standards of most of his other posts, where he assumes both sides are reasonable and have useful perspectives
Scott’s flavor of charity is not quite this. It wouldn’t be useful for understanding sides that are not reasonable or have useless perspectives otherwise, or else you’d need to routinely “assume” false things to carry out the exercise.
The point is to meaningfully engage with other perspectives, without the usual prerequisite of having positive beliefs about them. Treating them in a similar way as if they were reasonable or useful, even when they clearly aren’t. Sometimes the resulting investigation changes one’s mind on this point. But often it doesn’t, while still revealing many details that wouldn’t otherwise be noticed. Actually intervening on your own beliefs would be self-deception, while treating useless and unreasonable views as they are usually treated wouldn’t be charity.
This is related to tolerance, where the point isn’t to start liking people you don’t like, or to start considering them part of your own ingroup. It’s instead an intervention/norm that goes around the dislike to remove some of its downsides without directly removing the dislike itself.
Scott’s flavor of charity is not quite this. It wouldn’t be useful for understanding sides that are not reasonable or have useless perspectives otherwise, or else you’d need to routinely “assume” false things to carry out the exercise.
The point is to meaningfully engage with other perspectives, without the usual prerequisite of having positive beliefs about them. Treating them in a similar way as if they were reasonable or useful, even when they clearly aren’t. Sometimes the resulting investigation changes one’s mind on this point. But often it doesn’t, while still revealing many details that wouldn’t otherwise be noticed. Actually intervening on your own beliefs would be self-deception, while treating useless and unreasonable views as they are usually treated wouldn’t be charity.
This is related to tolerance, where the point isn’t to start liking people you don’t like, or to start considering them part of your own ingroup. It’s instead an intervention/norm that goes around the dislike to remove some of its downsides without directly removing the dislike itself.