No disagreement there, specific arguments ought to be considered. However, in my experience, if someone tells you that you have an obligation to do something (pray to $god, donate to $cause, enlist in $military, vote for $candidate, …), they are not to be trusted with putting forth arguments, or even estimating prior[itie]s. So, ignore people like that entirely and do your own research from scratch.
So the heuristic is to only consider arguments that don’t claim to be leading to any (novel/actionable) conclusions? This rule decides at the bottom line, stopping consideration of arguments that don’t conclude with uncertainty or close match to intuitively natural desires, which would be bad if conclusions not of that form turn out to be knowably correct.
If you remain specific, you may get rid of “pray to $god”, but not other similar things, “donate to $cause that’s known to be worthless”, but not other similar things, etc. That should lift most of the load without as many false negatives.
No disagreement there, specific arguments ought to be considered. However, in my experience, if someone tells you that you have an obligation to do something (pray to $god, donate to $cause, enlist in $military, vote for $candidate, …), they are not to be trusted with putting forth arguments, or even estimating prior[itie]s. So, ignore people like that entirely and do your own research from scratch.
So the heuristic is to only consider arguments that don’t claim to be leading to any (novel/actionable) conclusions? This rule decides at the bottom line, stopping consideration of arguments that don’t conclude with uncertainty or close match to intuitively natural desires, which would be bad if conclusions not of that form turn out to be knowably correct.
If you remain specific, you may get rid of “pray to $god”, but not other similar things, “donate to $cause that’s known to be worthless”, but not other similar things, etc. That should lift most of the load without as many false negatives.