Published on September 21, 2025 8:47 PM GMTFor me the 0th rule of rational dialogue is common assumption of commitment to the finding the truth together. That's a belief in your audience's sincere interest in the truth and capacity for it.In their book, Nate and Eliazer seem to fail that standard with rhetorical sappers like "bitter pill":"""Making a future full of flourishing people is not the best, most efficient way to fulfill strange alien purposes. So it wouldn't happen to do that, any more than we'd happen to ensure that our dwellings always contained a prime number of stones. In a sense, that's all there is to it. We could end the chapter here. But over decades of experience, we have found that this bitter pill is often hard for people to swallow."""If you are dismissing disagreement or lack of understanding as emotional avoidance, you are not engaging with your audience as if they're able and willing to understand you. How does that serve a rationalist cause? Not that there's anything wrong with the literary form of the political statement, but I read someone as arguing in bad faith if they're passing their argument off as anything more.A responsible way of handling would be to say "We will end the chapter here. An assumption of this work is that AI indifference is fundamentally opposed to wellbeing. Since we believe that that is true on face, we don't argue it in this work, and you will have to judge our conclusions on the assumption that it holds in order to be experienced as engaging with us capably and sincerely." To say anything else is a failure to acknowledge the existence of legitimate disagreement, and we're into theology.It's been a while since I posted on this forum, but I wanted to check the water. Discuss