casually talking about how ‘some views’ ought to be considered unacceptable for the sake of our community!
I don’t understand what this is referring to. This discussion was always about epistemic norms, not object-level positions, although I agree that this could have been made clearer. From the OP:
I myself was wrong to engage with them as if their beliefs had cruxes that would respond to things like argument and evidence.
To be clear, I’m also unhappy with the way Duncan wrote the snark paragraph, and I personally would have either omitted it or been more specific about what I thought was bad.
I myself was wrong to engage with them as if their beliefs had cruxes that would respond to things like argument and evidence.
This is a fully-general-counterargument to any sort of involvement by people with even middling real-world concerns in LW2 - so if you mean to cite this remark approvingly as an example of how we should enforce our own standard of “perfectly rational” epistemic norms, I really have to oppose this. It is simply a fact about human psychology that “things like argument and evidence” are perhaps necessary but not sufficient to change people’s minds about issues of morality or politics that they actually care about, in a deep sense! This is the whole reason why Bernard Crick developed his own list of political virtues which I cited earlier in this very comment section. We should be very careful about this, and not let non-central examples on the object level skew our thinking about these matters.
I don’t understand what this is referring to. This discussion was always about epistemic norms, not object-level positions, although I agree that this could have been made clearer. From the OP:
To be clear, I’m also unhappy with the way Duncan wrote the snark paragraph, and I personally would have either omitted it or been more specific about what I thought was bad.
This is a fully-general-counterargument to any sort of involvement by people with even middling real-world concerns in LW2 - so if you mean to cite this remark approvingly as an example of how we should enforce our own standard of “perfectly rational” epistemic norms, I really have to oppose this. It is simply a fact about human psychology that “things like argument and evidence” are perhaps necessary but not sufficient to change people’s minds about issues of morality or politics that they actually care about, in a deep sense! This is the whole reason why Bernard Crick developed his own list of political virtues which I cited earlier in this very comment section. We should be very careful about this, and not let non-central examples on the object level skew our thinking about these matters.