[0:00]
i think paths forward could change the i think paths forward could change the world i see problems i often think of pass forward as the key solution that would make things better i have two recent examples but first what is paths forward it is some of my ideas about error correction mechanisms specifically they're about fixing known specifically they're about fixing known errors errors so we make a lot of errors and many of them no one knows the solution to or even no one knows there's a problem there and 
[0:30]
fixing those requires creativity it requires new discoveries and that can take an indefinite amount of time however there are other errors where someone already knows the answer and they're willing to share the answer but you don't know it yet and that is an avoidable error in a way that the other errors are not avoidable if we would just listen to everyone with good ideas we could find out about these known errors and fix them right away since the issue is already known and understood so pass forward ask questions like if 
[1:01]
this other guy is right and i'm wrong by what mechanism or path or set of steps can he tell me and my error actually gets corrected another way to view it is it's about having open ongoing discussion where you accept criticism from the general public i have a bunch of writing explaining more details so let's talk about two examples of problems i ran into where i thought pass forward would help first one i've been reading some nutrition and health books and like food 
[1:32]
and diet and it's hard to fact check everything it's hard to sort out which things are it's hard to sort out which things are right and if this issue had passed forward it would be a lot easier but no one on either side really debates takes responsibility for explaining things addresses the issues they all write like an incomplete book that doesn't really engage with the other side's arguments and talk past each other and it's hard to sort things out whereas if people had passed forward you could go to some of the leaders of different viewpoints and ask them some questions and this would 
[2:03]
make them engage with the other side because you take the anti-gluten arguments and you ask them to some of the pro-gluten people and vice versa until one side like runs out of argument and you got more of a clear conclusion or at least a good sense of where the debate is at what arguments are refuted and what arguments are open unrefuted seem important so another example is reading the art of problem solving by russell akov and he was talking about circular 
[2:34]
organizations so this problem in organizations so this problem in companies where there's a way that they're worse than democracies in a democracy the lawmakers have authority over you the public the citizens however they are responsible to you in a way you're their boss you can fire them and vote in someone else so there's a bit of checks and balances they don't just have unlimited authority to do whatever they want to you because you can replace them if you don't like what they're doing however in companies in general the 
[3:05]
workers have no authority over ceos they have no input or influence or whatever over the ceo they in fact are responsible to the ceo or to their boss the boss tells them what to do and then they have to report to their boss so politicians report to the voters not vice versa the voters don't have to say what they've been doing lately what they've been doing lately and explain themselves it's the politicians who have to explain themselves to voters 
[3:36]
but in a company it's the workers who have to explain themselves to their boss who has authority over them so the boss doesn't have to explain himself to the worker and has authority over that worker so the the power all goes in one direction instead of being mixed and going in both directions so it's a problem with companies that democracy has an advantage over democracy is not perfect but at least has some good mechanism here and a lot of companies just don't have anything at all to try to address this so acoff talks about an idea of a circular organization where you make the authority go in a circle so the people 
[4:08]
at the bottom have some authority over the top and that way everyone has someone with some authority over them or not authority but like being reported to being able to have some influence so the the workers at the bottom don't give the ceo orders but they would have some influence to affect his policies and he would have to report to them answer to them address their questions and they would have some little bit of power over him some limited things they could do 
[4:38]
and so he proposed uh so ceo there's a board of directors for companies and he proposed basically having something kind of like a board of directors at every level above every directors at every level above every manager and then for the ceo's board of and then for the ceo's board of directors like his personal one you put representatives of labor on it so that makes the organization circular because the people at the bottom have a role for dealing with people at the a role for dealing with people at the top being on the board is different than being someone's boss 
[5:08]
but it gives you some something but it gives you some something anyways my thought about that was it's okay but it's still about allocating authority better um so it's a bit of a who should rule problem to put it in puberian terms and so i thought a better approach would be passed forward a company could have passed forward and then it doesn't matter that much who has authority over who because everything can get settled with rational debate pass forward in a way makes authority not matter by giving authority to reason 
[5:40]
and truth seeking processes so that the best arguments will decide the outcome rather than it being a matter of who has the authority to make their decision um you know you actually debate it and the winner of the debate makes the decision authority would still matter in some ways but you could reduce it a lot if you had passed forward that way whenever one of the subordinates has a good idea his idea can get implemented so it didn't matter that he was a subordinate his idea got implemented anyways so you can solve a lot more of the problem i think with pass forward 
[6:11]
than with acos circular organization and by the way akov's organization asks managers to spend 25 percent of their time and the board meetings that that's his estimate of how long it would take so that's a big cost not it's not just a it's not just like a wasted cost though like you can talk about actual company issues and get things done during the meetings so maybe it's okay but you know there's a potential problem there and pass forward and organizations 
[6:41]
you know potentially everyone could do it but there are also smaller steps you could take like only the managers do it or only upper management does it or only the ceo does it and that could still you could get most of the benefit if it's only the ceo you could probably get 80 of the benefit why because everyone else is like underneath the ceo so if you have a problem with your boss and he doesn't do pass forward you can go to the ceo and get a pass forward about your idea there's something uh higher up in the power hierarchy that does have pass forward 
[7:12]
does have pass forward so you can do a lot that way you could also just have one additional person you don't want the ceo to be busy all day doing pass forward he has to do the company leadership stuff too so you could have co-ceos or you could add a new position for the past forward guy who would have authority similar to ceo he'd have to be up at the top but then his job could be to do pass forward for everyone that would be a potential way to change a company by hiring one new person that could potentially make a really large 
[7:42]
could potentially make a really large improvement so people's main objection to pass forward is time use and i think that's fairly obvious bad faith because i've already written a lot of solutions to how to do pf fast enough how to do a nice small enough amount of time and the people who say it would take too long never engage with those solutions they're just they just act like i had no solutions and i hadn't even thought of the problem so yes time uses an obvious potential problem that needs to be addressed in some way which is why i came up with half a dozen answers to it 
[8:14]
and they have not pointed out why those answers won't work or tried those answers won't work or tried those answers so it seems like they just want an easy excuse to rationalize not doing pass excuse to rationalize not doing pass forward and i think that's sad if you're going to be biased and you're a good or rational person you should be biased in favor of pass forward you should be extra charitable to it because you want it to work you really really want rationality to be able to be done fast enough and you have no good alternatives so you'd be like bending over backwards to make pass forward methods actually work because you really really want the outcome of having more rational 
[8:44]
discussions and more error correction but these other people they're just looking for excuses not to do it so being biased against error correction and wanting excuses to avoid it is really sad but widespread among not just people but specifically people with some sort of interest in rationality like you would find out less rationality like you would find out less wrong or on some sort of rational subreddit like that kind of self-selected person who's extra interrationality compared to most people most people um i've found that type of person often 
[9:15]
just makes excuses to not really take pass forward seriously and not give it a pass forward seriously and not give it a chance even though they have no good alternative there's no competitor that they like better than pass forward their alternative is to not have a method so that means doing things like trusting yourself and like trying to be rational whatever that means but with no specific like rules guidelines method steps you're going to guidelines method steps you're going to do nothing in writing about what you're going to do you just like try to have good judgment and hope you're rational and they seem satisfied with that and that's such a recipe for a bias 
[9:47]
okay so how does pass forward address time use um one of the big ones is reusing answers you can write down a canonical answer to something and then if two people raise the same issue you raise your answer and if people raise different issues that's actually good you want to address all the different issues all the different criticisms that people think of you don't want to just leave a criticism unaddressed so it's never been addressed by anyone ever that would be bad another answer is having proxies or helpers who can answer stuff for you that is most available if you are if you 
[10:19]
have a lot of money if you're very popular but if you don't have much money and you're not popular then you're probably not going to get a lot of inquiries a lot of critics trying to talk to you to talk to you so as the number of people who want to talk to you skills up the your ability to get helpers should also scale up somewhat proportionally so i think that's a reasonable solution another one this is probably the single most important thing is addressing patterns of error or categories of error instead of doing errors one by one so if 
[10:50]
people make new things by making slight changes to old things then addressing them all would take way too long and reusing an answer for you can't reason answer if you answer one really specific thing and then they slightly change it because now your old answer doesn't apply so in order for answer we used to actually be effective you have to address categories of issues types of issues categories of issues types of issues patterns and this is what people commonly do for example we have the ad hominem fallacy it's sometimes called 
[11:22]
which is the error of insulting someone instead of making arguments and so instead of addressing every single insult as an individual case with a new answer we talk about the whole category of insulting someone rather than making an argument and you can write a generic explanation of what is an insult and what is an argument and how do you tell the difference and how do you know when someone's doing ad hominems and why is that bad and so on and you could explain all that and you could write it down one time and then you could reuse that every time someone does an insult and if they come up with a new insult you can still reuse your answer 
[11:53]
another thing you can do for a passport is gate access to protect your time so you don't actually answer everyone but you have to do this in a way where someone has a good point there is something they can do to get your attention so most current access gating is based on either social status bias or a proxy for social status like it's indirectly based on social like it's indirectly based on social status and so pass forward says do not get on those things you should not limit access to yourself based on social status or bias in any 
[12:24]
way those are those are bad ways to filter people out and whatever gates you come up with you should write them down with so you should have clear written rules and then hold yourself accountable to them you need to have transparency need to have transparency um that way people can know in advance like what do they have to do to get your attention and get their issue addressed and if they do get your attention like what will you do like i have a debate policy so you know if you get my attention you've got to debate here are the rules for the debate so then i will follow those rules 
[12:57]
whereas if you just know like if i do the following things then i will get to say my id as the person but they might just like ignore me or say it's dumb and then i don't get to respond if it's like that you realize you might not get anywhere so there needs to be a bunch of rules about what happens once you share the idea so it doesn't get incorrectly dismissed anyways if you write down a bunch of policies for this stuff and then you have transparency whenever people make have transparency whenever people make requests you um the way you deal with it is publicly visible then you can build up a track record of 
[13:27]
actually following your policies and people can see when you don't follow the policy so if you have a reputation then they can trust you're not going to want to destroy your reputation so you'll have to follow your policies an example of gating that would be an example of gating that would be rational is you would say okay if you want to have a pass forward and tell me your criticism you have to give me twenty dollars now anyone can give you twenty dollars and if it's important they're probably gonna be willing to give you twenty dollars there are downsides here um you know you it could be harder for 
[13:58]
some people to tell you some criticism some people to tell you some criticism however it is a solvable problem where people could come up with the 20 where people could come up with the 20 bucks it might be like nearly unsolvable for a it might be like nearly unsolvable for a child whose parents don't want to help they might have to like wait until they're old enough to get a job old enough to get a job but if they actually have a good idea they could probably just make a gofundme for 20 bucks i mean maybe they can't they don't have a bank account but maybe they could just like ask the internet for help and get someone else to send you 20 
[14:28]
on their behalf if they have a good idea and they like share it on reddit and other people notice and say hey that's a good idea and they say but i'm a child and i can't possibly get twenty dollars for like five years then someone will probably just send the twenty dollars so they can get their pass forward so anyways the point is if you put a 20 pay wall in front of each pass forward request each criticism people want to share with you it does not fully block off you being it does not fully block off you being corrected it adds friction to the process but it doesn't mean that some corrections are just never going to be able to reach you 
[15:00]
if if the person cares to tell you the idea enough they can pay 20 bucks and there are other things you can do you can say hey you have to read a book and then i will listen to one criticism like if you have not read my book i won't listen to your criticism if someone has an important thing to say to you then they can read the book and then they can get their discussion they're not important things to say are not being blocked off like if the barrier to entry is reading one book a lot of people are not going to bother 
[15:30]
with that and the friction does have downsides but like if i saw someone making a mistake and i wanted to correct them and i thought it was important and i cared right now often i have like no options and in this better world if i could just read their book and then tell them that actually sounds reasonable i don't mind reading a book if i get to correct someone who has some sort of importance in the world on something so those are some examples of gating that is not based on social status or 
[16:01]
bias if you ask someone to pay 20 or to read your book first they can just do that regardless of their social status and regardless of your biases something that is a proxy for social status is if you want my attention you have to basically social network your way into my circle like you make friends with someone who makes friends with someone who i know like you know having some sort of personal contact anyway people might not see that as being like what is your social status 
[16:31]
because you might have high social status in a different group or something but you know it is very related to social status and social hierarchy that's the kind of thing you want to that's the kind of thing you want to avoid another example is i think basically academic journal publishing is primarily gated by social status not quality and obviously they're not going to directly admit that and base it directly openly on social status but i think they use a bunch of things that are proxies for status okay anyways how else does pass forward address time use 
[17:02]
we talked about reusing answers criticizing patterns and categories instead of individual things having proxies or helpers and gaining access in rational ways another way is by making conversations shorter by using decisive arguments if you have a lot of debate skill then that can reduce the time you needed for debate and it's not just skill but it's also partly attitude and methodology if you know about my yes or no philosophy stuff about using binary 
[17:34]
decisive arguments then that makes debates go faster it's better at reaching conclusions and better at reaching conclusions and debates anyway so i thought those things are enough that people could try pass forward and see what goes wrong or at least give criticism of those methods but instead people have just said it would take too long and then not engage with those solutions and not tried them so it seems like they don't want pass forward they are biased against it rationality like scares them in some way 
[18:06]
anyway pes4 does have some other problems too which i've written less about so one i've encountered that i think is pretty important that the uh the people of jack nina pass forward never bring up i've never heard this one brought up but having tried passport a bit and getting other people to try it just a little bit i've uh i've run into this so the problem is that people lie this is much less of a problem if it is a public intellectual who has a reputation so if he lies but 
[18:39]
he has all these written pass-forward policies and then he's just lying about them he's going to get in trouble he's going to lose reputation but if someone is giving pass forward and they do not have a reputation to and they do not have a reputation to protect then they can just not follow their own then they can just not follow their own policies so this came up with someone they put up a pass forward policy and then i tried to use it and then they didn't want to do what they said they would do so then they just edited their policy and said oh okay i will change the policy to match what i'm actually going to do and if you just if you change your policy to 
[19:09]
match your behavior instead of changing your behavior to match the policy you're completely defeating the purpose of it and being dishonest and it works the other way so pat the person giving the pass forward can lie and just not follow their own policies and then also the critics can lie so a good example of this is if you have debate rules you say hey if you want to tell me this criticism we're going to have a debate and here is the methods we'll follow in the debate including like we will these are the following ways that the debate can end and we will not stop 
[19:41]
unless we reach one of these particular conclusions on the list and someone can agree to that and then just lie and break the rules and just leave without meeting the conditions which is a thing that happened to me someone agreed to my debate policy and then at the end they just decided to not do it like they wanted the conversation to end but they didn't follow the methods of here's how you end the conversation here's you have to like do certain steps at the end so that the conversation doesn't just 
[20:11]
end in the middle and they agree to that in advance and then refuse to do it so there's there's a problem there that people are just dishonest and even if you have written policies they can just break the rules when they get upset or triggered or defensive or something it motivates them to come up with excuses for not following the rules that they agreed to even if it's all in writing and there's transparency and everything they can just be irrational anyways i don't think that's a deal breaker 
[20:42]
problem like it's not worse than a status quo i think that having things like explicit policies makes that problem better not worse compared to the status quo but it's an issue to be concerned with there's room for improvement there and so there's one more difficulty with pass forward that i want to talk about and this one i think is pretty important the short version of it is simply that people dislike rational criticism passport is about people actually receiving rational criticism but people do not like that 
[21:14]
and this goes both ways the past forward giver obviously is setting himself up to be exposed to a bunch of criticism and if his critics are actually right he might hate that so that is a potential problem for pass forward and then it also goes the other way the critics themselves how do you deal with criticism that is incorrect you criticize it you refute it you have to like counter it in debate so the people who try to tell you criticism will frequently be criticized themselves their arguments their ideas will receive criticism so 
[21:46]
you have someone who's probably not a public intellectual just a member of the public and they come try to tell you their great idea and then you respond with criticism and so a lot of people are gonna have a bad time they're gonna hate that and so i've thought of pass forward the most in the context of like a public intellectual including a scientist being the person doing paths forward and that is an area where it works relatively well and makes a lot of sense it has less of a problem with offending people if the public doesn't like you and you're public intellectual and a lot of people are offended by you 
[22:17]
it is still completely possible to have a good career be successful but that can be okay you don't have to be really popular to be a rational truth-seeking intellectual type you need your boss to not hate you and maybe some academic journal editors or some scientific collaborators or some scientific collaborators or something but if you can actually have the majority of the public dislike you and go on with your career as normal so offending some people by doing path forward could be okay but there are other contexts where offending people is a bigger problem 
[22:48]
so one that i talked about earlier was in a company that passed forward in a company could be helpful and solve the problem of authority better than akoff's circular organization idea organization idea however in a company who is going to be telling you criticism and trying to share ideas with you your employees if you offend your employees that is bad that could demoralize them some of them could quit you don't want to have your employees dislike you and be upset with you and all 
[23:20]
that so that is a real problem you want to deal with your employees in a relatively tactful way not in a way that offends and bothers them and also you want them to actually give suggestions even if they're not that good at rationality so you would like to respond to suggestions in a friendly way so that you can get the good suggestions whereas with the general public if you like offend an alien in a lot of people and only the more rational people want to talk to you that's kind of okay but as a if you're a decent company you probably want your less rational 
[23:51]
employees to be able to communicate and employees to be able to communicate and stuff and not be too scared of criticism and so on whereas if you're like a scientist or public intellectual and the people in the public who are scared of criticism don't talk to you that's kind of okay because if everyone talked to you there'd be too many people anyways but in a company if like all your employees are willing to communicate when they have ideas maybe that's okay and not too much communication in another context a good example where a pass forward could be problematic is a a pass forward could be problematic is a politician 
[24:21]
doing pass forward with voters and you can see like huge advantages and positives there very similar to the company thing if the politician instead of just having authority and making his own decisions would sometimes have decisions based on decisive debates that could be a lot better if you get better policies instead of him just being like i'm going to use my judgment because i have authority you could have some some of the times the truth wins however if a politician is offending a bunch of his voters with harsh criticism um that is a big problem for him he's 
[24:53]
going to get voted out of office politicians have to be popular even more so than ceos so then what is the world just not ready for pass forward in some context people aren't rational enough maybe hard to say um what i can say is that if you tone down your criticism it's going to cause a lot of trouble with pass forward because you need to win issues like decisively and quickly when the arguments settle the issues reach conclusions otherwise it's going to take a long time and actually a lot of ways 
[25:23]
people argue they never really reach a conclusion so a lot of your discussions could just go on indefinitely on indefinitely and that if a lot of people want to talk to you and your discussions take indefinite time you're in huge trouble you need to for a pass forward to work you have to be able to actually resolve issues reach conclusions one of the things you can do that helps is you can ask a critic do you have a clear decisive debate ending thing to say or not and if they say not then they don't actually have a correction for you it doesn't really count you could still listen to them and 
[25:54]
you can put like a time limit on and be like okay well you can have 10 minutes to tell me your idea and then i'll take it into consideration but we won't debate it since you're not claiming that it actually decisively wins the debate and corrects one of my errors and then you can only actually debate people when they claim that they have a decisive criticism a decisive argument that should conclusively change your mind in a relatively short debate you can make the actual debate discussions be focused on decisive arguments because if they don't have something decisive to say why are they 
[26:25]
even talking to you like maybe they want even talking to you like maybe they want to like just tell you a few suggestions and you'll think about it and they just like trust your judgment or whatever but like nothing too important is but like nothing too important is happening okay so question why is decisive criticism offensive what offends people people tend to hate being wrong um this is a problem both for the people giving the passports and the critics and people especially hate being badly wrong like if you say oh you have a few good points in there i'm going to change my idea like modify 10 of it to use a 
[26:56]
few of your points that's a lot less offensive than if you say hey i have a decisive refutation of what you said so i'm just going to fully 100 rejected and use none of that and that'll offend people a lot more and what people especially hate is personal criticism and there are some reasons that personal criticism or criticism at least seems personal to people can come up in rational decisive debates rationality relies significantly on metacriticisms that address patterns of errors methods missing prerequisites 
[27:28]
things like that and people will take a lot of that stuff personally is it personal criticism i don't i don't think it has to be i think it can be think it has to be i think it can be rational criticism that isn't really about a specific person but people take it personally anyways a good way to look at this a test is could you have written the same criticism before you met the person if so then in some sense it's impersonal so you can actually do that like you can write an article about bias or write an article about bias or dishonesty and then you can meet someone years and then you can meet someone years later and say hey you're doing some of those 
[27:59]
red flags from the article the article explained here's how you like spot this type of bias and here are some solutions to it and you wrote that years ago and now this person comes along and they they do the things that the article pointed out they're doing the red flags so you use the methods in the article and you spot the bias and then you link them to the article and they say hey you're calling me bias that is personal and offensive and you say well i wrote it before i even knew you this is a pre-existing opinion i had about what bias looks like and i think bias is a topic that should actually be talked about and addressed not just like 
[28:29]
talked about and addressed not just like ignored and i mean i think that's a reasonable thing to say but a lot of people are going to get offended they don't want to be called biased they don't like the idea that their errors are related to bias and that that is the type of thing they should be looking at they want all their errors to be like topical like part of the object level topic not their methodology their lack of prerequisites their bias their dishonesty all that stuff but their errors often do come from bias dishonesty missing prerequisites poor methods etc 
[29:00]
so if if i link a person to an article about bias and say hey you did these three things in our discussion three things in our discussion and they fit these three different things in the article that explain how to spot the article that explain how to spot bias that is a little bit personal because i've connected the article to some of their discussion contributions and their discussion contributions and people take their discussion contributions take their discussion contributions personally because it does reflect on them like they wrote those bad biased arguments so if you say those arguments they wrote are biased 
[29:31]
that is very similar to calling them that is very similar to calling them biased i think the solution to this is in short for people to be more rational like you should be happy to find out about your biases your dishonesty and your uh your methodological problems like those are actually really important places to correct errors in but people tend to be extra hostile to correcting those errors anyways i think this stuff is basically not ignorable you can't just ignore a bunch of red flags for bias and then 
[30:02]
have a rational debate where they keep making mistakes due to their bias but you never talk about the bias and you just try to respond directly to what they're saying that is going to be really inefficient it's going to take a long time to decisively settle the debate quickly you have to respond to the actual main problem that's going on not be around the bush so what's the solution i don't know um there's the gradual approach people could just get more rational over time a few people could try some paths forward who are better at it or more interested in it or whatever and then that could set a good example 
[30:33]
people could see some rational debate sometimes and they could see when there is an irrational reaction a lot of times people in the audience will not sympathize with the person being sympathize with the person being irrational even if they would do the same thing in the same situation they often still won't sympathize with it they'll sympathize on the side of rationality because they want to pretend to be more rational than they are so you can do pass forward and if you offend some people often the people watching will not be offended sometimes they will but not always anyway so it could just kind of 
[31:03]
gradually grow and people could um they could see how people get offended and learn something from it and maybe get a like if you see a bunch of examples of people getting offended in debates and then you uh have a fee and you think about it over the course of several years and then you try to debate yourself maybe you'll do better at it because you've gotten a bit of a warning on some of the things that commonly go wrong and had time to digest it when it didn't threaten you personally or on the time span of generations it's even easier for progress to happen 
[31:34]
and also there are a lot of things people can do for self-improvement there's self-help type stuff and also just learning things you can study things learn more and that's going to things learn more and that's going to help but i don't have just a silver bullet for you dislike rationality you just like criticism here's the solution or here's a workaround that makes that irrelevant um i don't have like an easy answer for that so i think that's the main thing that holds back pass forward in the world is that people just aren't rational enough for a rational method like inventing a rational method is good but 
[32:05]
people have to have a significant amount of rationality to use it and i do have stuff explaining how to be rational stuff explaining how to be rational um you know like the yes or no philosophy like how to debate rationally all that but um it's hard to get people to engage with and learn that stuff partly because they don't pass forward there's a bit of a circular problem where they're making all these errors and then they have bad error correction mechanisms and then if you try to talk about the error correction mechanism problem they make a bunch of errors so you got stuck anyways if people would learn more about 
[32:37]
yes or no philosophy and decisive arguments that would help because a lot of why their debates are so long and indecisive as they make these inconclusive degree arguments and they make justification of positive they make justification of positive arguments and that type of argument is not suitable for actually reaching conclusions and resolving issues and so pass forward would seem a lot more like plausible and viable to people if they actually had a clue how to rationally debate to a conclusion relatively debate to a conclusion relatively quickly another thing that could help is that people knew more about social status 
[33:08]
people knew more about social status stuff so a lot of their dislike of criticism is related to status and if they consciously saw what social status games people are playing and all the social side of stuff that was going on was transparent to them or even if it was just partially transparent to those they saw in real time or even just reflecting on it within a few days what social status behavior people were doing and what was wrong with its flaws then they would do less of it it'd be easier also to criticize social status climbing behaviors in debates to 
[33:38]
point it out to people who know something about it instead of people something about it instead of people where they basically have to learn the topic from the ground up that's a good example of the type of metacriticism that people often don't like but which can settle debates a lot faster you can say hey i think you're wrong because of these various con you're doing social status climbing not rationality i think that's the problem here however explaining that to you would be really hard because you're missing all the prerequisites of understanding what 
[34:09]
social status climbing is and so on and so you should go read a few books and like learn about it and then come back and then we can continue the conversation at that point and if you say that kind of thing to people they get like really upset and they want they want to be able to have the conversation right now without going and developing any skills and i think that is an unreasonable thing to ask for if you say hey you can go learn more about this topic and then come back and we continue that is a path forward it is a way 
[34:40]
that they could continue it has some friction but it is not a hard blocker it's not a barrier with no way to get the air effects and it is not a blocker based on bias or social status there could be a bit of bias or social status involved because you could be more likely to put that kind of barrier in front of low status people or people that you're biased against but at least it's not a hard barrier of that type and if you are doing it in a biased way maybe hopefully someone will notice that 
[35:11]
and criticize it ask if i pass forward to point out your ask if i pass forward to point out your bias and how you implement your pass forward anyway i think pass forward can be seen in an inspiring way if you look at it and how it can reduce the impact of authority on people's lives and make truth matter more and how it could get so many errors corrected in the world and we could have a more rational world where everyone with a good idea can share their good idea with relevant share their good idea with relevant people that is such a nice vision of the world 
[35:42]
and it could solve a lot of specific problems like people in companies who are like here's this problem i see and i don't like putting up with that and my only real option is to quit and go get a different job at a company that's going to make its own error so there's no real solution or like start your own business but that's hard and not everyone can do it or they would have no employees and so it would be really nice for labor and so it would be really nice for labor if the suggestion box accompanies was not just a black hole 
[36:13]
and their good ideas could actually get listened to implemented debated to a listened to implemented debated to a conclusion where either something wrong with it is explained or it's used there are a lot of different concrete things where you can look at how pass forward would make this better it would be nice if i was trying to research health and diet and food and so on and there are actually people in the field who had passed forward who i could talk to and get some answers to questions and if i could take criticisms from each side of the debate and bounce them off each other although if people 
[36:44]
had passed forward that probably would have already been done you know someone who is on one side of the debate if the other side had passed forward would probably go and tell them forward would probably go and tell them some criticism and then i'd be able to see the results of that and so a lot more issues would be resolved instead of just the debate about nutrition and so on like gluten or vegetable oil is just like gluten or vegetable oil is just inconclusive and it's hard to sort out fact checking is another good example that applies to a lot of things you read a book and you wonder are these facts a book and you wonder are these facts true 
[37:14]
and there are just tons and tons of books where the authors do not have paths forward so even if a bunch of readers noticed factual errors there there's no forum where you could go and like check and see what criticisms of the book have been written criticisms of the book have been written and what the results of those debates were whereas if all the authors had passed whereas if all the authors had passed forward and the the debates they had were available on the internet then whenever you read a book you could go then look up the author's pass forward discussions and see if they got a bunch of facts see if they got a bunch of facts corrected and criticized and refuted from their 
[37:45]
book or not instead of having to just fact check yourself because you can't see what errors other people already noticed and for a lot of books it's not your field so it's hard to fact check there are a lot of people in a better position to fact check most topics than i am um they can just read the book and off hand notice some factual errors because they're familiar with that so it's it's a really good thing if fact checking is kind of crowdsourced so everyone who notices errors about 
[38:17]
whatever they know about they can all get put together into an overall fact check instead of one person doing check instead of one person doing everything so password would enable that but the current situation is basically no one wants to debate me and actually use my pass forward policy so that's sad i don't have the social status the fame the reputation to get a bunch of people from just the general public to take an interest in me and my own fans all basically just think i'm so much better than them and they will lose the debate 
[38:48]
really badly and are kind of scared off by that and don't think that they have any important correction for me they're just like oh elliot is so rational know so much stuff and they they struggle to think of anything i'm wrong about i think and then the other option is to go to other people's forums instead of my own except that there are like literally no good rational forums on the internet that are suitable that i can find and i have um for over a decade been asking 
[39:18]
for over a decade been asking [Music] for over a decade i've been asking if anyone else knows of a good forum i should try and i haven't really gotten any answers to that ever so yeah none of the people who talk about at my forum who who come and try my forum ever know of some some other one that they think might be better or or worthwhile or anything because yeah the obvious thing to do when you're not really popular you don't have a large following is to go to some other forum that is 
[39:48]
more popular instead of just relying on your own tiny form that you don't have the reputation to attract a lot of people to but um yeah i just don't know any like but um yeah i just don't know any like that so if you think you do please tell me that is a thing that i'd be particularly interested in pass forward about i'd be particularly happy to debate if you bring up a forum i can say why i think it's not rational or i can try it or it's not rational or i can try it or whatever because i would like a forum where i could get more criticism for my philosophy ideas 
[40:20]
if there's anything wrong with yes or no philosophy or pass forward or my other ideas i would like to find out about that if anyone knows of errors in them if there's some problem that other people already know about and understand i'd like to find out that's all okay the end