you sympathize with them while not taking their worldview seriously
There is no reason at all to take any idea/worldview less than seriously. For the duration of engagement, be it 30 seconds as a topic comes up, or 30 minutes of a conversation, you can study anything in earnest. Better understanding, especially of the framing (which concerns are salient, how literal words translate into the issues they implicitly gesture at), doesn’t imply your beliefs or attitudes must shift as well.
if you aren’t willing to change your beliefs, why should they
This is not just an inadvisable or invalid principle, but with the epistemic sense of “belief” it’s essentially impossible to act this way. Beliefs explain and reflect reality, anything else is not a belief, so if you are changing your beliefs for any reason at all that is not about explaining and reflecting reality, they cease being beliefs in the epistemic sense, and become mental phenomena of some other nature.
There is no reason at all to take any idea/worldview less than seriously.
I think this is too absolute, at least for flawed humans as opposed to ideal rationalists. Some possible counterexamples:
The person talking to you is a skilled manipulator with potentially unfriendly goals
The idea is extremely distressing/depressing and you don’t feel psychologically safe engaging with it
The social cost of engaging with the idea outweighs the expected benefit of doing so
Certainly all three of those reasons can be misapplied; they are convenient excuses to protect one’s own flawed worldview, hang on to comforting delusions, or toe the line on politically charged issues. But sometimes doing those things really is better than the alternative.
Maybe there are modes of engagement that should be avoided, and many ideas/worldviews themselves are not worth engaging with (though neglectedness in your own personal understanding is a reason to seek them out). But as long as you have allocated time to something, even largely as a result of external circumstances, doing a superficial and half-hearted job of it is a waste. It certainly shouldn’t be the intent from the outset, as in the quote I was replying to.
There is no reason at all to take any idea/worldview less than seriously. For the duration of engagement, be it 30 seconds as a topic comes up, or 30 minutes of a conversation, you can study anything in earnest. Better understanding, especially of the framing (which concerns are salient, how literal words translate into the issues they implicitly gesture at), doesn’t imply your beliefs or attitudes must shift as well.
This is not just an inadvisable or invalid principle, but with the epistemic sense of “belief” it’s essentially impossible to act this way. Beliefs explain and reflect reality, anything else is not a belief, so if you are changing your beliefs for any reason at all that is not about explaining and reflecting reality, they cease being beliefs in the epistemic sense, and become mental phenomena of some other nature.
I think this is too absolute, at least for flawed humans as opposed to ideal rationalists. Some possible counterexamples:
The person talking to you is a skilled manipulator with potentially unfriendly goals
The idea is extremely distressing/depressing and you don’t feel psychologically safe engaging with it
The social cost of engaging with the idea outweighs the expected benefit of doing so
Certainly all three of those reasons can be misapplied; they are convenient excuses to protect one’s own flawed worldview, hang on to comforting delusions, or toe the line on politically charged issues. But sometimes doing those things really is better than the alternative.
Maybe there are modes of engagement that should be avoided, and many ideas/worldviews themselves are not worth engaging with (though neglectedness in your own personal understanding is a reason to seek them out). But as long as you have allocated time to something, even largely as a result of external circumstances, doing a superficial and half-hearted job of it is a waste. It certainly shouldn’t be the intent from the outset, as in the quote I was replying to.