After rewriting this comment a few times, my definite and authoritative opinion is: “I don’t know”. I think I could argue for both sides.
I agree that if our goal is to “raise the sanity waterline”, strawmanning people and laughing at them does not seem like a good way to achieve that. Indeed, laughing at strawmanned versions of other people’s opinion is the traditional way to socially punish updating towards heresy. This leads to various echo chambers, and worse.
And even if the outgroup really is crazy stupid (uhm, “epistemically unlucky”), still, people do not like being laughed at. If you make enemies, at least think about the cost/benefit ratio first.
On the other hand, reverse stupidity is not intelligence. It is known that “our kind” is generally low on social cohesion. Throwing out all techniques that merely increase social cohesion (reasoning: if it does not increase epistemical rationality, it has no place here) seems like a noble suicide option; like deciding that we are too virtuous to live (as a group).
And sometimes stupid opinions do deserve to be laughed at, just to drive home (on the gut level) the point how stupid they are. In a perfect world, willful stupidity would be low status, and accidental stupidity would be something people will openly warn you about. And I am afraid that any kind of abbreviation will feel like a strawman. Without making abbreviations we would be unable to talk about positions we disagree with.
I suspect this may be the situation where different things work for different people. And it reminds me of discussions about atheism: how one person says “I would intellectually agree with atheism, but Richard Dawkins’ arrogance makes me unwilling to share the label with him”, while another person says “seeing Richard Dawkins treat religion with disrespect allowed me to think about my own doubts with less fear of social disaproval”. Sometimes politeness projects power, sometimes it projects weakness. Sometimes it is strategical to avoid open conflict, sometimes it is the right time to attack. Similarly, laughing at a summary of a position can make some people think “what an arrogant asshole” and other people think “oh, now I see with clarity what I have only suspected before; and indeed it is stupid”.
After rewriting this comment a few times, my definite and authoritative opinion is: “I don’t know”. I think I could argue for both sides.
I agree that if our goal is to “raise the sanity waterline”, strawmanning people and laughing at them does not seem like a good way to achieve that. Indeed, laughing at strawmanned versions of other people’s opinion is the traditional way to socially punish updating towards heresy. This leads to various echo chambers, and worse.
And even if the outgroup really is crazy stupid (uhm, “epistemically unlucky”), still, people do not like being laughed at. If you make enemies, at least think about the cost/benefit ratio first.
On the other hand, reverse stupidity is not intelligence. It is known that “our kind” is generally low on social cohesion. Throwing out all techniques that merely increase social cohesion (reasoning: if it does not increase epistemical rationality, it has no place here) seems like a noble suicide option; like deciding that we are too virtuous to live (as a group).
And sometimes stupid opinions do deserve to be laughed at, just to drive home (on the gut level) the point how stupid they are. In a perfect world, willful stupidity would be low status, and accidental stupidity would be something people will openly warn you about. And I am afraid that any kind of abbreviation will feel like a strawman. Without making abbreviations we would be unable to talk about positions we disagree with.
I suspect this may be the situation where different things work for different people. And it reminds me of discussions about atheism: how one person says “I would intellectually agree with atheism, but Richard Dawkins’ arrogance makes me unwilling to share the label with him”, while another person says “seeing Richard Dawkins treat religion with disrespect allowed me to think about my own doubts with less fear of social disaproval”. Sometimes politeness projects power, sometimes it projects weakness. Sometimes it is strategical to avoid open conflict, sometimes it is the right time to attack. Similarly, laughing at a summary of a position can make some people think “what an arrogant asshole” and other people think “oh, now I see with clarity what I have only suspected before; and indeed it is stupid”.