Let's discuss, with conditions
Writing prompt: What topics do you like to discuss?
I like to discuss everything under the Sun. However, I’m also wary of people who waste time talking about something in a way that couldn’t possibly lead to a useful insight or a changed mind but are in fact discussing in order to discuss — or of course are sealioning, dogpiling, catfishing, astroturfing, etc. Granted, we don’t know what we don’t know, and it’s rarely possible to say where a conversation could lead. But I think that the moment I find that an engagement is going to lead nowhere, I rapidly lose interest.
On a related note, there’s a line from American journalist Gideon Lewis-Krauss’s essay in The New Yorker in 2020 about Scott Alexander Siskind and the NYT-versus-SSC fracas that has stayed with me:
The rationalists regularly fail to reckon with power as it is practiced, or history as it has been experienced, and they indulge themselves in such contests with the freedom of those who have largely escaped discrimination.
I think of myself as a mostly rational person but I’m also keen to avoid this trap. So I suppose I’m saying that I’m prepared to discuss anything under the Sun unless I’m aware that such a discussion is designed to waste my time, which isn’t or doesn’t turn into the rationalist’s performative circus, and of course which is contrary to my understanding of the world as a rationalist. By that last point, I mean I’m okay to discuss, say, why homeopathy is pseudoscience but not to discuss the pros and cons of homeopathy.
