I’m glad you’re running this! It seems valuable to have reading programs focused on such an important question.
But I wonder whether a better goal for the program might be to help people to engage with the ideas and figure out their views either way, rather than to increase people’s confidence that longtermism is correct[1].
I think that this is better even if your motivation is to increase the number of people who agree with longtermism—convincing people of specific conclusions seems worse for community epistemics, and might seem offputtingly dogmatic to some people.
I understood “we hope to decrease the uncertainty about your belief in longtermism” to mean “we hope to increase your confidence in longtermism being correct”, although is it a bit ambiguous.
You are right that we could have phrased it better.
However, it is not about convincing people of specific conclusions but about engaging in a deeper way with the topic. Every week there will be open discussions and the last week deals explicitly with Criticisms of longtermism
I’m glad you’re running this! It seems valuable to have reading programs focused on such an important question.
But I wonder whether a better goal for the program might be to help people to engage with the ideas and figure out their views either way, rather than to increase people’s confidence that longtermism is correct[1].
I think that this is better even if your motivation is to increase the number of people who agree with longtermism—convincing people of specific conclusions seems worse for community epistemics, and might seem offputtingly dogmatic to some people.
I understood “we hope to decrease the uncertainty about your belief in longtermism” to mean “we hope to increase your confidence in longtermism being correct”, although is it a bit ambiguous.
You are right that we could have phrased it better. However, it is not about convincing people of specific conclusions but about engaging in a deeper way with the topic. Every week there will be open discussions and the last week deals explicitly with Criticisms of longtermism
Sounds great!