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Comment by kitd | Hacker News Reader

- Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives.

- See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.

This is good advice IME. Get well acquainted (like REALLY well acquainted) with opposing viewpoints, such that you could argue them better than their proponents. See also "Argue Well by Losing" by Phil Haack [1].

Somewhat relatedly, the ancients viewed Rhetoric as the purest expression of intelligence. It required you to have deep knowledge of a topic, including all arguments in favour and against (implying deep empathy with the audience), and the ability to form coherent and meaningful argument. Modern political "debate" is ludicrous in comparison.

[1] https://haacked.com/archive/2013/10/21/argue-well-by-losing....

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I always felt like Congressional debates should begin with each side trying to explain the opposing position, with debate only beginning when each side agrees with the opposition's framing of their PoV. I also recognize how naive and idealistic this sounds.

The public Congressional debates are performative, intended to curry favor with key voters, campaign donors, and media personalities. The substantive debates happen in private using completely different rhetoric. This is mostly fine in that it allows for policy decisions to move forward with compromises. The problem is that some members of Congress are unable to shut off their deranged public personas even in private back room negotiations.

> The public Congressional debates are performative, > The substantive debates happen in private using completely different rhetoric.

If we can't hear the substantive debates, voting becomes meaningless and performative too. Are we supposed to believe that we vote better when we don't know the truth?

> This is mostly fine

Is it?

Well what's the alternative? We obviously can't prevent legislators from talking with each other in private.

Actually, in this world of technology, we 100% can.

While I accept that this is how it is done in practice, I think the unintended consequence is it raises the partisan temperature and further ruins the already abysmal trust of Congress.

Was this the case from day 1 in the US?

How about day 1 in Ancient Greece? Or the French Republic?

One for our political historians. I'm sure you can stretch anywhere into "yes" or "no", but what do the relative degrees look like?

There was always a performative aspect to the public debates but it really escalated after C-SPAN started televising everything. In principle citizens should be able to watch their legislature in operation but the effects haven't been entirely positive.

I've also found simply testing a hypothesis without reasoning about it can quite often outdo your own reasoning and the reasoning of everyone else. Sometimes you are wrong, and everyone else is wrong, and only an empirical test can separate the wheat from the chaff.

Although maybe this method only works for me because I am a moron, and many people can out reason me, so the only way I can discover anything is to do something all reasonable and rational people are already sure is wrong.

> Sometimes you are wrong, and everyone else is wrong,

Happens all the time.

> and only an empirical test can separate the wheat from the chaff.

Not for the vast majority of political issues and indeed for most of Social Sciences. In these cases, empirical evidence is just an accessory, it's still evidence but it's never conclusive, you need reasoning to sort out the complexity.

> Somewhat relatedly, the ancients viewed Rhetoric as the purest expression of intelligence. It required you to have deep knowledge of a topic, including all arguments in favour and against (implying deep empathy with the audience), and the ability to form coherent and meaningful argument. Modern political "debate" is ludicrous in comparison.

"Rhetoric" is an unfortunately overloaded term, as modern political "debate" is often nothing more than (the other definition of) rhetoric.

  > Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours.

It is very similar to Feynman's

  The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.

I'm linking my comment but if you want to skip to the source it is [5]: Cargo Cult Science.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46997906

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