Even in the complete absence of personal consequences, expressing unpopular opinions still brings disrepute on other opinions that are logically related or held by the same people. E.g., if hypothetically there were a surprisingly strong argument for murdering puppies, I would keep it to myself, because only people who care about surprisingly strong arguments would accept it, and others would hate them for it, impeding their ability to do all the less horrible and more important things that there are surprisingly strong arguments for.
In this case the principle that leaves the state of evidence undisturbed is to keep any argument for not murdering puppies to yourself as well, for otherwise you in expectation would create filtered evidence in favor of not murdering puppies.
This is analogous to trial preregistration, you just do the preregistration like an updateless agent, committing to act as if you’ve preregistered to speak publicly on any topic on which you are about to speak regardless of what it turns out you have to say on it. This either prompts you to say a socially costly thing (if you judge the preregistration a good deal) or to stay silent on a socially neutral or approved thing (if the preregistration doesn’t look like a good deal).
If people would think badly upon my community for acting righteously then I welcome their transient disdain as proof that I am saying something worth saying.
You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.
Obviously the idea is not to never risk making enemies, but the future is to some extent a hostage negotiation, and, airy rhetoric aside, it’s a bad idea to insult a hostage taker’s mother, causing him to murder lots of hostages, even if she’s genuinely a bad person who deserves to be called out.
You don’t talk about because you want others to accept your position. You talk about it, so others have a chance to convince you to abandon that position, either for you to take theirs or something entirely different. How do you know that you’ve read everything to take up your position if you don’t bother giving others who have put into their own time and thoughts into this a chance to present their arguments? But at the end of the day, we just gotta what we gotta do that makes us happy.
Even in the complete absence of personal consequences, expressing unpopular opinions still brings disrepute on other opinions that are logically related or held by the same people. E.g., if hypothetically there were a surprisingly strong argument for murdering puppies, I would keep it to myself, because only people who care about surprisingly strong arguments would accept it, and others would hate them for it, impeding their ability to do all the less horrible and more important things that there are surprisingly strong arguments for.
In this case the principle that leaves the state of evidence undisturbed is to keep any argument for not murdering puppies to yourself as well, for otherwise you in expectation would create filtered evidence in favor of not murdering puppies.
This is analogous to trial preregistration, you just do the preregistration like an updateless agent, committing to act as if you’ve preregistered to speak publicly on any topic on which you are about to speak regardless of what it turns out you have to say on it. This either prompts you to say a socially costly thing (if you judge the preregistration a good deal) or to stay silent on a socially neutral or approved thing (if the preregistration doesn’t look like a good deal).
If people would think badly upon my community for acting righteously then I welcome their transient disdain as proof that I am saying something worth saying.
Obviously the idea is not to never risk making enemies, but the future is to some extent a hostage negotiation, and, airy rhetoric aside, it’s a bad idea to insult a hostage taker’s mother, causing him to murder lots of hostages, even if she’s genuinely a bad person who deserves to be called out.
You don’t talk about because you want others to accept your position. You talk about it, so others have a chance to convince you to abandon that position, either for you to take theirs or something entirely different. How do you know that you’ve read everything to take up your position if you don’t bother giving others who have put into their own time and thoughts into this a chance to present their arguments? But at the end of the day, we just gotta what we gotta do that makes us happy.