This is great, the parenting connection is great, and lately there's additional material available in the social/psych literatures about the prerequisites necessary for collaborative cognitive mistake/error-correction. Both the "rational mistake correction" conversation or even a "self-interested bargaining negotiation" conversation require non-trivial social/tribal trust as the context for information exchange or agreement, which as you said can be psychologically hijacked by emotional threat. Negotiation theory also has some really good stuff about finding specific mutual shared interests/values even in the presence of otherwise divergent interest/values, which I think relates to your earlier "Tradeoffs are not Opposites," but again would have trust/benevolence prereqs.
The last section of the piece seems key! Probably as you said the real idea would be a more "situationist" theory, seeking to characterize the degree of benevolence/malevolence in the situation, and the specific convergent/divergent interests, goals, values in play, and to see which ones of those are dynamic vs. static in the situation.
A related typology I've come up with is to break down conflict theory and mistake theory into two.
Mistake theory (disagreements originate in mistakes):
* ability erisology: some people are smarter (or otherwise better) than others and this leads to disagreements between the informed and the uninformed
* standpoint erisology: people have different experiences, leading to different beliefs, and if they cannot pool their info to come to a shared set of knowledge, then they end up persistently disagreeing
Conflict theory (disagreements originate in conflict):
* battle erisology: some people represent concerns that are in tension with your concerns and they are trying to promote their concerns by spreading lies and interfering in communication
* trauma erisology: different people have had different negative experiences that makes them avoid different sources of information, leading to them having different opinions due to their different sources of information
Here, trauma erisology seems to match the benevolence perspective you bring up, while battle erisology matches your original definition of conflict theory. "This person is incredibly ignorant or stupid" also seems related to ability erisology.
You make a very basic error fairly early on in the argument. Firstly you correctly point out that a mistake theorist is more likely to be interested in debate and a conflict theorist in hurting their opponents. But then you very quickly end up conflating these ideas and treating "trying to debate people" with being a mistake theorist. They're not the same thing! A mistake theorist who gets fed up of their opponents refusing to debate and resorts to smearing them on social media is still a mistake theorist. Likewise a conflict theorist might try to convince their opponents that what they want actually aligns well with their opponents (different) values; they're still a conflict theorist.
(Obviously no one is literally 100% conflict or 100% mistake; and obviously reality includes both kinds of dispute; we're not talking absolute here, just degrees)
Scott has written a much more recent article on this subject, so there's not much point in rehashing the whole of that here. But I think the example of vaccines is very telling. This is an arena where mistake theory is *clearly* correct; both sides want the same thing- health for themselves and their children. It doesn't matter how partisan and nasty the conversation gets or how little productive debate happens, fundamentally the issue is still about one side making a mistake, not genuinely different values. Even if all relevant actors are primarily conflict theorists; mistake theory describes the world correctly; the conflict theorists are just wrong.
This is great, the parenting connection is great, and lately there's additional material available in the social/psych literatures about the prerequisites necessary for collaborative cognitive mistake/error-correction. Both the "rational mistake correction" conversation or even a "self-interested bargaining negotiation" conversation require non-trivial social/tribal trust as the context for information exchange or agreement, which as you said can be psychologically hijacked by emotional threat. Negotiation theory also has some really good stuff about finding specific mutual shared interests/values even in the presence of otherwise divergent interest/values, which I think relates to your earlier "Tradeoffs are not Opposites," but again would have trust/benevolence prereqs.
The last section of the piece seems key! Probably as you said the real idea would be a more "situationist" theory, seeking to characterize the degree of benevolence/malevolence in the situation, and the specific convergent/divergent interests, goals, values in play, and to see which ones of those are dynamic vs. static in the situation.
A related typology I've come up with is to break down conflict theory and mistake theory into two.
Mistake theory (disagreements originate in mistakes):
* ability erisology: some people are smarter (or otherwise better) than others and this leads to disagreements between the informed and the uninformed
* standpoint erisology: people have different experiences, leading to different beliefs, and if they cannot pool their info to come to a shared set of knowledge, then they end up persistently disagreeing
Conflict theory (disagreements originate in conflict):
* battle erisology: some people represent concerns that are in tension with your concerns and they are trying to promote their concerns by spreading lies and interfering in communication
* trauma erisology: different people have had different negative experiences that makes them avoid different sources of information, leading to them having different opinions due to their different sources of information
Here, trauma erisology seems to match the benevolence perspective you bring up, while battle erisology matches your original definition of conflict theory. "This person is incredibly ignorant or stupid" also seems related to ability erisology.
I think this is not a good take.
You make a very basic error fairly early on in the argument. Firstly you correctly point out that a mistake theorist is more likely to be interested in debate and a conflict theorist in hurting their opponents. But then you very quickly end up conflating these ideas and treating "trying to debate people" with being a mistake theorist. They're not the same thing! A mistake theorist who gets fed up of their opponents refusing to debate and resorts to smearing them on social media is still a mistake theorist. Likewise a conflict theorist might try to convince their opponents that what they want actually aligns well with their opponents (different) values; they're still a conflict theorist.
(Obviously no one is literally 100% conflict or 100% mistake; and obviously reality includes both kinds of dispute; we're not talking absolute here, just degrees)
Scott has written a much more recent article on this subject, so there's not much point in rehashing the whole of that here. But I think the example of vaccines is very telling. This is an arena where mistake theory is *clearly* correct; both sides want the same thing- health for themselves and their children. It doesn't matter how partisan and nasty the conversation gets or how little productive debate happens, fundamentally the issue is still about one side making a mistake, not genuinely different values. Even if all relevant actors are primarily conflict theorists; mistake theory describes the world correctly; the conflict theorists are just wrong.