I myself was wrong to engage with them as if their beliefs had cruxes that would respond to things like argument and evidence.
This is a fully-general-counterargument to any sort of involvement by people with even middling real-world concerns in LW2 - so if you mean to cite this remark approvingly as an example of how we should enforce our own standard of “perfectly rational” epistemic norms, I really have to oppose this. It is simply a fact about human psychology that “things like argument and evidence” are perhaps necessary but not sufficient to change people’s minds about issues of morality or politics that they actually care about, in a deep sense! This is the whole reason why Bernard Crick developed his own list of political virtues which I cited earlier in this very comment section. We should be very careful about this, and not let non-central examples on the object level skew our thinking about these matters.
This is a fully-general-counterargument to any sort of involvement by people with even middling real-world concerns in LW2 - so if you mean to cite this remark approvingly as an example of how we should enforce our own standard of “perfectly rational” epistemic norms, I really have to oppose this. It is simply a fact about human psychology that “things like argument and evidence” are perhaps necessary but not sufficient to change people’s minds about issues of morality or politics that they actually care about, in a deep sense! This is the whole reason why Bernard Crick developed his own list of political virtues which I cited earlier in this very comment section. We should be very careful about this, and not let non-central examples on the object level skew our thinking about these matters.