Don't diagnose your opponents

When you disagree with someone, there are two paths forward. The first is to try to engage with what they’re saying: what their reasons are, whether their position is true, what evidence could be brought to bear, and so on. The second is to diagnose them: to engage with the second-order question of why they’re saying it. For instance, if you’re arguing with somebody about microservices1, you could say “well, you only like microservices because you want to polish your resume”, or “you only like monoliths because you’re scared of distributed systems”. This happens a lot in online arguments. On the question “are AI models improving”, some anti-AI people will argue that people only think so because AI psychosis is rotting their brain, and the dumber they get, the smarter AI models seem in comparison. Likewise, many pro-AI people argue that people only disagree because they’re Luddites, or scared of change, and so on. None of these arguments are about the quality of AI models. It feels so…