about whether we were really up to the task, and about what it would do to our movement if we tried
Does your outlook change at all if you try dropping the assumption that there is a “we” who cares about “our movement”? I’ve certainly found a lot of the skills I learned from reading the Sequences useful in my subsequent thinking about politics and social science. (Which thinking, obviously, mostly does not take the form of asking whether “liberalism” or “conservatism” is “better”; political spectra are dimensionality reductions.) I’m trying. I’m not sure how much I’ve succeeded. But I expect my inquiries to be more fruitful than those of people who make appeals to consequences to someone’s “movement” before trying to think about something.
You’re right in catching and calling out the appeal to consequences there, of course.
But aside from me really caring about the movement, I think part of my thought process is that “the movement” is also the source of these self-help techniques. If some people go into this space and then report later with what they think, I am worried that this information is less trustworthy than information that would have come from these same people before they started dealing with this question.
Does your outlook change at all if you try dropping the assumption that there is a “we” who cares about “our movement”? I’ve certainly found a lot of the skills I learned from reading the Sequences useful in my subsequent thinking about politics and social science. (Which thinking, obviously, mostly does not take the form of asking whether “liberalism” or “conservatism” is “better”; political spectra are dimensionality reductions.) I’m trying. I’m not sure how much I’ve succeeded. But I expect my inquiries to be more fruitful than those of people who make appeals to consequences to someone’s “movement” before trying to think about something.
You’re right in catching and calling out the appeal to consequences there, of course.
But aside from me really caring about the movement, I think part of my thought process is that “the movement” is also the source of these self-help techniques. If some people go into this space and then report later with what they think, I am worried that this information is less trustworthy than information that would have come from these same people before they started dealing with this question.