- You find it easy to conclude that those who disagree with you are insincere or stupid.
Another one:
- You are reluctant to agree a rival’s claim, even if you had no prior opinion on the topic.
This is also clearly a rhetorical device...something people actively do when pursuing persuasion, but don't as much when pursuing truth.
Indeed, a good chunk of the list is discussion a tension between persuasion and truth-seeking. As usual, Robin is arguing (implicitly) for the truth-seeking side of the balance, while almost everyone else is persuading.
It shouldn't surprise any of my readers that, of the dangers Robin lists, I believe myself to be most afflicted by:
- You are uncomfortable taking a position near the middle of the opinion distribution.
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4 comments:
1. Little experience with it.
2. Being clear is a lot of work, and most prefer to assume they're being clear rather than actually find out. If you don't understand, they think, it's your problem, not theirs.
3. Importance is measured subjectively. For example, what if someone sincerely thinks truth isn't that important? The neglect or lack thereof would be irrelevant.
4. Humans get distracted by shiny things all the time. The immediate drowns out the important regularly, even for people who sincerely just want to be persuasive.
4.5 This is way too much fun.
5. This is me. But my time is valuable, finding truth for myself is easy, but understanding well enough to communicate is difficult. I try not to waste all that time if I know nobody's going to listen. Indeed, why wouldn't I just slack off, instead?
6. I'm uncomfortable agreeing with anyone. I worry that I'm doing it to be lazy or to avoid conflict.
7. Sorry, what?
8. Availability bias. And, it takes research to properly understand distant events. Also, again the immediate trumps the important.
9. There's got to be some reason why people disagree with you. The main categories are: don't understand your arguments; don't agree with your arguments.
Prima facie that maps pretty well onto stupid and insincere. Since these explanations of disagreement are endemic, few see any reason to look for explanations that don't suck. Without significant work, they look just fine.
10. I'm reluctant to change my publicly stated opinion. It's embarrassing and people start taking the piss.
This just makes me more cautious about what I state in public. I'm steadily becoming more and more diligent about doing my homework before I write something.
Even still, it would certainly it would be better if I could change my mind as often and easily in public as I do privately, but people just don't work like that. At least, certainly don't want to work like that.
11. Reverse halo effect. Intellectual rivals often are just straight-up intellectual inferiors. (In one direction or another.) When that's not the case, it's a lot of work to figure out where a mind is reliable and where they're unreliable - and to explain the unreliability requires ad hominem arguments. And this explanation is necessary to predict when they'll screw up.
It is much easier just to view them in simple black/white terms - which necessarily means that if you agree with them, you've probably made the same kind of mistakes they do. (From your perspective.) In Bayes terms, if Hitler agrees with some moral argument, it is a good reason to downgrade the argument somewhat.
12. If your rivals gain status they'll likely use it to punish you. Most act as if they don't deserve punishment, so I assume they believe they don't.
Yes, in a perfect world their punishment would be viewed as illegitimate as your false anti-status arguments. So...you wanna try this whole building-a-perfect-world thing again? We might not kill millions of people this time! I think I have it figured out: don't make the phase 1 trial a whole country.
13. The more complicated the beliefs are, the more powerful the test of internal consistency becomes.
Most religious nuts have to bifurcate their beliefs about daily life and their religion, as if there were two non-interacting truth realms. This is one of the ways out of consistency as a test of truth. I find it easy to spot, though.
14. It's easier to spot sloppy arguments you disagree with, mainly because it's hard to be charitable when you don't like the conclusion. A lot of apologia for sloppy arguments goes as 'they didn't mean that,' which is a clear tell for charitable interpretation.
Of course it's much faster to drop the whole 'scientific' and 'rational' front and just say straight up you don't like the conclusion and why. I've seen many many of arguments that could have been instantly resolved with this single step.
Often those arguments about not liking the conclusion are better even from a 'rational' perspective than anything up to that point, too.
15. I've seen many scholarly papers which don't even have academic applications beyond itself, let alone practical applications.
I'm still working on this one, but I suspect it's because remembering to look for applications takes up brain space, which is at a premium when searching for truth, let alone when arguing to persuade.
Certainly my best work uses the limit of my cognitive capacity. (Or perhaps I'm judging worth by effort?) I don't have space to also worry about what it means until I'm done.
16/17. Dunning-Krueger. You can't tell someone knows more than you without knowing a great deal yourself.
And if, to the best of your knowledge, someone is smart but ignorant/biased/unscientific/uneducated/offencive/insane/obsessed/emotional/unempathetic/uncompassionate/childish/vague, why would you listen to them?
Hmmmm. Sometimes your opponents ARE stupid or malicious. Quite frankly, this is the only reasonable explanation for the continuing popularity of socialism and the other Rousseau-derived theories in the Universities.
Even the body count can't convince seriously smart people. There aren't a lot of alternative choices.
That's only true if socialists care about truth. I'd say the body count argument is more or less a knock-down against the idea they care about truth.
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