Imo your plea, as currently written, moderately anti-contributes to truth-seeking norms. There’s a missing mood imo. Like, I would have phrased it as eg:
First, if it is all hype, then it is good that you are saying it is all hype compared to not saying anything, even if various people ignore you. That said, you should treat your time/thought/writing as a valuable resource: it makes sense to assess what true things you are best positioned to help others understand and are most important for others to understand, and to focus on helping others understand those. And I think you might be wrong about this being such a truth, for the following reasons: …
(This could have been a preamble, or a post-preamble for attentional reasons.)
I think the version I suggest is significantly less norm-eroding, though it should still be viewed with some suspicion if one says this sort of thing selectively in response to positions one disagrees with.
One could claim that many of these people are themselves already corrupt consequentialists in their talking, i.e. already not in some sort of truth-seeking community, and it is just fine to “advise these criminals on how to do crime better” if that has good local consequences? I don’t think that’s fine — I think that would be a mistaken assessment of these people, and I think one should be trying more to bring even the people about whom this assessment is correct into the fold.
Yeah I should probably have a disclaimer somewhere that’s like “I respect people for following the policy of deciding what is true and then saying what they think is true. Insofar as you are saying it’s all hype because you really deep down are confident of that, then this isn’t addressed to you. This is addressed to the many people I know who are loudly saying ‘it’s all hype’ in significant part because they think that doing so is a way to Resist the evil tech companies.”
Imo your plea, as currently written, moderately anti-contributes to truth-seeking norms. There’s a missing mood imo. Like, I would have phrased it as eg:
First, if it is all hype, then it is good that you are saying it is all hype compared to not saying anything, even if various people ignore you. That said, you should treat your time/thought/writing as a valuable resource: it makes sense to assess what true things you are best positioned to help others understand and are most important for others to understand, and to focus on helping others understand those. And I think you might be wrong about this being such a truth, for the following reasons: …
(This could have been a preamble, or a post-preamble for attentional reasons.)
I think the version I suggest is significantly less norm-eroding, though it should still be viewed with some suspicion if one says this sort of thing selectively in response to positions one disagrees with.
One could claim that many of these people are themselves already corrupt consequentialists in their talking, i.e. already not in some sort of truth-seeking community, and it is just fine to “advise these criminals on how to do crime better” if that has good local consequences? I don’t think that’s fine — I think that would be a mistaken assessment of these people, and I think one should be trying more to bring even the people about whom this assessment is correct into the fold.
Yeah I should probably have a disclaimer somewhere that’s like “I respect people for following the policy of deciding what is true and then saying what they think is true. Insofar as you are saying it’s all hype because you really deep down are confident of that, then this isn’t addressed to you. This is addressed to the many people I know who are loudly saying ‘it’s all hype’ in significant part because they think that doing so is a way to Resist the evil tech companies.”