DiscourseDrome on Tradeoffs

Crossposted with permission. Very much a Tumblr post, but also a really good short summary of a thing I think is an important EA skill. I am also not vague-blogging about anything, but realized yesterday that I had asked discoursedrome for permission to crosspost months ago but hadn't checked to see if they'd responded. Here is the post:

OK this is going to sound like I’m vaguing about something but it’s really just a general observation that I keep making in different contexts and wanted a post for. 

Pretty much all disputes about what people should do boil down to “weighing tradeoffs in the presence of uncertainty”, and adult policy discussions tend to reflect that. As a rule of thumb, when you think you have a policy dispute that doesn’t fit that mould you’re usually wrong. This generalizes from arguments for the radical reconstruction of society down to arguments for nerfing a League of Legends hero.

However, people are always trying to make arguments that don’t engage with this framework at all. In particular, it’s common for people to argue that something has costs and so we shouldn’t do it, or that it has benefits and so we should do it, and act like they’ve finished presenting a cogent case for their position, and I am just astonished at the level of confusion that this requires. In a serious discussion, you don’t even have both legs in your pants at that point! It’s weighing trade-offs in the presence of uncertainty. If your argument doesn’t engage with the subject on that level, it’s not ready for competition yet.

Of course, the internet is not a debate club: people can say whatever they think as well or as poorly as they please, and that’s usually a good thing. But it doesn’t seem like it’s just a case of people not electing to make serious policy arguments; I feel there’s surprisingly little awareness of what serious policy arguments entail, and of what kinds of situations lead to policy disputes in the first place. That’s frustrating, if only because people keep showing up to serious discussions with the apparent intention of participating when they only have like 25% of an argument, and you have to decide if you want to just ignore them and come off like a dick, or sit down and try to coach them the rest of the way into expressing a coherent position.