almost every single major ideology has some strawman that the general population commonly imagines when they think of the ideology. a major source of cohesion within the ideology comes from a shared feeling of injustice from being misunderstood.
There are some people that I’ve found to be very consistently thoughtful—when we disagree, the crux is often something interesting and often causes me to realize that I overlooked an important consideration. I respect people like this a lot, even if we disagree a lot. I think talking to people like this is a good antidote to digging yourself into a position.
On the other hand, there are some people I’ve talked to where I feel like the conversation always runs in circles so it’s impossible to pin down a crux, or they always retreat to increasingly deranged positions to avoid admitting being wrong, or they seem to constantly pattern match my argument to something vaguely similar instead of understanding my argument. I think arguing against people like this too much is actively harmful for your epistemics, because you’ll start digging yourself into your positions, and you’ll get used to thinking that everyone who disagrees with you is wrong. There are a bunch of people (most notably Eliezer) who seem to me to have gone too far down this path.
On the other side of the aisle, I don’t know exactly how to consistently become more thoughtful, but I think one good starting point is getting good at deeply understanding people’s viewpoints.
The people who understand the proper interpretation of the ideology can feel intellectually superior to those who don’t. Also, people who misunderstand something are by definition wrong… and therefore the people who understand the ideology correctly must—quite logically—be right!
(An equivocation between “be right about what is the correct interpretation of the ideology” and “be right about whether the ideology correctly describes the reality”.)
almost every single major ideology has some strawman that the general population commonly imagines when they think of the ideology. a major source of cohesion within the ideology comes from a shared feeling of injustice from being misunderstood.
There are some people that I’ve found to be very consistently thoughtful—when we disagree, the crux is often something interesting and often causes me to realize that I overlooked an important consideration. I respect people like this a lot, even if we disagree a lot. I think talking to people like this is a good antidote to digging yourself into a position.
On the other hand, there are some people I’ve talked to where I feel like the conversation always runs in circles so it’s impossible to pin down a crux, or they always retreat to increasingly deranged positions to avoid admitting being wrong, or they seem to constantly pattern match my argument to something vaguely similar instead of understanding my argument. I think arguing against people like this too much is actively harmful for your epistemics, because you’ll start digging yourself into your positions, and you’ll get used to thinking that everyone who disagrees with you is wrong. There are a bunch of people (most notably Eliezer) who seem to me to have gone too far down this path.
On the other side of the aisle, I don’t know exactly how to consistently become more thoughtful, but I think one good starting point is getting good at deeply understanding people’s viewpoints.
The people who understand the proper interpretation of the ideology can feel intellectually superior to those who don’t. Also, people who misunderstand something are by definition wrong… and therefore the people who understand the ideology correctly must—quite logically—be right!
(An equivocation between “be right about what is the correct interpretation of the ideology” and “be right about whether the ideology correctly describes the reality”.)