Foundations for discussion

From an aside of a much longer essay from Tom Forth:

I am infamously negative about calls for more complex and nuanced discussions in UK public policy…It is because people in those debates in Britain so rarely seem to have done the work needed to set the foundation for having fruitful complex and nuanced discussions. For someone to usefully be part of a complex and nuanced discussion they need to bring a set of well-checked and informedly-held simplifications which others can earn trust in them having assembled in a fair way, through diligent work, at risk to their own reputation, biased only by their own well-documented accumulated prejudices.

Which brings me back to AI.

In so much British policy discussion, there is an appeal to great complexity and nuance before we’ve achieved much agreement at a more basic level. It feels, so often, more like tutorials at Imperial College and debates at the Oxford Union than the kind of rigorously blunt experiences I enjoyed in France. And of course I am exaggerating the difference.

In so much of what I deal with from AI today, I feel the same. AI can generate in a few seconds what will take me two days to check. And when the checking is done, it has cost me days of time, and provided no value. We are adding intelligence to debates that lacked something else.

While I don’t have the experience of debating policy in any sort of formal way, I’ve noticed this in more informal conversations over the past few years. It’s much harder to talk about much of anything because there’s not a common foundation of shared knowledge and experience, people want to dive straight into very complex details, and it’s rare to go more than a few minutes before someone wants to look something up on the internet.

Part of this is that good conversation is an art and a skill, which we’re rapidly losing because we simply don’t practice it as much as we once did. Another part is that many hold that there’s a technocratic solution to every problem. If we know enough facts, then there’s an obvious right answer. I’ve become less inclined than ever to think that’s the case.