“Don’t let the fact that idiots agree with you be the sole thing that
makes you change your mind, else all you’ll have gained is a different
set of idiots who agree with you.”
Naive people (particularly contrarians) put into a situation where they aren’t sure which ideas are truly “in” or “out” or “popular” may become highly confused and find themselves switching sides frequently. After joining a “side”, then being agreed with by people whose arguments were poor in support of something good, they find themselves making an argument like “Wow. So many idiots support this! There’s no way this can be good.” only to find out after switching sides again that the same thing keeps happening. Why? It’s because there are likely complete fools who support every cause you might consider good.
Bottom line: consider arguments on their merits, and avoid automatically thinking that they’re bad (or good) simply because of who believes them or the (bad) arguments made on behalf of the idea. That’s difficult, but if you don’t, you wind up with situations similar to Eliezer’s.
I came up with quote for a closely related issue:
“Don’t let the fact that idiots agree with you be the sole thing that makes you change your mind, else all you’ll have gained is a different set of idiots who agree with you.”
Naive people (particularly contrarians) put into a situation where they aren’t sure which ideas are truly “in” or “out” or “popular” may become highly confused and find themselves switching sides frequently. After joining a “side”, then being agreed with by people whose arguments were poor in support of something good, they find themselves making an argument like “Wow. So many idiots support this! There’s no way this can be good.” only to find out after switching sides again that the same thing keeps happening. Why? It’s because there are likely complete fools who support every cause you might consider good.
Bottom line: consider arguments on their merits, and avoid automatically thinking that they’re bad (or good) simply because of who believes them or the (bad) arguments made on behalf of the idea. That’s difficult, but if you don’t, you wind up with situations similar to Eliezer’s.