When Can I Stop Listening to my Enemy's Points?

Flat Earth will probably not have any luck convincing me.

Bentham's Bulldog

recently put out an article that I disagree with, titled “No Views Have A Monopoly on Smartness”. In it, he argues “There are always smart people on both sides of every issue. There’s never a clean divide, where the smart people think X and the dumb people think Y.” I’ll disagree by providing a list of issues where there is a clean divide where the smart people think X and the dumb people think Y:

• Creationism

• Climate Change Being Something That Exists At All

• Astrology

• Vaccines Preventing Disease

• Flat Earth

• 5G Causes COVID-19

• Moon Landing was Fake

• Holocaust was Fake

• The Pyramids were Built by Aliens

• Geocentrism

…I’m sure you can think of a number of other suitable issues that are so heavily polarized in terms of good faith arguments that it’s difficult to find good arguments for them.

(When I use “smart” here, I’m not simply talking about high IQ. Being smart necessarily implies being able to discern the quality of an argument; otherwise your beliefs and arguments suck, and what are we doing here! The philosophers I listen to, on Substack and elsewhere, are smart in the latter way. If Bentham meant “no side has a monopoly on high IQ people” that’s trivially true, and much less interesting. Anyone can pump out convoluted bad arguments for any belief. More discussion in the comments)

But Bentham’s point in the article was not to defend these issues, but to gesture at close minded people who aren’t willing to entertain arguments for veganism, theism, abortion, or other issues where there are, in fact, many intelligent people with reasonable arguments on both sides.

And I think he’s hit on something very important: When do we decide that we’ve seen enough arguments for whichever side we’ve chosen in religion, politics, morality, philosophy, and stop listening? It’s not so simple as “keep an open mind! Value your personal truth over the consensus!” If I write a post defending flat earth, even if I make some interesting arguments you haven’t heard before, I’d forgive you if you assume I’m stupid and then leaving my post.

It’s also not so simple as radical skepticism. You should believe, very close to 100%, that the Earth is round! That’s the correct opinion! If you examine an issue like whether raising minimum wage is good for GDP, examine the competing meta-analyses on the issue, and decide “Huh, I don’t know which side is better, it’s maybe 70-30, I wish I was more of an expert”, then I think that’s reasonable. But it’s less reasonable to look at the arguments for flat earth vs round earth and say “Interesting points on both sides, round earth is a bit stronger, I bet it’s 70-30.”

It’s also definitely not so simple as the entrenchment of all the beliefs and biases you have right now. Refusing to change your mind even a little bit is a failure mode for many a group throughout history. It’s vital to change your mind when new evidence comes out, or when you view this new evidence — that’s a trivial point. If evidence can’t sway you, then you’re the one living in a post-truth world all the academics like to point at.

So the issue… is a misclassification of issues. There are issues where anyone respectable agrees. There are issues where the consensus swings one way, but there’s still many people who disagree. And there are issues where it’s a deadlock. This all gets complicated when you realize that every individual wants to position their chosen belief AS consensus, because a great way to sway people to your side is for them to think “every respectable person believes X”. Movements on Twitter have used this technique to influence major political parties’ core points! This is just another underhanded argumentative technique that’s used on social media, and doesn’t point to which side is actually correct, but this is obviously relevant for this classification!

If genuinely intelligent people who you respect think an opposite way from you, you should consider that solid evidence in favor. But how do you identify who’s intelligent about the issue? Is there a political bias that’s making them reluctant to tell the truth? How do you know if they ARE intelligent if you judge intelligence by the criteria of “do they agree with my beliefs right now”?

This gets even more interesting when you have the expertise, and you keep seeing the same bad arguments over and over again, but there are still intelligent people on both sides. I left a comment heavily disagreeing with a Substack post about the Sleeping Beauty Problem (I’m a thirder!), and the poster called me stupid and uneducated compared to him, and said I didn’t understand any of his post. Now, being mean to people you disagree with is obviously bad epistemic practice (I could write a whole post about that), but maybe my arguments were bad and he’d seen them 1,000 times! If I make a post about why the Earth is round, and someone replies with the same terrible arguments in favor of it being flat, I would certainly be dismissive. I don’t think my arguments fell into this category, but if you’re an expert in something, there are points casuals make that you can instantly dismiss. I have some AI doomer friends who feel that way about arguments against doomerism, though I mostly disagree.

I wish I had a stronger conclusion, but all I can say is that you must take each belief on a case-by-case basis. I don’t think there’s any broad, sweeping generalization that can be used to instantly decide whether an issue is hogwash or genuinely contentious, as nice as that would be. And I think most people do not take the time to distinguish the beliefs they hold that may be wrong vs the beliefs they hold that are obviously correct. And if they do this, they don’t do it well! In many cases, you won’t be smart or educated enough to evaluate the best evidence, and you have to gauge the consensus amongst experts and which category the issue falls into, and gauge if that consensus is biased or misguided, and how much. And you have to gauge if you’re smart enough to even determine the bias! It’s all a mess. I think this is a very hard problem that people don’t think is very hard.

Eliezer Yudkowsky has made a similar point before, but I think he has far too much confidence for his beliefs on the consciousness of infants and animals, just like I certainly have far too much confidence for some of my unexamined beliefs. If the figurehead of rationality isn’t immune to this classification issue, who is?

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