RespectTradition
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This is a really interesting article about some classic political/psychological mistakes we make when judging people we disagree with.
Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence | Eliezer Yudkowsky | Cato Unbound
Excerpt:
"The temptation to psychoanalyze people so you can dismiss their motives is very common; I know people who have psychoanalysis the way other people have bad breath. I see two relevant rationality tropes; the first doesnt have a standard name, but Id phrase it as If you understand their core flaws so well, please demonstrate it by refuting their actual arguments and conclusions. It does no good to explain at great length why nanotechnologists are immature utopians, or something, unless you can actually pull out a copy of Nanosystems and point out where one of the equations is wrong. (Why, yes, I do meet a lot of people who think they can produce solid judgments about difficult empirical or computational questions by sagely psychoanalyzing the motives of people who disagree with them.) Psychoanalyzing Republicanism, or Democratism, or Libertarianism, or whatever, does not absolve you of the job of refuting anyones actual arguments about what some particular regulation is going to do to the economy. (That really annoys me, actually; I feel an unusually strong impulse to hit somebody with a sock full of spare change whenever Party A is trying to conduct a modular argument about how reality works and Party B is responding with a self-satisfied literary analysis of their personality flaws.)"
Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence | Eliezer Yudkowsky | Cato Unbound
Excerpt:
"The temptation to psychoanalyze people so you can dismiss their motives is very common; I know people who have psychoanalysis the way other people have bad breath. I see two relevant rationality tropes; the first doesnt have a standard name, but Id phrase it as If you understand their core flaws so well, please demonstrate it by refuting their actual arguments and conclusions. It does no good to explain at great length why nanotechnologists are immature utopians, or something, unless you can actually pull out a copy of Nanosystems and point out where one of the equations is wrong. (Why, yes, I do meet a lot of people who think they can produce solid judgments about difficult empirical or computational questions by sagely psychoanalyzing the motives of people who disagree with them.) Psychoanalyzing Republicanism, or Democratism, or Libertarianism, or whatever, does not absolve you of the job of refuting anyones actual arguments about what some particular regulation is going to do to the economy. (That really annoys me, actually; I feel an unusually strong impulse to hit somebody with a sock full of spare change whenever Party A is trying to conduct a modular argument about how reality works and Party B is responding with a self-satisfied literary analysis of their personality flaws.)"
