Conversation

I’m genuinely surprised by the number of religious people who read me. While I’m not a militant atheist like Dawkins etc, I make no effort to pre-empt merge conflicts with religion in my writing This is the strongest personal evidence I have in for the robustness of pluralism.
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Pluralism “works” in a nonzero-sum way because 90% of what humans can connect over has low political content and involves neither confirmation nor disconfirmation of any beliefs. If you avoid a few narrow danger zones, it’s pure upside.
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The space for possible productive, win-win interactions between any 2 randomly chosen humans is far vaster than the space where they must necessarily conflict. The only catch is: both sides must be open to new experiences, otherwise the interaction will quickly find conflict
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In a way this is heartening evidence of the fundamentally scientific sensibility underlying human sociability. We act to “fail fast” in relationships by disconfirming the hypothesis that a counterparty can be trusted, by seeking common conflict ground. Rational under scarcity.
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We may not be in a condition of universal material abundance, but we are already post scarcity and non-rivalrous in information wealth. Information-based interactions need never gravitate to conflict ground if both sides are curious. There is always tons to learn mutually.
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Overloading John Gottman’s healthy-marriage heuristic, try to ensure that 4 out of 5 interactions with anyone are neither about confirmation or disconfirmation, but about mutual knowledge growth. That’s how you invest in pluralism.
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Learning from people disagreeing with you is overrated. Most of my learning from others actually comes from them thinking thoughts I wouldn’t be likely to think at all. And most tend to neither confirm or disconfirm anything I already think, but expand the scope of thoughts.
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Pitched battlegrounds and echo chambers are both harmful to pluralism because they tend to dampen openness to experience and collapse high-dimensional growth sociability into low-dimensional conflict/cooperate sociability.
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The more time you spend with someone *not* trying to defeat or kill each other, the more trust capital accumulates in the non-conflict zone of peaceful, pluralist co-existence. If it continues, the original conflict ground can sometimes be reduced to a rounding error.
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Don’t want to be polyannish here. Obviously some conflicts are deep-rooted and I don’t expect to see Arabs and Israelis spend 4x as much time bonding over falafel and knock-knock jokes as they do trying to kill each other, or that doing so would solve everything.
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A basic huge distortion in the possibility space here is large impersonal institutions, strong class boundaries and entrenched cultures of manners.
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They all make it harder to be open to, find, and invest in, deep+NEW common ground to increase the dimensionaloty of mutuality. This is btw a subtle point. Finding common ground is not enough. You must CREATE *new* common ground.
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In fact seeking existing common ground is a bad idea because it rapidly degenerates to diminishing returns zero-sum matching-pennies games. “Oh you like green curry more than red curry, so do I!”
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A particularly tedious kind of common-grounding game is trying to find common acquaintances and then discussing them. “Do you know X?” “No, do you know Y?” “No, do you know Z?” “Yes!” Cue dull discussion of Z whom neither know very well or care for.
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Tldr: don’t debate, don’t seek common ground. Just try to keep the game going as long as possible exploring common NEW ground.
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Btw, do not fall for aspirational mutual growth trap where you try to find lofty new common ground together (“let’s go to classical music concerts together”, “let’s learn Python together”). Random low-brow shit works FAR better. Taco hunting this weekend, B-movie next weekend.
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In discworld Pratchett has the notion of “dungeon dimensions” where dark forces and creatures lurk. A parody of Cthulhu type mythology. Human sociability rests atop a much more positive sort of dungeon dimension space. You just have to dig to unleash goodwill monsters.
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