Parts of your comment reminded me of something thatās perhaps unrelated, but seems interesting to bring up, which is Stefan Schubertās prior work on āargument-checkingā, as discussed on an 80k episode:
Stefan Schubert: I was always interested in āWhat would it be like if politicians were actually truthful in election debates, and said relevant things?ā [...]
So then I started this blog in Swedish on something that I call argument checking. You know, thereās fact checking. But then I went, āWell thereās so many other ways that you can deceive people except outright lying.ā 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 āThat suits you perfectly. Youāre so judge-y.ā And unfortunately thereās 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: Thatās 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 theyāre 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. Itās just outrageous if you think about it.
Robert Wiblin: Yeah, when I read those articles, I imagine weāre referring to similar things, Iām just astonished. And I donāt know how to react. Because I read it, and I could just see egregious errors, egregious misunderstandings. But then, weāve got this modesty issue, that weāre bringing up before. These are well-respected people. At least in their fields in kind of adjacent areas. And then, Iām thinking, āAm I the crazy one?ā Do they read what I write, and they have the same reaction?
Stefan Schubert: I donāt 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 itās true is very low. But if theyāre a reasonable person, and theyāre arguing for it well, then you should update. But if theyāre arguing in a way which is very emotive ā theyāre not really addressing the positions that weāre holding ā then I donāt 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 youāre just sure about something that someone else you respect just disagrees.
But I agree. There is real red flag when people donāt seem to be actually engaging with the substance of the issues which happens surprisingly often. Theyāll write something, which just suggests, āI just donāt like the toneā or āI donāt like this topicā or āThis whole thing makes me kind of madā but they canāt explain why exactly.
Parts of your comment reminded me of something thatās perhaps unrelated, but seems interesting to bring up, which is Stefan Schubertās prior work on āargument-checkingā, as discussed on an 80k episode: