Metablog

Charity sure doesn’t get a lot of love. Many Unfogged commenters don’t like the idea much. (Though more express support.) It’s so frustrating to combat the cynicism of those who think there’s not any hope for people productive rational debate. Take, for instance, comments from SomeCallMeTim:

Particularly when we’re talking about something that has been widely discussed, like abortion, people lining up on different sides have at least slightly different baseline principles. And those baseline principles are themselves contingent on a certain series of assumption about facts and the way those facts relate to other facts, and so on. You can’t really overcome the tendency because you often aren’t trying to overcome one opinion, but a host of them, the vast majority of which never get brought up in the debate for reasons of time, etc.

I think we disagree about the (a) the existence of common priors, (b) how willing we are to change our common priors, and (c) how deeply rooted and, at the same time, contingent belief in a set of common priors really is. I think you’re looking for a coherence, stability, and factuality to beliefs that simply doesn’t exist, for any of us. Debating or arguing is really much more about finding out the shape of a possible deal, with the understanding that, like any deal, someone may pull out down the line when his perceived interests change.

What can you say to that? Perhaps a study that trains people in debating productively, then pits those people in discussions with ideological separated people and see if their position changes more than a control group? Maybe there’s some easier way to test the issue using existing data? Someone call Steven Levitt.

Intuitional differences aren’t necessarily the end of the discussion. They can be resolved too, by changing your intuitions. Well, not directly, but by framing situations differently. Different framing leads to differently triggered instincts. And many times intuitions are conditioned responses to situations based on childhood experiences or trauma, and that can be changed too, to some extent.

But I don’t think charity is approprite for every situation. While I think the a truly stable society requires that charitable debate be the rule in all situations, I don’t think we’re living in a stable society. Things are changing, fast. And you can make more of a difference by focusing your resources in the few pivotal situations where things really matter (say, trying to make sure that we develop safe artificial intelligence, or overcoming disease and old age) than you can going around trying to change people’s minds about things.

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