“Psychologizing” is when we go past arguing that a position is in fact wrong, and start considering what could have gone wrong in people’s minds to make them believe something so wrong. Realistically, we can’t entirely avoid psychologizing—sometimes cognitive biases are real and understanding how they potentially apply is important. Nonetheless, since psychologizing is potentially a pernicious and poisonous activity, Arbital’s discussion norms say to explicitly tag or greenlink with “Psychologizing” each place where you speculate about the psychology of how people could possibly be so wrong. Again, psychologizing isn’t necessarily wrong—sometimes people do make mistakes for systematic psychological reasons that are understandable—but it’s dangerous, potentially degenerates extremely quickly, and deserves to be highlighted each and every time.
If you go off on an extended discourse about why somebody is mentally biased or thinking poorly, before you’ve argued on the object level that they are in fact mistaken about the subject matter, this is Bulverism. - Arbital
plex comments on AGI in our lifetimes is wishful thinking