Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Elements of Rationalist Discourse, published by Rob Bensinger on February 12, 2023 on LessWrong.

I liked Duncan Sabien's Basics of Rationalist Discourse, but it felt somewhat different from what my brain thinks of as "the basics of rationalist discourse". So I decided to write down my own version (which overlaps some with Duncan's).

Probably this new version also won't match "the basics" as other people perceive them. People may not even agree that these are all good ideas! Partly I'm posting these just out of curiosity about what the delta is between my perspective on rationalist discourse and y'alls perspectives.

The basics of rationalist discourse, as I understand them:

1. Truth-Seeking. Try to contribute to a social environment that encourages belief accuracy and good epistemic processes. Try not to “win” arguments using asymmetric weapons (tools that work similarly well whether you're right or wrong). Indeed, try not to treat arguments like soldiers at all.

2. Non-Violence: Argument gets counter-argument. Argument does not get bullet. Argument does not get doxxing, death threats, or coercion.

3. Non-Deception. Never try to steer your conversation partners (or onlookers) toward having falser models. Where possible, avoid saying stuff that you expect to lower the net belief accuracy of the average reader; or failing that, at least flag that you're worried about this happening.

As a corollary:

3.1. Meta-Honesty. Make it easy for others to tell how honest, literal, PR-y, etc. you are (in general, or in particular contexts). This can include everything from "prominently publicly discussing the sorts of situations in which you'd lie" to "tweaking your image/persona/tone/etc. to make it likelier that people will have the right priors about your honesty".

4. Localizability. Give people a social affordance to decouple / evaluate the local validity of claims. Decoupling is not required, and indeed context is often important and extremely worth talking about! But it should almost always be OK to locally address a specific point or subpoint, without necessarily weighing in on the larger context or suggesting you’ll engage further.

5. Alternative-Minding. Consider alternative hypotheses, and ask yourself what Bayesian evidence you have that you're not in those alternative worlds. This mostly involves asking what models retrodict.

Cultivate the skills of original seeing and of seeing from new vantage points.

As a special case, try to understand and evaluate the alternative hypotheses that other people are advocating. Paraphrase stuff back to people to see if you understood, and see if they think you pass their Ideological Turing Test on the relevant ideas.

Be a fair bit more willing to consider nonstandard beliefs, frames/lenses, and methodologies, compared to (e.g.) the average academic. Keep in mind that inferential gaps can be large, most life-experience is hard to transmit in a small number of words (or in words at all), and converging on the truth can require a long process of cultivating the right mental motions, doing exercises, gathering and interpreting new data, etc.

Be careful to explicitly distinguish "what this person literally said" from "what I think this person means". Be careful to explicitly distinguish "what I think this person means" from "what I infer about this person as a result".

6. Reality-Minding. Keep your eye on the ball, hug the query, and don’t lose sight of object-level reality.

Make it a habit to flag when you notice ways to test an assertion. Make it a habit to actually test claims, when the value-of-information is high enough.

Reward scholarship, inquiry, betting, pre-registered predictions, and sticking your neck out, especially where this is time-consuming, effortful, or socially risky.

7. Reducibility. Err on the side of using simple, conc...