Right now my main question is “should I spend more time thinking about this or go back to ignoring it and hope it isn’t too bad?”.
It seems like you’re curious and find it interesting, so why not? There are probably worthwhile things to learn.
I think if I decided to do that I’d probably expect “solve political polarization” to be a major piece of it and yeah I’d want to talk to a wider variety of people qualitatively.
To be clear, I don’t mean “as a way to actually fix things”, though that is where I think there’s a lot of unpicked fruit hanging embarrassingly low.
I just mean as a personal epistemics thing. If I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, and I don’t trust my feeds to be delivering the necessary perspective, I’d want to probe what people think just to make sure there aren’t some obvious counterarguments that my current perspective is blind to. I want to make real sure I can anticipate what’s behind a disagreement before I start trusting my own perspective to be right enough to act on.
I agree that baking in the framing into the initial question is bad, but, like, the framing is the reason why I’m even considering thinking more about this in the first place and I’m not sure how to sidestep that.
We’re always going to have framings that make less sense in hindsight. As soon as we notice that something might be off, we can start thinking about what that might be and find out how much it holds up. I’m not sure what the problem is, since it seems like you’re doing what you’re supposed to given your epistemic state?
Oh. Is it like… if I’m overcome with “Holy fuck, how are antivaxxers so dumb” and it motivates me to look into it, I can’t just “not have” the motivation and ignoring it would mean I don’t look at all, but if I act within that framing then everything comes out like “Why are you so dumb, anyway?” which isn’t exactly epistemically helpful?
It seems like you’re curious and find it interesting, so why not? There are probably worthwhile things to learn.
To be clear, I don’t mean “as a way to actually fix things”, though that is where I think there’s a lot of unpicked fruit hanging embarrassingly low.
I just mean as a personal epistemics thing. If I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, and I don’t trust my feeds to be delivering the necessary perspective, I’d want to probe what people think just to make sure there aren’t some obvious counterarguments that my current perspective is blind to. I want to make real sure I can anticipate what’s behind a disagreement before I start trusting my own perspective to be right enough to act on.
We’re always going to have framings that make less sense in hindsight. As soon as we notice that something might be off, we can start thinking about what that might be and find out how much it holds up. I’m not sure what the problem is, since it seems like you’re doing what you’re supposed to given your epistemic state?
Oh. Is it like… if I’m overcome with “Holy fuck, how are antivaxxers so dumb” and it motivates me to look into it, I can’t just “not have” the motivation and ignoring it would mean I don’t look at all, but if I act within that framing then everything comes out like “Why are you so dumb, anyway?” which isn’t exactly epistemically helpful?