I don’t think your last paragraph is fair; doing outreach / advocacy, and discussing it, is not particularly related to motivated cognition. You don’t know how much time capybaralet has spent trying to figure out whether their views are justified; you’re not going to get a whole life story in an 800-word blog post.
There is such a thing as talking to an ideological opponent who has spent no time thinking about a topic and has a dumb opinion that could not survive 5 seconds of careful thought. We should still be good listeners, not be condescending, etc., because that’s just the right way to talk to people; but realistically we’re probably not going to learn anything new (about this specific topic) from such a person, let alone change our own minds (assuming we’ve already deeply engaged with both sides of the issue).
On the other hand, when talking to an ideological opponent who has spent a lot of time thinking about an issue, we may indeed learn something or change our mind, and I’m all for being genuinely open-minded and seeking out and thinking hard about such opinions. But I think that’s not the main topic of this little blog post.
I think capybaralet meant ≥1%.
I don’t think your last paragraph is fair; doing outreach / advocacy, and discussing it, is not particularly related to motivated cognition. You don’t know how much time capybaralet has spent trying to figure out whether their views are justified; you’re not going to get a whole life story in an 800-word blog post.
There is such a thing as talking to an ideological opponent who has spent no time thinking about a topic and has a dumb opinion that could not survive 5 seconds of careful thought. We should still be good listeners, not be condescending, etc., because that’s just the right way to talk to people; but realistically we’re probably not going to learn anything new (about this specific topic) from such a person, let alone change our own minds (assuming we’ve already deeply engaged with both sides of the issue).
On the other hand, when talking to an ideological opponent who has spent a lot of time thinking about an issue, we may indeed learn something or change our mind, and I’m all for being genuinely open-minded and seeking out and thinking hard about such opinions. But I think that’s not the main topic of this little blog post.