can't be done, but the team are no strangers to being more thorough than the experts in the materials, although they will of course listen. Useful information goes both ways. Take a look at the Louis Vuitton Foundation building in Paris for a typical example. I like to imagine that's standing because of radical openness to feedback.

The public doesn't trust experts and experts don't trust the public, but we must work together well for democracy to thrive. The "how" seems to be the core question that republics try to answer. How do you get people with the whole range of experiences and skills deciding together wisely?

So I'd like you to think about the question as you go about your daily life. What else can or might help with this? How do we make getting past blind spots and hearing and engaging with new ideas more the routine and less the exception in our democratic institutions?