Will Sawin:
If it's a high-status belief, due to correctness of the Titanic analogy, very few high-status people will ask that [what's the harm]. They are much more likely, instead, to criticize your argument that the belief is wrong.
Would that it were so! When it comes to really pervasive and established high-status delusional beliefs, with very few exceptions, what you'll get is at best a criticism whose content is far below the usual scholarly standards, and at worst just mindless sneering and moral indignation.
This holds both for those high-status false beliefs that are a matter of ideological orthodoxy and those that are a matter of venal interest. (The overlap between those is, of course, larger than the pure part of either category, and people have no problem coming up with honest rationalizations for their professional, ideological, and other interests.)
(In addition, the whole methodology of collecting individual examples works well for distributed mistakes like the passengers', but not for large, single mistakes like the captain's.)
In many cases, high-status delusional beliefs don't result in a single identifiable disaster, but rather in lots of widely distributed harm and suffering. (In this sense, the Titanic analogy breaks down.)
In these cases, however, a collection of touching human-interest stories will likely fail to strike the intended note among high-status readers, and will instead be dismissed as nefarious extremist propaganda.
If I go around saying "This belief is wrong! Hey everyone, did you know that this belief is wrong?" and it's a low-status belief, high-status people are likely to ask "What's the harm?"
Not really. It depends on the exact way the belief in question is perceived in high-status circles. In some cases, you'll win status points out of all proportion with the actual importance of the problem and without much scrutiny of the accuracy of your arguments (the phrase "raising awareness" comes to mind). In other cases, you won't register on high-status people's radar even if you have a solid case, simply because the issue doesn't happen to be a status-fertile cause. In yet other cases, it may happen that while a belief is low-status, it is also considered uncouth to attack it all-out; one is supposed to scoff at it in more subtle and oblique ways instead.
Would that it were so! When it comes to really pervasive and established high-status delusional beliefs, with very few exceptions, what you'll get is at best a criticism whose content is far below the usual scholarly standards, and at worst just mindless sneering and moral indignation.
Would you argue that this consists of people "asking what's the harm" rather than "criticizing your argument"? I never said that they would criticize your argument well.
...In many cases, high-status delusional beliefs don't result in a single identifiabl
When I was 12, my cousin Salina was 15. She was sitting in the back seat of a car with the rest of her family when a truck carrying concrete pipes came around the turn. The trucker had failed to secure his load properly, and the pipes broke loose. One of them smashed into Salina's head. My family has never wept as deeply as we did during the slideshow at her funeral.
The trucker didn't want to kill Salina. We can't condemn him for murder. Instead, we condemn him for negligence. We condemn him for failing to care enough for others' safety to properly secure his load. We give out the same condemnation to the aircraft safety inspector who skips important tests on his checklist because it's cold outside. That kind of negligence can kill people, and people who don't want their loved ones harmed have strong reasons to condemn such a careless attitude.
Social tools like praise and condemnation can change people's attitudes and desires. I was still a fundamentalist Christian when I went to college, but well-placed condemnation from people I respected changed my attitude toward gay marriage pretty quickly. Most humans care what their peers think of them. That's why public praise for those who promote a good level of safety, along with public condemnation for those who are negligent, can help save lives.
Failure to secure a truck load can be deadly. But failure to secure one's beliefs can be even worse.
Again and again, people who choose to trust intuition and anecdote instead of the replicated scientific evidence about vaccines have caused reductions in vaccination rates, which are then followed by deadly epidemics of easily preventable disease. Anti-vaccination activists are negligent with their beliefs. They fail to secure their beliefs in an obvious and clear-cut case. People who don't want their loved ones to catch polio or diphtheria from a neighbor who didn't vaccinate their children have reasons to condemn - and thereby decrease - such negligence.
People often say of false or delusional beliefs: "What's the harm?" The answer is "lots." WhatsTheHarm.com collects incidents of harm from obvious products of epistemic negligence like AIDS denial, homeopathy, exorcism, and faith healing. As of today they've counted up more than 300,000 injuries, 300,000 deaths, and $2 billion in economic damages due to intellectual recklessness. Very few of those harmed by such epistemic negligence have been listed by WhatsTheHarm.com, so the problem is actually much, much worse than that.
Failure to secure one's beliefs can lead to misery on a massive scale. That is why your rationality is my business.