Have you done your absolute best effort trying to convince your supporters that they are wrong? What if your major donor said that they would withdraw support unless they judged you to have done your best to invalidate your own arguments, would you simply refuse the money and tell them "find someone who really believes it"?
No, because it's not actually a good idea to try to convince your supporters that they are wrong, especially if you don't actually think they're wrong. If someone did tell me to argue compellingly that I am wrong about something important (and assuming I decided not to attempt deceit), I would tell them that someone who actually believes that should be able to provide a more compelling argument (assuming equivalent rhetorical skills, information, etc). If they really insisted on it, I would try, but that really doesn't seem like a particularly desirable situation. If I could convince my donor to drop this weird request, I would.
On the topic of Eliezer:
Scott Aaronson seems to have no trouble believing it something very similar. Have you gone through his argument and verified that you did come up with it independently earlier and rejected as fallacious? What about Holden Karnofsky's arguments, did you find nothing new there?
I would assign a reasonably high probability that Eliezer has read Aaronson's and Karnofsky's arguments.
Additionally, on a more general level, you really don't have to have independently considered an argument prior to hearing someone else make it, in order to reject it.
Today's post, Against Devil's Advocacy was originally published on 09 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Timeless Control, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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