Sorry for doing such an insane necro here, and I’ll delete if asked, but I don’t think this is right at all. Broadly, in the real world, I accept the premise “avoiding listening to opposing positions is bad.” I do not believe that “if you really don’t think you could stand up to debate with a talented missionary, maybe you aren’t really an atheist” because I don’t think it scales up.
I am a human, I have mechanisms for deciding what I believe that are not based on rationality. I have worked very hard to break and adapt some of those mechanisms to align more with rationality, but they still exist. An arbitrarily good debater/absurdly charismatic person could absolutely, with time, override all of the work that has been done to make me accept things like logic and evidence as the basis for the world. In truth, I’m not sure that such a charismatic or intelligent person exists on Earth, and if they did I don’t know why they would want to convince me of these things, but I can imagine a person who would and could. And I do not think that being able to imagine that person means I should stop believing in what I believe, because I am not a perfect rationalist.
In practice, your answer is almost always right. If Adolf Hitler is charismatic and convincing enough to override your “nazism is bad” belief, you probably didn’t hold it very strongly or are not doing rationalism very well, or he is right (just to clarify, he is not). You should expect that he cannot convince you, and if you have a decent reason to read his work you should not avoid it for fear of being convinced. But the argument doesn’t generalize 100% of the time, is all I’m saying
Sorry for doing such an insane necro here, and I’ll delete if asked, but I don’t think this is right at all. Broadly, in the real world, I accept the premise “avoiding listening to opposing positions is bad.” I do not believe that “if you really don’t think you could stand up to debate with a talented missionary, maybe you aren’t really an atheist” because I don’t think it scales up.
I am a human, I have mechanisms for deciding what I believe that are not based on rationality. I have worked very hard to break and adapt some of those mechanisms to align more with rationality, but they still exist. An arbitrarily good debater/absurdly charismatic person could absolutely, with time, override all of the work that has been done to make me accept things like logic and evidence as the basis for the world. In truth, I’m not sure that such a charismatic or intelligent person exists on Earth, and if they did I don’t know why they would want to convince me of these things, but I can imagine a person who would and could. And I do not think that being able to imagine that person means I should stop believing in what I believe, because I am not a perfect rationalist.
In practice, your answer is almost always right. If Adolf Hitler is charismatic and convincing enough to override your “nazism is bad” belief, you probably didn’t hold it very strongly or are not doing rationalism very well, or he is right (just to clarify, he is not). You should expect that he cannot convince you, and if you have a decent reason to read his work you should not avoid it for fear of being convinced. But the argument doesn’t generalize 100% of the time, is all I’m saying