I feel like there's something about being charitable here, and strawman/steelman distinctions. Like, if someone tells you a belief, and their reasoning for it is terrible, we can still steelman the belief by replacing the terrible reasoning with something better. And that's the most "charitable" way to listen to someone's perspective.
And steelmanning spinach means even if you only know canteen spinach, there might be better spinach out there.
But on the other hand, I've come across a lot of people who are much *too* charitable. If someone says something clearly racist, they choose not to see it. If they have a bad experience, they keep hanging out with the same people, doing the same things, and somehow they expect things to change.
It seems like there might be a problem there, where if you are too charitable generally, then you don't trust your preferences, your thoughts, your intuitions anymore. Maybe once you've tasted spinach in a few different situations, it's *ok* to just not like spinach, and entirely forget the thoughts of the platonic ideal of spinach that you just haven't tried yet. At this point in my life, after patting myself on the back for being openminded and charitable, I'm trying to listen to my preferences more. And maybe I just don't like spinach! Maybe all of the reasoning for a particular belief *is* garbage. And maybe that person really is a racist.
I feel like there's something about being charitable here, and strawman/steelman distinctions. Like, if someone tells you a belief, and their reasoning for it is terrible, we can still steelman the belief by replacing the terrible reasoning with something better. And that's the most "charitable" way to listen to someone's perspective.
And steelmanning spinach means even if you only know canteen spinach, there might be better spinach out there.
But on the other hand, I've come across a lot of people who are much *too* charitable. If someone says something clearly racist, they choose not to see it. If they have a bad experience, they keep hanging out with the same people, doing the same things, and somehow they expect things to change.
It seems like there might be a problem there, where if you are too charitable generally, then you don't trust your preferences, your thoughts, your intuitions anymore. Maybe once you've tasted spinach in a few different situations, it's *ok* to just not like spinach, and entirely forget the thoughts of the platonic ideal of spinach that you just haven't tried yet. At this point in my life, after patting myself on the back for being openminded and charitable, I'm trying to listen to my preferences more. And maybe I just don't like spinach! Maybe all of the reasoning for a particular belief *is* garbage. And maybe that person really is a racist.