Parts of your comment reminded me of something that’s perhaps unrelated, but seems interesting to bring up, which is Stefan Schubert’s prior work on “argument-checking”, as discussed on an 80k episode:
Stefan Schubert: I was always interested in “What would it be like if politicians were actually truthful in election debates, and said relevant things?” [...]
So then I started this blog in Swedish on something that I call argument checking. You know, there’s fact checking. But then I went, “Well there’s so many other ways that you can deceive people except outright lying.” So, that was fairly fun, in a way. I had this South African friend at LSE whom I told about this, that I was pointing out fallacies which people made. And she was like “That suits you perfectly. You’re so judge-y.” And unfortunately there’s something to that.
[...]
Robert Wiblin: What kinds of things did you try to do? I remember you had fact checking, this live fact checking on-
Stefan Schubert: Actually that is, we might have called it fact checking at some point. But the name which I wanted to use was argument checking. So that was like in addition to fact checking, we also checked argument.
Robert Wiblin: Did you get many people watching your live argument checking?
Stefan Schubert: Yeah, in Sweden, I got some traction. I guess, I had probably hoped for more people to read about this. But on the plus side, I think that the very top showed at least some interest in it. A smaller interest than what I had thought, but at least you reach the most influential people.
Robert Wiblin: I guess my doubt about this strategy would be, obviously you can fact check politicians, you can argument check them. But how much do people care? How much do voters really care? And even if they were to read this site, how much would it change their mind about anything?
Stefan Schubert: That’s fair. I think one approach which one might take would be to, following up on this experience, the very top people who write opinion pieces for newspapers, they were at least interested, and just double down on that, and try to reach them. I think that something that people think is that, okay, so there are the tabloids, and everyone agrees what they’re saying is generally not that good. But then you go to the the highbrow papers, and then everything there would actually make sense.
So that is what I did. I went for the Swedish equivalent of somewhere between the Guardian and the Telegraph. A decently well-respected paper. And even there, you can point out this glaring fallacies if you dig deeper.
Robert Wiblin: You mean, the journalists are just messing up.
Stefan Schubert: Yeah, or here it was often outside writers, like politicians or civil servants. I think ideally you should get people who are a bit more influential and more well-respected to realize how careful you actually have to be in order to really get to the truth.
Just to take one subject that effective altruists are very interested in, all the writings about AI, where you get people like professors who write the articles which are really very poor on this extremely important subject. It’s just outrageous if you think about it.
Robert Wiblin: Yeah, when I read those articles, I imagine we’re referring to similar things, I’m just astonished. And I don’t know how to react. Because I read it, and I could just see egregious errors, egregious misunderstandings. But then, we’ve got this modesty issue, that we’re bringing up before. These are well-respected people. At least in their fields in kind of adjacent areas. And then, I’m thinking, “Am I the crazy one?” Do they read what I write, and they have the same reaction?
Stefan Schubert: I don’t feel that. So I probably reveal my immodesty.
Of course, you should be modest if people show some signs of reasonableness. And obviously if someone is arguing for a position where your prior that it’s true is very low. But if they’re a reasonable person, and they’re arguing for it well, then you should update. But if they’re arguing in a way which is very emotive – they’re not really addressing the positions that we’re holding – then I don’t think modesty is the right approach.
Robert Wiblin: I guess it does go to show how difficult being modest is when the rubber really hits the road, and you’re just sure about something that someone else you respect just disagrees.
But I agree. There is real red flag when people don’t seem to be actually engaging with the substance of the issues which happens surprisingly often. They’ll write something, which just suggests, “I just don’t like the tone” or “I don’t like this topic” or “This whole thing makes me kind of mad” but they can’t explain why exactly.
Parts of your comment reminded me of something that’s perhaps unrelated, but seems interesting to bring up, which is Stefan Schubert’s prior work on “argument-checking”, as discussed on an 80k episode: