When people make claims, we expect there to be some justification proportional to the claims made.
To be clear, I also absolutely do not hold myself to this standard. I feel totally fine, and encourage others to do as well, to casually mention controversial and important beliefs of theirs whenever it seems relevant, without an obligation to fully back up that claim. Indeed, I am pretty confused what norm you are referring to here, since I also can’t think of this norm in almost any context I am in.
If someone mentions they believe in god, I don’t expect that this means they are ready or want to have a conversation about theology with me right then and there. When someone says they vote libertarian in the US general election I totally don’t expect to have a conversation with them about macroeconomic principles right there. People express large broad claims all the time without wanting to go into all the details.
In the examples you give, the arguments for and against are fairly cached so there’s less of a need to bring them up. That doesn’t apply here. I also think your argument is often false even in your examples—in my experience, the bigger the gap between the belief the person is expressing and that of the ~average of everyone else in the audience, the more likely there is to be pushback (though not always by putting someone on the spot to justify their beliefs, e.g. awkwardly changing the conversation or straight out ridiculing the person for the belief)
Pushback (in the form of arguments) is totally reasonable! It seems very normal that if someone is arguing for some collective path of action, using non-shared assumptions, that there is pushback.
The thing that feels weirder is to invoke social censure, or to insist on pushback when someone is talking about their own beliefs and not clearly advocating for some collective path of action. I really don’t think it’s common for people to push back when someone is expressing some personal belief of theirs that is only affecting their own actions.
In this case, I think it’s somewhat ambiguous whether there I am was arguing for a collective path of action, or just explaining my private beliefs. By making a public comment I at least asserted some claim towards relevance towards others, but I also didn’t explicitly say that I was trying to get anyone else to really change behavior.
And in either case, invoking social censure on the basis of someone expressing a belief of theirs without also giving a comprehensive argument for that belief seems rare (not unheard of, since there are many places in the world where uniform ideologies are enforced, though I don’t think EA has historically been such a place, nor wants to be such a place).
To be clear, I also absolutely do not hold myself to this standard. I feel totally fine, and encourage others to do as well, to casually mention controversial and important beliefs of theirs whenever it seems relevant, without an obligation to fully back up that claim. Indeed, I am pretty confused what norm you are referring to here, since I also can’t think of this norm in almost any context I am in.
If someone mentions they believe in god, I don’t expect that this means they are ready or want to have a conversation about theology with me right then and there. When someone says they vote libertarian in the US general election I totally don’t expect to have a conversation with them about macroeconomic principles right there. People express large broad claims all the time without wanting to go into all the details.
In the examples you give, the arguments for and against are fairly cached so there’s less of a need to bring them up. That doesn’t apply here. I also think your argument is often false even in your examples—in my experience, the bigger the gap between the belief the person is expressing and that of the ~average of everyone else in the audience, the more likely there is to be pushback (though not always by putting someone on the spot to justify their beliefs, e.g. awkwardly changing the conversation or straight out ridiculing the person for the belief)
Pushback (in the form of arguments) is totally reasonable! It seems very normal that if someone is arguing for some collective path of action, using non-shared assumptions, that there is pushback.
The thing that feels weirder is to invoke social censure, or to insist on pushback when someone is talking about their own beliefs and not clearly advocating for some collective path of action. I really don’t think it’s common for people to push back when someone is expressing some personal belief of theirs that is only affecting their own actions.
In this case, I think it’s somewhat ambiguous whether there I am was arguing for a collective path of action, or just explaining my private beliefs. By making a public comment I at least asserted some claim towards relevance towards others, but I also didn’t explicitly say that I was trying to get anyone else to really change behavior.
And in either case, invoking social censure on the basis of someone expressing a belief of theirs without also giving a comprehensive argument for that belief seems rare (not unheard of, since there are many places in the world where uniform ideologies are enforced, though I don’t think EA has historically been such a place, nor wants to be such a place).