I think that the position put forward here could usefully be applied to parts of the post itself.
In particular, I’d say that it’s quite uncommon for people to claim that abortion opponents “oppose abortion as part of a conspiracy to curtail women’s rights”. There’s no reason to posit a conspiracy, ie., a large number of people who have discussed and decided on this as a good method of suppressing women. I think a fair number of people claim that abortion opponents are motivated by religious purity norms, though, such that they don’t mind inflicting suffering on women who have sex outside of marriages; or perhaps that they generally don’t care enough about the welfare of women, because they’re misogynist. Justifications for why abortion opponents want to prevent abortions in the first place range from thinking that they hate promiscious women so much that they want to punish them, to acknowledging that they may care about foetuses to some extent, to thinking that they mostly care about repeating religious shibboleths. Some of these seem silly to me, but not all of them.
There’s even some evidence that you could cite for these claims, e.g. that abortion opponents are rarely strong supporters of birth control (which I’d guess is the best method of preventing abortions). And there’s some arguments you could put forward against this, in turn, namely that people in general are bad at finding the best interventions for the things they care about. I haven’t thought about this in depth, but I don’t think the most sophisticated version of any of these sides is silly and obviously wrong.
On the margin, I think it’d be good if people moved towards the position that you’re advocating in this post. But I don’t think it’s obvious that people generally “tend to explain their actual reasoning”. I think there’s often a mix-up between conversation norms and predictions about how people act in the real world, when talking about this kind of thing:
In a 1-on-1 conversation, it makes sense to take the other persons view seriously, because if you think they’re arguing in bad faith, you should probably just stop talking with them.
In conversations with lots of listeners, people might be able to convince a lot of people by putting forth arguments other than those that convinced them, so I can’t why we should predict that they always put forward their true reasoning. Whether they mostly do so or not seems like an empirical question with a non-obvious answer (and I would actually quite like to read an analysis of how common this is). However, we still want to strongly endorse and support the norm of responding to points under the assumption that they were made in good faith, because accusations will quickly destroy all value that the conversation might have generated. I think it’s extremely important that we have such norms on lesswrong, for example (and I also believe that lesswrongers almost always do argue in good faith, partly because we generally don’t discuss hot topics like, uhm, abortion… oops).
When thinking about other people’s actions outside of conversations with them (whether in our own heads or in conversation with a third party), I think we’d be unnecessarily handicapped if we assumed that people always meant everything they said. If a politician makes a claim, I predict that a person who has “the politician made that claim just to gain votes” somewhere in their hypothesis-space is going to make better predictions than someone who steadfastely applies the conversation norms to their own thoughts.
I think that the position put forward here could usefully be applied to parts of the post itself.
In particular, I’d say that it’s quite uncommon for people to claim that abortion opponents “oppose abortion as part of a conspiracy to curtail women’s rights”. There’s no reason to posit a conspiracy, ie., a large number of people who have discussed and decided on this as a good method of suppressing women. I think a fair number of people claim that abortion opponents are motivated by religious purity norms, though, such that they don’t mind inflicting suffering on women who have sex outside of marriages; or perhaps that they generally don’t care enough about the welfare of women, because they’re misogynist. Justifications for why abortion opponents want to prevent abortions in the first place range from thinking that they hate promiscious women so much that they want to punish them, to acknowledging that they may care about foetuses to some extent, to thinking that they mostly care about repeating religious shibboleths. Some of these seem silly to me, but not all of them.
There’s even some evidence that you could cite for these claims, e.g. that abortion opponents are rarely strong supporters of birth control (which I’d guess is the best method of preventing abortions). And there’s some arguments you could put forward against this, in turn, namely that people in general are bad at finding the best interventions for the things they care about. I haven’t thought about this in depth, but I don’t think the most sophisticated version of any of these sides is silly and obviously wrong.
On the margin, I think it’d be good if people moved towards the position that you’re advocating in this post. But I don’t think it’s obvious that people generally “tend to explain their actual reasoning”. I think there’s often a mix-up between conversation norms and predictions about how people act in the real world, when talking about this kind of thing:
In a 1-on-1 conversation, it makes sense to take the other persons view seriously, because if you think they’re arguing in bad faith, you should probably just stop talking with them.
In conversations with lots of listeners, people might be able to convince a lot of people by putting forth arguments other than those that convinced them, so I can’t why we should predict that they always put forward their true reasoning. Whether they mostly do so or not seems like an empirical question with a non-obvious answer (and I would actually quite like to read an analysis of how common this is). However, we still want to strongly endorse and support the norm of responding to points under the assumption that they were made in good faith, because accusations will quickly destroy all value that the conversation might have generated. I think it’s extremely important that we have such norms on lesswrong, for example (and I also believe that lesswrongers almost always do argue in good faith, partly because we generally don’t discuss hot topics like, uhm, abortion… oops).
When thinking about other people’s actions outside of conversations with them (whether in our own heads or in conversation with a third party), I think we’d be unnecessarily handicapped if we assumed that people always meant everything they said. If a politician makes a claim, I predict that a person who has “the politician made that claim just to gain votes” somewhere in their hypothesis-space is going to make better predictions than someone who steadfastely applies the conversation norms to their own thoughts.