# Strengthening the foundations under the Overton Window without moving it

As I understand them, the social rules for interacting with people you disagree with are like this:

*   You should argue with people who are a bit wrong
*   You should refuse to argue with people who are very wrong, because it makes them seem more plausibly right to onlookers

I think this has some downsides.

Suppose there is some incredibly terrible view, V. It is not an obscure view: suppose it is one of those things that most people believed two hundred years ago, but that is now considered completely unacceptable.

New humans are born and grow up. They are never acquainted with any good arguments for rejecting V, because nobody ever explains in public why it is wrong. They just say that it is unacceptable, and you would have to be a complete loser who is also the Devil to not see that.

Since it took the whole of humanity thousands of years to reject V, even if these new humans are especially smart and moral, they probably do not each have the resources to personally out-reason the whole of civilization for thousands of years. So some of them reject V anyway, because they do whatever society around them says is good person behavior. But some of the ones who rely more on their own assessment of arguments do not.

This is bad, not just because it leads to an unnecessarily high rate of people believing V, but because the very people who usually help get us out of believing stupid things – the ones who think about issues, and interrogate the arguments, instead of adopting whatever views they are handed – are being deprived of the evidence that would let them believe even the good things we already know.

In short: we don’t want to give the new generation the best sincere arguments against V, because that would be admitting that a reasonable person might believe V. Which seems to get in the way of the claim that V is very, very bad. Which is not only a true claim, but an important thing to claim, because it discourages people from believing V.

But we actually know that a reasonable person might believe V, if they don’t have access to society’s best collective thoughts on it. Because we have a whole history of this happening almost all of the time. On the upside, this does not actually mean that V isn’t very, very bad. Just that your standard non-terrible humans can believe very, very bad things sometimes, as we have seen.

So this all sounds kind of like the error where you refuse to go to the gym because it would mean admitting that you are not already incredibly ripped.

But what is the alternative? Even if losing popular understanding of the reasons for rejecting V is a downside, doesn’t it avoid the worse fate of making V acceptable by engaging people who believe it?

Well, note that the social rules were kind of self-fulfilling. If the norm is that you only argue with people who are a bit wrong, then indeed if you argue with a very wrong person, people will infer that they are only a bit wrong. But if instead we had norms that said you should argue with people who are very wrong, then arguing with someone who was very wrong would not make them look only a bit wrong.

I do think the second norm wouldn’t be that stable. Even if we started out like that, we would probably get pushed to the equilibrium we are in, because for various reasons people are somewhat more likely to argue with people who are only a bit wrong, even before any signaling considerations come into play. Which makes arguing some evidence that you don’t think the person is too wrong. And once it is some evidence, then arguing makes it look a bit more like you think a person might be right. And then the people who loathe to look a bit more like that drop out of the debate, and so it becomes stronger evidence. And so on.

Which is to say, engaging V-believers does not intrinsically make V more acceptable. But society currently interprets it as a message of support for V. There are some weak intrinsic reasons to take this as a signal of support, which get magnified into it being a strong signal.

My weak guess is that this signal could still be overwhelmed by e.g. constructing some stronger reason to doubt that the message is one of support.

For instance, if many people agreed that there were problems with avoiding all serious debate around V, and accepted that it was socially valuable to sometimes make genuine arguments against views that are terrible, then prefacing your engagement with a reference to this motive might go a long way. Because nobody who actually found V plausible would start with ‘Lovely to be here tonight. Please don’t take my engagement as a sign of support or validation—I am actually here because I think Bob’s ideas are some of the least worthy of support and validation in the world, and I try to do the occasional prophylactic ludicrous debate duty. How are we all this evening?’