Sure, many people use “I don’t want to hear X” or “pfft, X is a well-known fallacy” or “you really should read author X on this subject and come back when you’ve educated yourself” or many variations on that theme to dismiss arguments they don’t actually have counterarguments for. Agreed.
This ought not be surprising… any strategy that knowledgeable people use to conserve effort can also be adopted as a cheap signal by the ignorant. And since ignorant people are in general more common than knowledgeable people, that also means I can dismiss all the people who use that cheap strategy as ignorant, including the knowledgeable ones, if I don’t mind paying the opportunity costs of doing that. (Which in turn allows for cheap countersignaling by ignorant contrarians, and around and around we go.)
None of that is to say that all the people using this strategy are ignorant, or that there’s no value in learning to tell the difference..
Many knowledgeable people find frustrating being asked to address the same basic argument over and over. A common response to this is to write up the counterargument once and respond to such requests with pointers to that writeup. In larger contexts this turns into a body of FAQs, background essays and concepts, etc. which participants in the conversation are expected to have read and understood, and are assumed to agree with unless they explicitly note otherwise.
LW does this with a number of positions… starting a conversation about ethics here and then turning out halfway through to not accept consequentialism, for example, will tend to elicit frustration. Non-consequentialists are not per se unwelcome, but failing to acknowledge that the community norm exists is seen as a defection, and people who do that will frequently be dismissed at that point as not worth the effort. Similar things are true of atheism, of the computational model of consciousness, and a few other things.
My point is that there is a difference between an important FAQ and a bingo card.
Also, even with an FAQ one needs to be willing to engage in further discussion when people point out problems with the answers there, e.g., I don’t entirely accept consequentialism (or many of the standard premises here for that measure) and have generally been able to have civilized discussions on the topics in question.
one needs to be willing to engage in further discussion when people point out problems with the answers there
I don’t really agree. Up to a point, yes, but one reaches that point quickly.
For example, we get theists every once in a while insisting that we engage in further discussion when they point out problems with our reasons for atheism. I often engage them in further discussion, as do others, although I wouldn’t say we need to… it’s not like theism is some kind of obscure philosophy that we’re simply not acquainted with the compelling arguments for.
If we instead got one every few days, I would not engage them, and I would also recommend that others not do so; at that point silent downvotes would be a superior response.
Reasonable people can disagree about where exactly the threshold between those points is best drawn, but I think it’s clear that it needs to be drawn somewhere.
Sure, many people use “I don’t want to hear X” or “pfft, X is a well-known fallacy” or “you really should read author X on this subject and come back when you’ve educated yourself” or many variations on that theme to dismiss arguments they don’t actually have counterarguments for. Agreed.
This ought not be surprising… any strategy that knowledgeable people use to conserve effort can also be adopted as a cheap signal by the ignorant. And since ignorant people are in general more common than knowledgeable people, that also means I can dismiss all the people who use that cheap strategy as ignorant, including the knowledgeable ones, if I don’t mind paying the opportunity costs of doing that. (Which in turn allows for cheap countersignaling by ignorant contrarians, and around and around we go.)
None of that is to say that all the people using this strategy are ignorant, or that there’s no value in learning to tell the difference..
Many knowledgeable people find frustrating being asked to address the same basic argument over and over. A common response to this is to write up the counterargument once and respond to such requests with pointers to that writeup. In larger contexts this turns into a body of FAQs, background essays and concepts, etc. which participants in the conversation are expected to have read and understood, and are assumed to agree with unless they explicitly note otherwise.
LW does this with a number of positions… starting a conversation about ethics here and then turning out halfway through to not accept consequentialism, for example, will tend to elicit frustration. Non-consequentialists are not per se unwelcome, but failing to acknowledge that the community norm exists is seen as a defection, and people who do that will frequently be dismissed at that point as not worth the effort. Similar things are true of atheism, of the computational model of consciousness, and a few other things.
It’s not an unreasonable way to go.
My point is that there is a difference between an important FAQ and a bingo card.
Also, even with an FAQ one needs to be willing to engage in further discussion when people point out problems with the answers there, e.g., I don’t entirely accept consequentialism (or many of the standard premises here for that measure) and have generally been able to have civilized discussions on the topics in question.
I don’t really agree. Up to a point, yes, but one reaches that point quickly.
For example, we get theists every once in a while insisting that we engage in further discussion when they point out problems with our reasons for atheism. I often engage them in further discussion, as do others, although I wouldn’t say we need to… it’s not like theism is some kind of obscure philosophy that we’re simply not acquainted with the compelling arguments for.
If we instead got one every few days, I would not engage them, and I would also recommend that others not do so; at that point silent downvotes would be a superior response.
Reasonable people can disagree about where exactly the threshold between those points is best drawn, but I think it’s clear that it needs to be drawn somewhere.