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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 20th, 2021

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  • The gold standard for me would be “adversarial collaboration” as described by Scott Alexander here and here. The first describes a conflict about psychic psi powers research. The amazing twist is that both sides wrote a paper together. The second article describes a similar collaboration about fact-checking. Essentially, this is “debate until they reach an agreement” with the additional requirement that they publish a joint statement afterwards.

    So, if you are in an intense discussion with somebody, the best you can do is to write a blog post together. It requires both of you to present the evidence in a neutral way and derive conclusions such that you both agree with the reasoning. The process will make you work out where exactly you disagree (the quality of the sources? different values? missing knowledge?).

    Is that realistic though? Such a collaboration is much more effort than a reply to a comment which triggers me. It is the best way to make progress in the overall debate.

    Is that the goal here though? We don’t care so much about the result or progress of a debate but only to keep it civilized so everybody feels welcome to continue. An “unproductive” discussion is ok as long as all participants are nice to each other.


  • I’m thinking in incentives a lot.

    • Apple wins if I buy more Apple stuff, so they are incentivized to pull me into their ecosystem. This means they will neglect integration with non-Apple services.
    • Google wins if I click on more ads, so they are incentivized to show me more desirable ads. Getting private data is crucial for this.

    If you are willing to go through the hassle of flashing your own OS, then buying Android hardware is the way. However, if you just want to buy something that works out of the box as much as possible, then Apple wins the privacy aspect in my opinion.