From doing this internet propaganda in the early years of the internet, I learned how to do propaganda. You don’t appeal to emotion, or to reason, or anything. You just SHOUT. And REPEAT, and explain the position, and let the reader defend it for himself.
In the end, most readers agree with you (if you are right), but they will come up to you, much as you did, and say “While you are right, I see that, you are doing yourself a disservice by being so emotional—you aren’t persuasive....”
But I persuaded this reader! The fact is, I am persuasive, and maximally so. When there is a hostile political environment, if a paper is called “bullshit” or “pseudoscience”, you need to first MOCK the idiots calling it that, so as to establish a level playing field. That means calling them “douchebag”, “fuckwit”, “turd-brain”, etc, so that both you and the other person sound like children fighting in the playground, no authority.
Then you need to state the objective case (after the name-calling and cussing, or simultaneously), and then wait. If you are objectively right, people will sort it out on their own time, you don’t have to do anything. The people who didn’t sort it out will say “oh my, there’s a controversy” and will keep an open mind.
It’s classic propaganda techniques, and it can be used for good as easily as it can be used for evil. Of course, when calling people idiots for not agreeing with material that is called crackpot, you had better be careful, because if you are not right about the material, if it is crackpot, you are gone for good. The main difficulty is evaluating the work well, understanding it fully, and making sure that it is not crackpot, before posting the first cussword.
I have found it interesting and thought provoking how this quote basically inverts the principle of charity. Sometimes, for various reasons, one idea is considered much more respectable than the other. Since such unequal playing field of ideas may make it harder for the correct idea to prevail, it might be desirable to establish a level playing field. In situations when there are two people who believe different things and there is no cooperation between them, the person who holds the more respectable opinion can unilaterally apply the principle of charity and thus help to establish it.
However, the person who holds the less respectable opinion cannot unilaterally level a playing field by applying the principle of charity, therefore they resort to shouting (as the quote describes) or, in other contexts, satire, although just like shouting it is often used for other, sometimes less noble purposes.
To what extent do you think these two things are symmetrical?
I agree that this is a step in the right direction, but I want to elaborate why I think this is hard.
It is my impression that many utopians stay loyal to their chosen tactics that are supposed to closen the utopia even after the efficiency of the those tactics come into question. My hypothesis for why such thing can happen is that, typically, the tactics are relatively concrete whereas goals they are supposed to achieve are usually quite vague (e.g. “greater good”). Thus when goals and tactics conflict the person who tries to reconcile them will find it easier to modify the goals than the tactics, perhaps without even noticing that the new goals may be slightly different from the old goals, since due to vagueness the old goals and the new goals overlap so much. Over time, goals may drift into becoming quite different from the starting point. At the same time, since tactics are more concrete it is easier to notice changes in them.
I suspect that in your case we might observe something similar, since it is often quite hard to pinpoint exactly what underlying features of human psychology make a certain idea compelling.
I agree that science, probability and game theory put constraints on how hard problems of politics could be solved. Nevertheless, I suspect that those constraints, coupled with vagueness of our desires, may turn out to be lax enough to allow many different answers for most problems. In this case this idea would help to weed out a lot of bad ideas, but it may not be enough to choose among those the rest. In another case, those constraints may turn out to be too restrictive to satisfy a lot of desires people find compelling. Then we would get some kind of impossibility theorem and the question which requirements to relax and what imperfections to tolerate.