I think starting the post with “Do Better” is a kind of rhetorical flush that probably erodes goodwill between you and the people you want to convince while giving no reasons for people to agree with what you are saying.
It’s a common turn of phrase, and when I see it I often think it’s an effort to sort of shame people into agreeing with what you are saying, to assert moral superiority without actually providing argument for it. In your post you do make a number of arguments which I think are pretty good. I don’t think they need to be embellished with some low-key shaming in your post’s title.
Edit: I ought to explain more clearly why I think what I claimed above. The exhortation, “Do Better” carries an unambiguous implication the recipient isn’t putting in as much effort as they ought to. This is probably true in many cases, but I think probably there are people with many different starting positions in this discussion who are doing as well as they can to understand how they should respond. So “do better” as an exhortation to everyone who disagrees with the particular claims one is making seems quite blunt and carries inaccurate implications. People who are already doing the best they can might conclude the only way they can “do better” is to change their attitude or position without really understanding why they should do so.
I don’t know—there are probably some issues where that’s fine, given the stakes, but it is poor epistemic practice because it has rhetorical persuasive power independent of the truth value or clarity of the claims being made, but possibly very dependent on social norm adherence.
I think starting the post with “Do Better” is a kind of rhetorical flush that probably erodes goodwill between you and the people you want to convince
while giving no reasons for people to agree with what you are saying.It’s a common turn of phrase, and when I see it I often think it’s an effort to sort of shame people into agreeing with what you are saying, to assert moral superiority without actually providing argument for it. In your post you do make a number of arguments which I think are pretty good. I don’t think they need to be embellished with some low-key shaming in your post’s title.
Edit: I ought to explain more clearly why I think what I claimed above. The exhortation, “Do Better” carries an unambiguous implication the recipient isn’t putting in as much effort as they ought to. This is probably true in many cases, but I think probably there are people with many different starting positions in this discussion who are doing as well as they can to understand how they should respond. So “do better” as an exhortation to everyone who disagrees with the particular claims one is making seems quite blunt and carries inaccurate implications. People who are already doing the best they can might conclude the only way they can “do better” is to change their attitude or position without really understanding why they should do so.
I don’t know—there are probably some issues where that’s fine, given the stakes, but it is poor epistemic practice because it has rhetorical persuasive power independent of the truth value or clarity of the claims being made, but possibly very dependent on social norm adherence.