Comment by Intermernet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Intermernet | Hacker News Reader

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But the arguments on both sides would be somewhat crippled by removing the use of stats relating to gun control vs. crime.

Your quote may as well replace "gun control" with "religion" and "crime" with "morality". The arguments on both sides become superficial as you've removed the specific causes for each side to argue. You may as well continue this trend until both sides are arguing "good equals good" for differing values of "good".

This stuff isn't easily arguable by humans with opinions. Removing the example data that forms the opinions doesn't make the arguments on either side stronger or weaker, it makes the argument as a whole less relevant to society.

This is unfortunate because, as you quote, "that’s the sort of thing which at least in principle is tractable to studies and statistics and scientific consensus"

Breaking complex issues down to be "tractable to studies" is possible, but most techniques are fraught with errors of over-simplification.

> But the arguments on both sides would be somewhat crippled by removing the use of stats relating to gun control vs. crime.

In this case, the double crux was on crime prevention, so after agreeing on the crux they'd be only looking at gun control vs. crime statistics. Did you mean to say something else?

I think parent's point is that by searching for a double-crux you might obfuscate high-level generators of disagreement, so the conversation might progress but won't actually change anyone's mind even if there is a purely factual answer to the double-crus.

I think parent's point is made later in the paragraph after the section on double-cruxing:

> High-level generators of disagreement are what remains when everyone understands exactly what’s being argued, and agrees on what all the evidence says, but have vague and hard-to-define reasons for disagreeing anyway. In retrospect, these are probably why the disagreement arose in the first place, with a lot of the more specific points being downstream of them and kind of made-up justifications. These are almost impossible to resolve even in principle.

I.e., many people who have strong opinions on gun control would never agree to this sort of double-crux. And even if they did agree to it in the context of one conversation, and then "lost" the argument on that basis, they wouldn't actually go on to change their mind. They would return to the "High-level generator" and everyone just wasted their time.

The way I understand it, double-cruxing is a technique to be used (probably multiple times) during the debate, and isn't the entire debate itself. It kind of reminds me of "divide and conquer" strategies.

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