My guess is that it’s relatively epistemically corrupting and problematic to spend a lot of time engaging with weak arguments.
I think it’s tempting to make the mistake of thinking that debunking a specific (bad) argument is the same as debunking a conclusion. But actually, these are extremely different operations. One requires understanding a specific argument while the other requires level headed investigation of the overall situation. Separately, there are often actually good intuitions underlying bad arguments and recovering this intuition is an important part of truth seeking.
I think my concerns here probably apply to a wide variety of people thinking about AI x-risk. I worry about this for myself.
See also “Other people are wrong” vs “I am right”, reversed stupidity is not intelligence, and the cowpox of doubt.
My guess is that it’s relatively epistemically corrupting and problematic to spend a lot of time engaging with weak arguments.
I think it’s tempting to make the mistake of thinking that debunking a specific (bad) argument is the same as debunking a conclusion. But actually, these are extremely different operations. One requires understanding a specific argument while the other requires level headed investigation of the overall situation. Separately, there are often actually good intuitions underlying bad arguments and recovering this intuition is an important part of truth seeking.
I think my concerns here probably apply to a wide variety of people thinking about AI x-risk. I worry about this for myself.