Project summary

Most major successes in a high-impact cause will probably presume one or several people, both internal and external to the EA sphere significantly changing their mind to adopt true beliefs. The goal of Effective Disagreement is to home in on this critical event and optimize for it as much as possible, as well as strictly preventing potential decay in epistemic norms among outward-facing advocacy groups.

The Effectively Handling Disagreement Workshop has been running for a year.
It synthesizes the teaching of common evidence-based technique rebuttals (So far, Smart Politics, Street Epistemology, and Deep Canvassing), i.e socratically shaped ways of helping people probe their beliefs, epistemology, experiences and interpretations. These technique rebuttals are believed to be more effective than topic rebuttal, i.e. usual argumentative methods [1] [2] (yet see [3] for discussion). My interpretation is that they are more suited to conversation with people outside the EA sphere.

The workshop targets people who have the opportunities to have impactful conversations and aims to be truth-seeking rather than persuading -e.g. people who are at the interface of cause areas like GCR/Animal Welfare, and external stakeholders.

Contrarily to other technique rebuttal workshops, it is short (4 hours long) and entirely based on Deliberate Practice -an evidence-based, time-intensive way to learn [4]. The Deliberate-Practice part breaks down performance according to subcomponents that are mostly extracted from the academic literature (see the library)

What are this project's goals and how will you achieve them?

The general goal is to offer a high-quality, time-intensive, scalable way to generalize the skill of effectively handling disagreements in an ethical and truth-seeking way. Today, only a minority of people are qualified enough to do this without significant downsides, such as trading-off important time and resources, managing their anxiety, or not bringing adverse consequences during high-stakes communication.
The short-term goal is to test the workshop's effect to estimate its cost-effectiveness, to keep growing the learner base, and extend the workshop to cover more realistic interaction scenarios.
The long-term goal is to ideally have 20% of active GCR and AW workers be able to create venues for, and effectively handle, disagreements with other citizens, organizations, companies, and possibly government representatives. This will include versions for group deliberation, and an extensive coverage of use cases.
The baseline, following Brookman & Kala 2016, is expected to be 35% of interlocutors of the trainees changing their position on a given belief, with the added constraint, that it should be for reasons that are evaluated as rational by an external party, after 15 to 20 minutes of conversation.

How will this funding be used?

1-Compensating time for me to work on making the workshop self-sustainable, through further search for funding, or setting up commercial practices, and marketing and advertising the workshop.

2-Compensating time for me to drastically improve and augment the workshop (this includes a second workshop targeting professional advocates, more in-depth versions, and consulting pedagogy and risk communication experts to help me improve it)

3-Scale up the workshop. In order to make it able to handle a greater number of learners, I’m already using free-subscription LLMs, for generating fast feedback. I plan to automate a part of the workshop using LLMs, which would thus be always accessible.

4-Compensating time and ressources for designing a pilot experiment to test the effect of the workshop. The literature seems to suggest that the taught methods themselves work, and that the procedure by which they are taught does as well. However, it might be that accelerated learning of said methods is too hard to be achieved. If the effect is negligible, the workshop will be killed.

Who is on your team and what's your track record on similar projects?

I'm alone, except for the pilot experiment (a PhD Candidate in economics at Warwick university will be here to advise me, along a few other advisors). I've been running the workshop successfully for a year and can provide testimonies on demand. I have otherwise made several workshops in the EA community with positive reviews. My background is in cognitive science and I have been reading on the topic since 2018.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails? (premortem)

Causes:
1-Not enough people show interest in the workshop. Specific communication skills tend to not be the focus of community members, as outlined by this post and the limited karma that these posts received.

2-Conversationally induced rational belief progression is not a bottleneck in GCR and Animal Welfare, e.g. because mass-scale, one-way outreach (e.g, a documentary) is considerably more cost-effective, even in confrontational or divisive environments.

3-The techniques, despite being evidence-based, seem not to work. These techniques are still part of social sciences, which has been subject to a replication crisis. This should warrant healthy skepticism.

Counterfactual outcomes:
1-[medium] One or several EA-related communities maintain arguing skills that only perform well on affiliated audiences, focused on conclusion-first, argumentatively conflictual practices, while staying blind to the inefficiency of those methods when applied to unaffiliated audience, leading to polarization, refrained communication and lost potential support from the public. I have anecdotally observed this and moderately believe it is the default if no program to learn how to handle disagreements is offered.

2-[strong] Most members of the community will adress disagreeing partners by relying on usual, confrontational argumentation. My belief is that there is a significant chance (~80%) this proves less productive.

3-[weak] The community organically reorients itself to self-made, epistemically dubious and/or ineffective practices for handling such disagreements. This could be e.g. repeating expert arguments, or substantially vacuous PR handling.

4-[Personal] I’ll probably have to shut down the project after 1 or 2 years of activity.

What other funding are you or your project getting?

No other funding at the moment. I do allow participants of the workshop to contribute voluntarily, and also plan to further seek funding. 

What will you do with different levels of funding?
I will be doing minimally part-time, focused work on this project in proportion to the funding I receive. 5000$ would pay for 10 months of part-time work. 500$ would pay for one month. Expenses will depend on how long the project can keep going. If the project lasts 8 months, then part of the funds will be used to pay for the large-scale experiment evaluating the workshop.

Note on lobbying
This activity does not engage in lobbying. However, partakers of the workshop might use their knowledge for activism or lobbying purposes independently of my instructions. Note that the workshop is taught in a spirit of truth-seeking and promotes such a spirit to its atendees. Absent of feedback from a Manifund moderator, this project will be noted as not engaged in lobbying.