People mastering different topics can lead to conflicts.
And how Open-Mindedness can help prevent such meaningless conflicts.
Conflicts can result from benign differences in expertise.
Alice and Bob
Let's consider Alice and Bob. Alice is a technologist. Bob is an artist.
For her entire life, Alice built new technology and grasped how technology can improve people's lives. For his entire life, Bob created new art and grasped how art can improve people's lives.
The two of them have long time horizons: they expect the consequences of their actions to materialise in years or decades.
One day, they meet. They talk. A lot. Then, they start debating about the best way to improve the world. And they start hating each other.
Alice realises that Bob doesn't care about technology. He doesn't put any effort into fostering good technology usage and has never invested time or money in helping an important piece of technology be developed.
Bob thinks Alice is crazy about some random technological bullshit. And that she is so crazy that she ignores the heart of people, the natural beauty of nature and art.
This is sad, but it makes sense.
Analysis
From Alice point of view, the consequences of technological development are predictable. She has a strong grasp of how different technologies can be more helpful than others. How, without strong constraints, social media can easily devolve into hell. This is why she spends all of her energy on technology: it is a clear, tractable way to change things.
On the contrary, art is unpredictable: she can't know in advance what novel or movie will change people's beliefs or help them move forward in their lives. Why should she put energy into something so random? It is not that art is useless in itself. From her point of view, it would obviously be great if you could help people at scale through art. But as it stands, it just seems like she can't do much.
The situation is reversed for Bob. He cannot guess which technology will be good or not. So why bother? Better to focus on having people become better as human beings so that we get our shit together and make the best of whatever is coming our way.
But in the end, it looks like Alice doesn't care about art and that Bob doesn't care about technology. And they fight. Because we have limited resources, Alice would prefer them assigned to technological development, while Bob wants to patronise the arts.
More Analysis
Sometimes, people have different core values, and this ends in conflicts.
Sometimes, people have unresolved trauma, which leads to different superficial values, which then ends in conflicts.
Sometimes, people hold different beliefs, and it seems to them that they have different values, which leads to conflicts.
But sometimes, things are even more tragic. While people hold the same values and similar beliefs, they differ in expertise. If they both became experts in their mutual domains, it would be much easier to agree on a common plan featuring the best of both domains. Unfortunately, in that state, it still ends in conflicts.
Same Reality.
Disagreement
We all live in the Real World. It is objective: we all see, hear, and bathe in it.
This means that by default, as long as we are not too stupid or in bad faith, we should quickly resolve objective disagreements about facts, reasonings or predictions. There are theorems about this.
Unfortunately, good-faith smart people keep disagreeing about objective matters. What gives?
I do not purport to give an ultimate answer. I just want to explore one aspect of the problem and its solution.
Non Overlapping Beliefs - Abstract
It is easy to resolve overlapping beliefs.
Let's start with an abstract example: a die is cast.
By default, we can represent our beliefs about the result like so:
1 → 1/6 ; 2 → 1/6 ; 3 → 1/6 ; 4 → 1/6 ; 5 → 1/6 ; 6 → 1/6
Now, Alice learnt that the result was even. Then, her beliefs would be:
1 → 0 ; 2 → 1/3 ; 3 → 0 ; 4 → 1/3 ; 5 → 0 ; 6 → 1/3
Separately, Bob learnt that the result was greater than or equal to 4. Then, his beliefs would be:
1 → 0 ; 2 → 0 ; 3 → 0 ; 4 → 1/3 ; 5 → 1/3 ; 6 → 1/3
If they put their information in common, they can exclude their mutual impossibilities and agree on new beliefs. For instance:
1 → 0 ; 2 → 0 ; 3 → 0 ; 4 → 1/2 ; 5 → 0 ; 6 → 1/2
But what would a resolution look like if their beliefs had no overlap? If Alice believed that the die could only land on 1 or 2, and Bob believed that the die could only land on 5 or 6? In that case, there is no possible resolution. They are assuming that they are mutually 100% wrong.
Non Overlapping Beliefs - Concrete
Ok, the previous example was a bit abstract. Let's move on to a more concrete one.
Let's say Alice and Bob are both trying to model their country's future so that they can make the best political choices in the upcoming elections.
Alice is a technologist, and Bob is an artist. Because of the considerations mentioned earlier in the post, she slips from "I do not know how to reason about Art" to "People do not know how to reason about Art", "Art can't be reasoned", "Art can't be relied upon for the future", and finally, "Art will have no impact in the future",
Conversely, with Bob and science, at that point, there is no possible reconciliation between their beliefs. There is no longer any overlap.
Alice should have kept open the possibility that there was a way to change the world through art, and Bob that there was a way to change the world through technology. If they did so, without even sharing their expertise, they could easily come up with some reconciliation: Alice could increase the probability of there being some Art solution, Bob of there being some Technological solution. As a result, they might agree to dedicate some resources to both and help each other when relevant.
Solution: Universal Priors and Open-Mindedness
Now that the problem is clarified, what is the solution? How can we ensure that any pair of people's beliefs overlap enough to resolve contradiction?
The mathematical solution is called a universal prior, that is, a prior that assigns some probability to every possible hypothesis.
In real life, this is called Open Mindedness. The skill of considering new theories seriously. It involves remembering that others' points of view might hold a grain of truth, regardless of how crazy they seem to you.
Unfortunately, we have limited time, energy and attention: we should not proactively consider every theory under the sky. This is how one Giga-Brain themselves. Real-life Open Mindedness is not about trying all drugs or obsessively reading all conspiracy theories.
It is more of a "lazy" strategy. This means that, by default, Open-Mindedness doesn't dictate that we change what we do.
Instead, Open-Mindedness kicks in at specific times. For instance, when, despite our efforts, we get stuck in a problem, fail to understand what someone is saying, or stay too confused to reason about a situation.
In that situation, Open-Mindedness says we should pause before doing more of the same, investing more energy, putting in more time, or getting more angry in a debate. During that pause, we should consider whether our approach altogether is wrong, fruitless or too expensive.
As long as Alice and Bob are open-minded, it does not matter whether Alice has ever developed some sensitivity to art or whether Bob reads scientific magazines for fun. They can debate, and when they start being frustrated, they notice that they might both be wrong, completely missing an entire chunk of reality.
Have a nice day!