Regarding the last section, I think you’re being quite dismissive, i.e. not addressing their concerns and acting as though they don’t have legitimate concerns (while I think probably not in fact understanding their concerns). For example,
If you don’t see the difference between that and embryo selection
I mean, did they say “there is no difference between embryo selection and state-enforced murder”? I think you’re strawmanning them.
If you don’t want to deal with these sorts of comments, fine, that’s understandable, and there’s a lot of other valuable things that you do such that you don’t need to work on addressing these sorts of comments with more attention. As I’ve said repeatedly, I AM VOLUNTEERING TO GIVE THOUGHTFUL RESPECTFUL REAL ANSWERS TO MORAL/ETHICAL CONCERNS ABOUT REPROGENETICS. Please just tag me instead! I imagine (not confidently, but this is my top guess when I quickly try to empathize with you) that you’re doing a social motion that’s something like demonstrating+performing confidence / power, like “yeah actually I’m right, I know I’m right, I know lots of other people agree with me, and I’m expecting lots of people to back me up on this, now and then even more in the future”. I think that’s fine and in some cases good to do, as a general category. But I think that doing it by strawmanning and dismissing is bad. I think that you think that (or act as though) if someone can’t express their concern very clearly, and so you can give a shallow counterargument that they can’t quickly give a compelling response to, then that’s a win. I think that it’s sometimes a win and sometimes a loss, because if the version you’re doing is strawmanning them, then they have a concern which you haven’t addressed but you’ve put them in a position where their (fumbling) attempts to get their concern (however coherent or not it may be) addressed are met with dismissal or even derision, and no easy recourse for more helpful engagement.
This is a fair critique. I think I’ve partially ended up training myself to respond too dismissively by spending a lot of time engaging with the attention dynamics of Twitter.
Regarding the last section, I think you’re being quite dismissive, i.e. not addressing their concerns and acting as though they don’t have legitimate concerns (while I think probably not in fact understanding their concerns). For example,
I mean, did they say “there is no difference between embryo selection and state-enforced murder”? I think you’re strawmanning them.
If you don’t want to deal with these sorts of comments, fine, that’s understandable, and there’s a lot of other valuable things that you do such that you don’t need to work on addressing these sorts of comments with more attention. As I’ve said repeatedly, I AM VOLUNTEERING TO GIVE THOUGHTFUL RESPECTFUL REAL ANSWERS TO MORAL/ETHICAL CONCERNS ABOUT REPROGENETICS. Please just tag me instead! I imagine (not confidently, but this is my top guess when I quickly try to empathize with you) that you’re doing a social motion that’s something like demonstrating+performing confidence / power, like “yeah actually I’m right, I know I’m right, I know lots of other people agree with me, and I’m expecting lots of people to back me up on this, now and then even more in the future”. I think that’s fine and in some cases good to do, as a general category. But I think that doing it by strawmanning and dismissing is bad. I think that you think that (or act as though) if someone can’t express their concern very clearly, and so you can give a shallow counterargument that they can’t quickly give a compelling response to, then that’s a win. I think that it’s sometimes a win and sometimes a loss, because if the version you’re doing is strawmanning them, then they have a concern which you haven’t addressed but you’ve put them in a position where their (fumbling) attempts to get their concern (however coherent or not it may be) addressed are met with dismissal or even derision, and no easy recourse for more helpful engagement.
This is a fair critique. I think I’ve partially ended up training myself to respond too dismissively by spending a lot of time engaging with the attention dynamics of Twitter.