







Or: Why I’m Tired of My Colleagues Making Arguments That Only Work on Us
The sound of inevitability
Have you ever argued with someone who is seriously good at debating? I have. It sucks. You’re constantly thrown off-balance, responding to a point you didn’t expect to. You find yourself defending the weak edges of your argument, while the main thrust gets left behind in the back-and-forth, and you end up losing momentum, confidence, and ultimately, the argument. One of my close friends won international debate competitions for fun while we were at university (he’s now a successful criminal barrister), and he told me that the only trick in the book, once you boil it all down, is to make sure the conversation is framed in your terms. Once that happens, it’s all over bar the shouting.
How to Stop Endless Discussions
When we find ourselves in endless debates where everyone defends their idea, we don't know how to handle the situation. We eventually find a way out, but what we need is an excellent system.
Beginner's Guide to Arguing Constructively
How to turn arguments from vicious battles into productive dialogues.

Why this philosopher turned down Anthropic
The AI industry is courting the humanities — but it is asking the wrong questions

Why this philosopher turned down Anthropic
The AI industry is courting the humanities — but it is asking the wrong questions

We argue badly, and nothing accumulates. How could we do better? | Reason Commons — Issue Trees & Logical Thinking Process
Millions of people argue every day about the things that matter most — climate change, what to do about AI, how we might build a better world. Some of it is sharp, even insightful. And almost none of it accumulates.
Debate Maps — The Society Library
While The Society Library is dedicated to enabling access to information through our libraries, we recognize the difficult and tricky work of organizing that content into formal deliberation. There are hundreds of cognitive biases and logical pitfalls that can get in our way as human beings. Therefore, as a part of our service, The Society Library endeavors to map the knowledge we collect into “debate maps,” which essentially means we are organizing the arguments, claims, evidence, and opinions from all points of view into a formal debate - and effectively enabling “societal-scale debate.” A feat which may be otherwise impossible to organize in comparable levels of comprehensiveness with the existing limits of media, language, and human bandwidth to which we are confined.

[52] Menschplaining: Three Ideas for Civil Criticism
As bloggers, commentators, reviewers, and editors, we often criticize the work of fellow academics. In this post I share three ideas to be more civil and persuasive when doing so. But first: should…

Notion encourages busy-work and I’m tired of it
Why has everything become so needlessly complicated?

Objectivity | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
Insults | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
Art or tool?
The Internet spaces I tend to inhabit have more polarisation than at many other recent times, and little explication of the worldviews that lead to different premises for discussion, that in turn...

Guide to Incrementals/Navigating Criticism | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
Re: Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
‘You’re effed’: Palantir CEO says AI ‘will destroy humanities jobs’ – but Gen Z workers are apparently deliberately sabotaging AI rollouts in an effort to fight back
Gen Z workers are fighting against their own redundancy

1/ Scholarly publishing spent thirty years arguing about access. It has barely started arguing about what readers do with the paper once they have it. That second argument is turning into a field, forming around how science gets read and judged. Here is the map as I see it: aris.pub/blog/scholarly-interface-desi…
A budding discipline around how science gets read and judged - Aris
aris.pub