Scott Alexander, over at slatestarcodex.com, has hit a number of home runs in the last few weeks. I want to focus on his March 6 post, “Socratic Grilling.” To follow what I’m going to say, you need to read his post first. His posts are often very long, but the March 6 one is relatively short.
I’ve been practicing my own version of what Scott calls Socratic grilling since about the age of 5. I badly wanted to understand things around me. Even though I learned to read at age 5, I wasn’t much of a reader and, although we had a public library in my town of 1,200 people, it was a small library. For my first few years of reading, I focused on Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books.
My way of learning was not to read but to ask adults around me to explain things. When I got only a few thoughts that seemed to fit, I would then adopt a position and argue it, being open to being shown that that was wrong. You could say I was a Bayesian. I found it much easier to take definite positions than to be agnostic because if I was agnostic, I was less motivated to find the truth. I’m still that way.
I was also very literal and still am. So, for example, when I was about 12, the janitor of my church, an older man, took a liking to me and I liked him, and he invited me to his and his wife’s place on a Sunday afternoon. We got talking about politics, of which I knew next to nothing, and he made the claim that the newly formed New Democratic Party was communist. I said that was false. He insisted it was true. I made my mother the arbiter. I called her up and asked her if it was true. She said it was false and I handed the phone to my friend so she could tell him. I now realize that probably he was saying they were communist inclined and there was some truth to that for the more extreme members. But then he should have said that.
About 3 weeks ago, I started thinking, based on my reading, that we would have somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 U.S. deaths from COVID-19. So I stated the minimum 200,000 number on discussions of various people’s Facebook posts, hoping to have people argue back and say I was either overstating or understating. One person who disagreed with me and thought I was too pessimistic was my friend and co-author Charley Hooper. So I called him a few weeks ago to find out why. He walked me through his reasoning, based on the Diamond Princess cruise ship data, and I kind of filled in some of my own numbers, to come up with my position.
In the midst of it, I made a bet. Whereas my co-blogger Bryan Caplan bets to make people stand by their claims and his George Mason University colleague Alex Tabarrok says, “A bet is a tax on bulls**t,” my motivation is somewhat different. There’s an overlap: I want to make other people stand by their claims. But I also want to make myself stand by my claims. In other words, I want to tax my own thing that rhymes with pullkit. I want to motivate myself to get the right answer. And both prepping for the bet and making the bet motivate me. Before the bet, I think carefully with money at stake. After the bet, I’m more motivated to keep thinking.
I think sometimes friends on Facebook who think they know me are surprised. I’ll make a casual assertion, when there’s no money at stake, and then wait and see what other FB friends, many of whom are very smart and very thoughtful, will say. I’ve been doing that particularly with the COVID-19 issue. After seeing what they say, I sometimes thank them for the thoughtful discussion because I learned from it. In one case recently that was not about COVID-19 per se but, instead, was about Donald Trump’s handling of it, the comments caused me to completely switch my position. I explained to one of the other commenters that that did not motivate me to delete the post because there was a lot of good learning that went on, for me certainly and probably for other readers.
One friend recently said on his own post on FB, in no uncertain terms, that people who are not epidemiologists should, essentially, quit opining about the epidemiology of the COVID-19 issue. What rubbed me the wrong way was not mainly the anger with which he expressed it. More fundamentally, it went against my Socratic way of learning.
READER COMMENTS
Daniel Klein
Apr 3 2020 at 2:22am
In their books, great thinkers have practiced the Socratic method with what Arthur Melzer calls pedagogical esotericism.
john hare
Apr 3 2020 at 4:33am
I have used something similar at various times. It takes a fair amount of patience and focus to work effectively. When trying to get to the core of an issue, it is quite possible to infuriate one that is pretending to be an expert, especially when they don’t even realize that they are pretending. Mentioned in the link as the “internet anti-didactic”.
Also sometimes there is a time factor such as when two of you are lifting something heavy and one wants to discuss it while the load is in the air.
Phil H
Apr 3 2020 at 5:12am
“quit opining about the epidemiology…went against my Socratic way of learning”
This must be right, because you can’t stop people saying stuff. On the other hand, it is a very recognisable phenomenon that people become very attached to things that they have said. It happens to me on here all the time – I make a comment, someone challenges it, and even if I wasn’t very sure or committed to my comment originally, I end up defending it, probably too vigorously.
So I’m a big fan of consciously maintaining areas that I don’t know about, where I force myself to say “I don’t know” on issue X, because I don’t know enough about it, and it would only muddle my own minimal/nascent thinking to take an actual position.
Shane L
Apr 3 2020 at 9:04am
Around 2006 I joined some very busy online discussion forums on the Orkut social media site, and my experience there developed into an informal Socratic Grilling. It was imperfect, as some members just wanted to stir up trouble and some were too angry to deal with challenges to their ideas, but people did rigorously debate contentious issues in ways that helped both parties. I found it a source of fantastic intellectual stimulation and it changed my views on many issues. Orkut folded a few years ago and I have yet to find a good replacement. Real life definitely doesn’t match! The internet is a strange place where people can demand evidence for claims, and frequently it is possible to provide that evidence with links.
Thaomas
Apr 3 2020 at 9:56am
This is, or at least I like to think it is, the point of my commenting in this and other blogs. I want to know exactly why I do not agree with a position as stated. Or exactly what is wrong with a position I state.
Dylan
Apr 3 2020 at 11:44am
That goes for me too. I found that IRL, even in such settings where it seemed appropriate like school, I annoy people if I ask too many questions. In the comment sections of a blog I might also annoy people, but here it is easier to just stop responding once a person is done with my questions, so that’s a plus.
Mario J Rizzo
Apr 3 2020 at 3:02pm
Have you ever tried “Socratic grilling” on undergraduate students? I know it is sometimes used in law schools and law professors get away with it. However, I used to do this. But I stopped. Undergraduates get upset. And now there is the whole “micro-aggression” thing. Education is down the tubes. (I hope I exaggerate.)
Mario
David Henderson
Apr 3 2020 at 3:21pm
Mario,
I haven’t. The only time I taught undergrads was from September 1980 to December 1981 at Santa Clara University.
But I did do it with military officers in their late 20s to early 40s. The key is to be really gentle and to back off when you see them getting upset. I think I was more successful at that than most because the students learned pretty early in the quarter that I loved them, and so they understood what my goal was.
The other key is to let them do it to you. I still remember one of my students, Carlos Iglesias, doing it with me and getting me to admit that a major part of one of my articles on antiwar.com was wrong.
Related to the paragraph directly above, when you feel them setting a trap, you, as someone who can generally get out of a trap because you know the area so well, need to help them set the trap. They can start with something and get diverted whereas you, seeing the trap ahead, can help them avoid that diversion and keep you heading to the trap.
Alan Goldhammer
Apr 3 2020 at 3:13pm
Very good post. I’m reminded of the movie and later TV show “Paper Chase” with John Houseman as the law professor whose Socratic dialogues with students were a classic of the genre. He won an Oscar for the performance.
David Henderson
Apr 3 2020 at 4:05pm
Thanks, Alan.
nobody.really
Apr 3 2020 at 4:09pm
Me, too. At least, I think so. But maybe not.
Come to think of it, no—ish.
I understand the Socratic method as posing questions designed to achieve clarity in a responder’s statements—and, often, to illustrate contradictions in the responder’s thinking. But calling your mom is just an appeal to authority. In contrast, consider Henderson’s final paragraph:
Here, Henderson demonstrates an aversion to an appeal to authority.
Scott Alexander has noted a distinction between two world views. In one, people regard intellectual pursuits as a kind of joint enterprise wherein people may make mistakes, but they focus on resolving a mystery. In another, people are members of warring tribes, and disagreement merely reflects which tribe you’re on. When Henderson praises the Socratic method, I sense he praises a perspective that regards intellectual pursuits as a joint exercise in uncovering mysteries.
That said, how do wagers influence this worldview? As a practical matter, I sense that people do not like being perceived as having made a mistake. Again, if we truly regard ourselves as in a joint effort to uncover mysteries, we would transcend our egos–but in practice, people have difficulty doing that. Thus, as a fall-back position, I strive to avoid doing things that put my ego at risk. This includes making predictions. If I can avoid tying myself to a given conclusion, I will avoid burdening myself with the motivation to interpret new data in a way designed to justify my prior statements, leaving myself free to interpret new data on their own merits.
In short, I don’t dig wagers. Sometimes we cannot avoid them–but I don’t go looking for opportunities to engage in them.
nobody.really
Apr 3 2020 at 4:32pm
Indeed, what purpose do wagers serve?
After all, we can simply set forth our evidence, reasoning, and conclusions, and leave it at that. Perhaps my evidence, reasons, and conclusions persuade you, and perhaps they don’t. After all, if you choose to engage in the discussion, I expect you will exercise your own judgment–and your judgment may differ from mine.
But a wager turns a factual question about a mystery (“How many people will COVID-19 kill by the end of the year?”) into a test of someone’s cleverness (“nobody.really bet that it would be between 200,000 and 240,000–and she was right!”) That conclusion may enhance my prestige, leading more people to defer to my judgments in the future rather than struggling to form their own. In short, wagers help me achieve the status of expert–precisely the status that the Socratic method does not grant. Thus, I find it odd to praise wagers and the Socratic method in the same post.
Weir
Apr 3 2020 at 11:36pm
Newspapers put their astrologers on the front page now and label it news analysis. Or other times it’s presented as just objective reporting. But it’s about the future, so it’s a prediction. Not facts.
But there was value in maintaining a certain professionalism, when that was something journalists could aspire to. As long as they reported both sides of the story, they didn’t end up chained to their opinions. They weren’t only setting out the one view that they like.
Now they’re on record with what must be done. Now they’re on Twitter competing with the late night hosts, picking fights with people.
And everyone on Twitter is in the same position. It’s like the difference between a pre-literate society and the invention of writing. A gadfly can talk with different people in town and never write anything down. It’s a dialogue. There’s no fortress to defend. No holy writ.
Once you start etching this stuff in stone you want to defend it for its own sake, right or wrong. Wrong, especially, because you think you’ll lose face. Krugtron the Invincible can’t admit to learning anything he didn’t already know.
Reporters on Twitter and old people on Facebook aren’t suspending judgment or keeping an open mind, the way they used to in their more philosophical moods. They were more open to discussion before the discussion was written down.
David Seltzer
Apr 4 2020 at 11:05am
Interesting post David. Anecdote. When I was a grad student at U of C GSB, now Booth, the great statistician Harry Roberts opined, an intellectual is both curious and skeptical. Scientific inquiry, to my mind, is the foundation of agnosticism. Hence the Socratic method is employed to accept or reject an hypothesis in pursuit of truth.
David Henderson
Apr 4 2020 at 11:54am
Thanks, David. Everything I hear about Harry Roberts is good. I have a close friend who was in grad school with me at UCLA and was on the faculty of the B school in the late 1970s and 1980s, and he’s the first person who told me about Harry.
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