This is my API. You can use it to help us engage with each other. You can get a picture of my perspective on how discussion works. You can also give me tips for improvements.
Table of Contents
Some background on my perspective on discussion
People go too fast, act like communication is easy
If I'm wrong, and you know it, please...
People have trouble engaging with each other, coming to agreement, understanding each other's statements, understanding each others expectations and preferences, like regarding discussion, etc. Simultaneously, people try not to bug each other for fear of annoying each other, which exacerbates the problem. It results in people asking each other *less* questions instead of more. It results in people making fewer requests of each other, concerned that the other person will feel pressured. It results in less discussion than would occur if this bottleneck didn't exist or was reduced. It's a huge problem in our culture. What can be done about it?
Well what's causing it? Part of it is: Lack of APIs.
Imagine if you could engage with somebody in a way where that person posted his API, and you get to use that API to engage with that person. His API would give info about his expectations, preferences, discussion policies, interests, etc etc, which you could then use to make much better guesses about how to engage with that person in ways that would be successful.
In a person's API, he might ask other people to point out areas of potential improvement in his API. In this way, people could be helping each other improve their APIs. So if you find areas of potential improvement in this document, please tell me.
Better APIs = more effective engagement between people.
Note that since people are black boxes, people's APIs won't work exactly as described. The person won't exactly do what his API says he would do. This is an unavoidable fact but it's also something that can be made to improve without limit.
And the more work somebody puts into this, the more consistent is the connection between him (the block box) and his API. Note also that people could be helping each other improve their block-box <-> API connections.
Note that without having your own API, basically you're expecting people to use the standard API in your culture in order to engage with you -- standard cultural policies that we all kinda know. But this API kinda sucks. It's a one-size-fits-none API. It's definitely better than nothing, so I'm not hating on it -- it's partly what built our civilization. But we could do soooooo much better.
One example of something that is part of our standard cultural one-size-fits-none API is the policy of avoiding rudeness. Avoiding rudeness can often mean avoiding truth-seeking. But it's often the case that one person didn't think he was being rude but another person did. So there's a mismatch in expectations/preferences/understanding on basic issues. Having individual APIs (as against a lowest common denominator collective API) would help fix this.
Expecting our civilization to function on a collective API means treating all people as though they are fungible. We're not fungible. We're not like atoms. Atoms are interchangeable. People are not. No two people have the exact same set of ideas, expectations, preferences, emotions, intuitions, etc etc.
We should respect the fact that we're not fungible and incorporate it into our lives. Creating individual APIs is one way to respect this fact.
Note that this would have the effect of reducing verbal fights and violence. So it's something that would serve the pursuit of eradicating violence in the world.
In other words, anything that facilitates mutual win-win engagement between people will serve the goal of eradicating violence in the world, and this individual API idea is one such thing.
In a lot of discussions, people go too fast. They make only intuitional interpretations of the sentences they read. They don't do things like consciously trying to guess and criticize their way to their best interpretation of what somebody said. They just go with their first interpretation, which came to them instantly (as an intuition).
I think people feel pressured to go fast. And I'm not sure that they consciously think about the fact that they feel pressured to go fast.
It would be better if people slowed down a lot when they notice that they're having a hard time understanding each other. Fast discussion is ok when you and your discussion partner are understanding each other well, but when either of you recognize that you're not understanding each other, you should address that bottleneck by doing things like going slower, spending more time trying to work out the best interpretation of what somebody said, circling back to earlier statements to reinterpret them, stuff like that.
People act like communication is easy. They treat communication as if you say something, and they understand it, like automatically. This is true in some sense. Your intuition works automatically and pretty fast. But there's always error. You can avoid that fact but you can't avoid the consequences of that fact. We should be focussed on error-correction.
So the situation is this. You have a mindcode and I have a mindcode. They are not the same. They are not even written in the same programming language. When I say something to you, that means I'm translating my mindcode to english and you're translating my english to your mindcode. There is error in those processes.
You can't avoid error all together but you can do your best to reduce error. So it's good to do things like asking your discussion partner, "can I explain your view to see if I understand it? And you tell me if you find it satisfactory?"
It's good to clarify what a position is by checking your interpretation for error before you try to criticize the position. What people usually do is skip the error-correction step that could catch misunderstandings, and just jump straight to saying what they think is wrong with the other guy's position.
If I'm wrong about something you believe is important, please tell me.
Why am I doing this? This is my attempt to avoid the situation where I'm wrong about something important, someone knows why I'm wrong and is willing to explain, but I don't find out, and I lose the opportunity to change and get on the right side of the truth. In other words, it's my attempt to make a bridge between us.
