One of the most important things I’ve learned from therapy and contemplative practice for pragmatic interactions is that people will usually dig their heels in if they detect you have a bottom line written first. This effect is so strong that it activates even when people agree with you on the bottom line (but they have any level of conflict about it). I think this is one of the overwhelming considerations for why Eliezer gets the results he does. It cuts against another effect public intellectuals are subject to, which is that the easiest way to get popular is to become ‘The X Guy’ where X is a particular thing that the public has room in their heads for. But if you’re the X guy people also associate you with a particular bottom line, so good luck getting any truth finding interactions. Instead, you wind up as a piece that gets moved around the board for conflict/spectacle purposes.
This seems similar to politics. In theory, I would like a politician who is able to change their mind. In practice, if the politician changed their mind after election, about something that made me vote for them, in a way that I don’t agree with (that’s practically guaranteed, unless I changed my mind in the same way at the same time), I would feel betrayed.
If they changed their mind not immediately after the election, and signaled credibly that they changed their mind for concrete reasons after having looked into/engaged with the issue, then this’d probably be fine in some cases? (Ideally, if they’re right, they can convince you to change your mind too)
One of the most important things I’ve learned from therapy and contemplative practice for pragmatic interactions is that people will usually dig their heels in if they detect you have a bottom line written first. This effect is so strong that it activates even when people agree with you on the bottom line (but they have any level of conflict about it). I think this is one of the overwhelming considerations for why Eliezer gets the results he does. It cuts against another effect public intellectuals are subject to, which is that the easiest way to get popular is to become ‘The X Guy’ where X is a particular thing that the public has room in their heads for. But if you’re the X guy people also associate you with a particular bottom line, so good luck getting any truth finding interactions. Instead, you wind up as a piece that gets moved around the board for conflict/spectacle purposes.
This seems similar to politics. In theory, I would like a politician who is able to change their mind. In practice, if the politician changed their mind after election, about something that made me vote for them, in a way that I don’t agree with (that’s practically guaranteed, unless I changed my mind in the same way at the same time), I would feel betrayed.
If they changed their mind not immediately after the election, and signaled credibly that they changed their mind for concrete reasons after having looked into/engaged with the issue, then this’d probably be fine in some cases? (Ideally, if they’re right, they can convince you to change your mind too)