If you only talk to people who agree with you, then you didn’t communicate anything. Antagonizing “the misguided” doesn’t seem helpful. If the goal is to do good, then it seems to me to be valuable to carefully consider whether your rhetoric will best win allies.
If you only talk to people who agree with you, then you didn’t communicate anything. Antagonizing “the misguided” doesn’t seem helpful. If the goal is to do good, then it seems to me to be valuable to carefully consider whether your rhetoric will best win allies.
My main target audience is the sympathetic undecided: those who don't already agree with me, but are receptive to thinking clearly once it's brought to their attention. Antagonizing the deeply misguided few (who are already extremely antagonized -- did you read Wenar's article?) strikes me as a trivial cost by comparison.
I don't optimize my communication for "winning allies". I optimize for communicating importance-weighted truth. This very series explains why I think it's valuable for academics to fill this role. It would absolutely reduce the truth content for me to refrain from making clear that Leif Wenar's article was both intellectually and morally atrocious in just the way I describe with the anti-vax analogies. I'm not going to refrain from forceful criticism when it is called for, and I don't think it would be "helpful" to fail to make my objections as clear and vivid as possible to the "sensible middle" (e.g. typical philosophers and philosophy-adjacent audiences) who are my target audience.
If you only talk to people who agree with you, then you didn’t communicate anything. Antagonizing “the misguided” doesn’t seem helpful. If the goal is to do good, then it seems to me to be valuable to carefully consider whether your rhetoric will best win allies.
My main target audience is the sympathetic undecided: those who don't already agree with me, but are receptive to thinking clearly once it's brought to their attention. Antagonizing the deeply misguided few (who are already extremely antagonized -- did you read Wenar's article?) strikes me as a trivial cost by comparison.
I don't optimize my communication for "winning allies". I optimize for communicating importance-weighted truth. This very series explains why I think it's valuable for academics to fill this role. It would absolutely reduce the truth content for me to refrain from making clear that Leif Wenar's article was both intellectually and morally atrocious in just the way I describe with the anti-vax analogies. I'm not going to refrain from forceful criticism when it is called for, and I don't think it would be "helpful" to fail to make my objections as clear and vivid as possible to the "sensible middle" (e.g. typical philosophers and philosophy-adjacent audiences) who are my target audience.
Thank you for explaining. That makes sense.
(Which you can try to do without reducing the truth content)