That works if you assiduously and diligently and without flaw, start paying attention after no more than the third time you hear the idea advocated, and without using the idea itself to judge untrustworthy those who otherwise see competent.
In practice, people usually reject the idea itself and go on rejecting it, when they claim to be acting under cover of rejecting people. Consider those who die of rejecting cryonics; consider what policy they would have to follow in order to not do that. What good is it to quickly reject bad ideas if you quickly reject good ideas as well? Discrimination is the whole trick here.
I suppose we might have no recourse but to judge people and shut our ears to most of them, in the Internet age, but to say that we “lose so little” far understates the danger of a very dangerous policy.
I agree that people often don’t make the necessary distinction between ideas they have evidence against, and unevaluated ideas they’ve been ignoring because they’ve only heard them advocated by kooks. As you point out, only ideas in the prior category properly discredit their advocates.
There’s more than just the one non-failure mode to this kind of thing. My method involves taking the time to consider the information gathered up to the point where I decided to stop listening to the person, as if I hadn’t stopped listening to them at all. Information that I would’ve gotten from them after that point isn’t affected by my opinion of them, since I haven’t heard it (where it would be, if I were distracted by thinking ‘this person’s an idiot’ as I listened to them), and I give as fair of a trial as I’m able to to the rest.
It may also be noteworthy that I didn’t judge him for an argument he was making, and I make something of a point of not doing so unless the logic being used is painfully bad. (Tangential realization: That’s why activists who aren’t willing to have any 101-level discussions with newbies get a (mild) negative reaction from me; discarding a whole avenues of discourse like that cuts off a valuable, if noisy, source of information.)
That works if you assiduously and diligently and without flaw, start paying attention after no more than the third time you hear the idea advocated, and without using the idea itself to judge untrustworthy those who otherwise see competent.
In practice, people usually reject the idea itself and go on rejecting it, when they claim to be acting under cover of rejecting people. Consider those who die of rejecting cryonics; consider what policy they would have to follow in order to not do that. What good is it to quickly reject bad ideas if you quickly reject good ideas as well? Discrimination is the whole trick here.
I suppose we might have no recourse but to judge people and shut our ears to most of them, in the Internet age, but to say that we “lose so little” far understates the danger of a very dangerous policy.
I agree that people often don’t make the necessary distinction between ideas they have evidence against, and unevaluated ideas they’ve been ignoring because they’ve only heard them advocated by kooks. As you point out, only ideas in the prior category properly discredit their advocates.
There’s more than just the one non-failure mode to this kind of thing. My method involves taking the time to consider the information gathered up to the point where I decided to stop listening to the person, as if I hadn’t stopped listening to them at all. Information that I would’ve gotten from them after that point isn’t affected by my opinion of them, since I haven’t heard it (where it would be, if I were distracted by thinking ‘this person’s an idiot’ as I listened to them), and I give as fair of a trial as I’m able to to the rest.
It may also be noteworthy that I didn’t judge him for an argument he was making, and I make something of a point of not doing so unless the logic being used is painfully bad. (Tangential realization: That’s why activists who aren’t willing to have any 101-level discussions with newbies get a (mild) negative reaction from me; discarding a whole avenues of discourse like that cuts off a valuable, if noisy, source of information.)