Any intellectual community will have (at least implicit) norms surrounding which assumptions /â approaches are regarded as:
(i) presumptively correct or eligible to treat as a starting premise for further argument; this is the community âorthodoxyâ.
(ii) most plausibly mistaken, but reasonable enough to be worth further consideration (i.e. valued critiques, welcomed âheterodoxyâ)
(iii) too misguided to be worth serious engagement.
It would obviously be a problem for an intellectual community if class (ii) were too narrow. Claims like âdissent isnât welcomeâ imply that (ii) is non-existent: your impression is that the only categories within EA culture are (i) and (iii). If that were true, I agree it would be bad. But reasoning from the mere existence of class (iii) to negative conclusions about community epistemics is far too hasty. Any intellectual community will have some things they regard as not worth engaging with. (Classic examples include, e.g., biologistsâ attitudes towards theistic alternatives to Darwinian evolution, or historiansâ attitudes towards various conspiracy theories.)
People with different views will naturally dispute which of these three categories any given contribution ideally ought to fall into. People donât tend to regard their own contributions as lacking intellectual worth, so if they experience a lack of engagement itâs very tempting to leap to the conclusion that others must be dogmatically dismissing them. Sometimes theyâre right! But not always. So itâs worth being aware of the âoutside viewâ that (a) some contributions may be reasonably ignored, and (b) anyone on the receiving end of this will subjectively experience it just as the OP describes, as seeming like dogmatic/âunreasonable dismissal.
Given the unreliability of personal subjective impressions on this issue, itâs an interesting question what more-reliable evidence one could look for to try to determine whether any given instance of non-engagement (and/âor wider community patterns of dis/âengagement) is objectively reasonable or not. Seems like quite a tricky issue in social epistemology!
Any intellectual community will have (at least implicit) norms surrounding which assumptions /â approaches are regarded as:
(i) presumptively correct or eligible to treat as a starting premise for further argument; this is the community âorthodoxyâ.
(ii) most plausibly mistaken, but reasonable enough to be worth further consideration (i.e. valued critiques, welcomed âheterodoxyâ)
(iii) too misguided to be worth serious engagement.
It would obviously be a problem for an intellectual community if class (ii) were too narrow. Claims like âdissent isnât welcomeâ imply that (ii) is non-existent: your impression is that the only categories within EA culture are (i) and (iii). If that were true, I agree it would be bad. But reasoning from the mere existence of class (iii) to negative conclusions about community epistemics is far too hasty. Any intellectual community will have some things they regard as not worth engaging with. (Classic examples include, e.g., biologistsâ attitudes towards theistic alternatives to Darwinian evolution, or historiansâ attitudes towards various conspiracy theories.)
People with different views will naturally dispute which of these three categories any given contribution ideally ought to fall into. People donât tend to regard their own contributions as lacking intellectual worth, so if they experience a lack of engagement itâs very tempting to leap to the conclusion that others must be dogmatically dismissing them. Sometimes theyâre right! But not always. So itâs worth being aware of the âoutside viewâ that (a) some contributions may be reasonably ignored, and (b) anyone on the receiving end of this will subjectively experience it just as the OP describes, as seeming like dogmatic/âunreasonable dismissal.
Given the unreliability of personal subjective impressions on this issue, itâs an interesting question what more-reliable evidence one could look for to try to determine whether any given instance of non-engagement (and/âor wider community patterns of dis/âengagement) is objectively reasonable or not. Seems like quite a tricky issue in social epistemology!