I agree this set of questions is really important, and shouldn’t be avoided just because it’s uncomfortable. And I really appreciate your investment in truthseeking even when it’s hard.
But Alice doesn’t seem particularly truthseeking to me here, and the voice in your head sounds worse. Alice sounds like she has made up her mind and is attempting to browbeat people into agreeing with her. Nor does Alice seem curious about why her approach causes such indignance, which makes me further doubt this is about pursuit of knowledge for her.
One reason people react badly to these tactics: rejecting assholes out of hand when they try to extract value from you is an important defense mechanism. If you force people to remove that you make them vulnerable to all kinds of malware (and you can’t say “only remove it for good things” because the decision needs to be made before you know if the idea is good or not. That’s the point). If Alice is going to push this hard about responsibility to the world she needs to put more thought into her techniques.
Maybe this will be covered in a later post but I have to respond to what’s in front of me now.
yep, fair! Do you think the point would come across better if Alice was nice? (I wasn’t sure I could make Alice nice without an extra few thousand words, but maybe someone more skilful could.)
I think a lot of us have voices in our heads that are meaner than Alice, so if you think Alice is going to cause burnout, I think we need a response that is better than Bob’s (and better than “I’m just going to reject all assholes out of hand”, because I can’t use that on myself!)
I think being nicer would make truthseeking easier but isn’t truthseeking in and of itself.
I also think it’s a mistake to assume your inner Alice would shut up if only you came up with a good enough argument. The loudest alarm is probably false. Truthseeking might be useful in convincing other parts of your brain to stop giving Alice so much weight, but I would include “is Alice updating in response to facts?” as part of that investigation.
I agree this set of questions is really important, and shouldn’t be avoided just because it’s uncomfortable. And I really appreciate your investment in truthseeking even when it’s hard.
But Alice doesn’t seem particularly truthseeking to me here, and the voice in your head sounds worse. Alice sounds like she has made up her mind and is attempting to browbeat people into agreeing with her. Nor does Alice seem curious about why her approach causes such indignance, which makes me further doubt this is about pursuit of knowledge for her.
One reason people react badly to these tactics: rejecting assholes out of hand when they try to extract value from you is an important defense mechanism. If you force people to remove that you make them vulnerable to all kinds of malware (and you can’t say “only remove it for good things” because the decision needs to be made before you know if the idea is good or not. That’s the point). If Alice is going to push this hard about responsibility to the world she needs to put more thought into her techniques.
Maybe this will be covered in a later post but I have to respond to what’s in front of me now.
yep, fair! Do you think the point would come across better if Alice was nice? (I wasn’t sure I could make Alice nice without an extra few thousand words, but maybe someone more skilful could.)
I think a lot of us have voices in our heads that are meaner than Alice, so if you think Alice is going to cause burnout, I think we need a response that is better than Bob’s (and better than “I’m just going to reject all assholes out of hand”, because I can’t use that on myself!)
I think being nicer would make truthseeking easier but isn’t truthseeking in and of itself.
I also think it’s a mistake to assume your inner Alice would shut up if only you came up with a good enough argument. The loudest alarm is probably false. Truthseeking might be useful in convincing other parts of your brain to stop giving Alice so much weight, but I would include “is Alice updating in response to facts?” as part of that investigation.