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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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Murphy is evidently aware that this argument can't be spoken out loud because it's likely too vacant to be generally persuasive

From a rationalist point of view, this can be one of the bad things about the whole process. It's easy for some position to not "be generally persuasive" in the sense of "quoting it on CNN or sending it to your employer gets you in trouble", yet actually be fairly reasonable. I'm sure you can think of a number of examples (perhaps some low controversy examples would be "yes, I should run over a fat man with a trolley" or "yes, there is some acceptable non-zero level of violent crime", but many examples are very political).

There's also the problem of absolute statements made about noncentral examples. You can't say "Thomas Jefferson is a noncentral example of a racist" on the Internet. (Not that most of the audience knows what a noncentral example is anyway.)

And finally there's epistemic learned helplessness. The proper reaction to someone "disproving your position" is to politely ignore them. If you've checked around for a while, and haven't found any good counter-counterarguments even when you aren't being put on the spot and have some time and access to research, then maybe you can start changing your position.