A very important fact which just came to my attention is that people do not tend to sum or take the max reasonableness of arguments for P to form a judgement about P, rather they tend to take the average. π§΅
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This is a somewhat reasonable heuristic in some situations. For instance, if someone gives you a really unreasonable argument for P this is evidence that their judgement of arguments isnβt very good, and so their best argument is more likely to be secretly bad.
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Similarly, it is evidence that they are motivated to convince you even using faulty arguments, which is generally speaking a bad sign.
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It has important implications. Sometimes people think βoh I will make 50 ok arguments for P instead of one really good oneβ but most folks are not very impressed by this, even though they should be.
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Relatedly, if you try to turn a complicated thesis T into a social movement, the average reasonableness of an argument in favor of T will plummet, and so you may very quickly find that everyone perceives the anti-T-ers as being much more reasonable.
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This will probably still be true even if the best pro-T arguments are very good, and especially true if the best pro-T arguments are subtle or hard to follow.
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Yes, this is about ai risk. I donβt think this is a slam dunk argument against trying to make ai-risk-pilled-ness into a popular social movement, but it is a real cost, and nearly captures the shape of my real worries.
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The best version of my real worries, I also have real worries that are not nearly as defensible or cool.
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Oh actually probably they take the min rather than the average unless they like you, in which case they take the max.
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