I wonder if the crux here is the effectiveness of your particular call to action: “Please strive to be less stupid, and call it out when you see it in others.”
I am guessing I am a pretty typical ea-forum reader in that I am appalled by the anti-vaccine turn of the u.s. government. I cannot do much to “be less stupid” by your lights in this particular respect because I generally agree with you on the immorality of preventing vaccine access. But I also don’t think calling out the stupidity when I see it is necessarily a good strategy. That could be very alienating, reduce trust, make anti-vaccine advocates feel victimized, inadvertently associate my various controversial views with vaccines, and increase backlash in the form of more anti-vaccine advocacy. I’m surr in some instances it is in fact the exactly right thing to do, but I also don’t think it’s the straightforward correct response towards people who genuinely think that vaccines cause autism, death, or other harms.
Quick clarification: My target here is not so much people with radically different empirical beliefs (such that they regard vaccines as net-negative), but rather the particular form of status quo bias that I discuss in the original post.
My guess is that for relatively elite audiences (like those who read philosophy blogs), they’re unlikely to feel attached to this status quo bias as part of their identity, but their default patterns of thought may lead them to (accidentally, as it were) give it more weight than it deserves. So a bit of heated rhetoric and stigmatization of the thought-pattern in question may help to better inoculate them against it.
I wonder if the crux here is the effectiveness of your particular call to action: “Please strive to be less stupid, and call it out when you see it in others.”
I am guessing I am a pretty typical ea-forum reader in that I am appalled by the anti-vaccine turn of the u.s. government. I cannot do much to “be less stupid” by your lights in this particular respect because I generally agree with you on the immorality of preventing vaccine access. But I also don’t think calling out the stupidity when I see it is necessarily a good strategy. That could be very alienating, reduce trust, make anti-vaccine advocates feel victimized, inadvertently associate my various controversial views with vaccines, and increase backlash in the form of more anti-vaccine advocacy. I’m surr in some instances it is in fact the exactly right thing to do, but I also don’t think it’s the straightforward correct response towards people who genuinely think that vaccines cause autism, death, or other harms.
Quick clarification: My target here is not so much people with radically different empirical beliefs (such that they regard vaccines as net-negative), but rather the particular form of status quo bias that I discuss in the original post.
My guess is that for relatively elite audiences (like those who read philosophy blogs), they’re unlikely to feel attached to this status quo bias as part of their identity, but their default patterns of thought may lead them to (accidentally, as it were) give it more weight than it deserves. So a bit of heated rhetoric and stigmatization of the thought-pattern in question may help to better inoculate them against it.
(Just a guess though — I could be wrong!)