Five Components of Taking Ideas Seriously

In the course of drafting a plan to make Effective Altruism great again, I’m trying to pin down and decompose some central principles that make EA ideas and thinkers seem so vital. Perhaps chief among these is the notion of taking ideas seriously. Taking ideas seriously sounds all well and good, but what do we mean by that? As is my wont, I have narrowed down five things that I think serve as useful guides.

This first principle speaks to how you orient to ideas as things distinct from just anything you happen to say or believe. Namely, ideas evoke something more abstract and principled. They’re the kind of thing you can expound upon and mix with your empirical experience of the world to produce new insights.

An important question then becomes how willing you are to accept those insights. If you’re taking ideas seriously, I claim, you need to be willing to accept ideas at least enough to continue considering the places they might take you.

For example, if you don’t let a principled concern for pleasure and pain extend to real consideration of the pleasure and pain experienced by insects, maybe you aren’t taking the idea that pleasure and pain are what’s important seriously.

This principle extends the first by letting you arrive at weird places over and above just going there. Should shrimp welfare be our priority? It’s a question you need to be able to ask, and if all the arguments point to yes, even in the face of other problems that humans are facing, you should be willing to stand by the arguments instead of saying “but that’d be crazy, right?”

Similarly, if a powerful argument leads you to think that the long-term future contains many more lives and morally higher stakes, you should be able to accept the conclusion that this is what many more people should work on despite the desperate situation that many people today face for certain.

The real move here is holding reductio arguments to the high bar of actually revealing an inconsistency or inherent contradiction in an idea, rather than dismissing it for being merely uncomfortable.

Willingness to debate is another extension of the general principle we’ve been hovering around, in this case applied to specific people, groups, or positions that polite society would excuse rejecting out of hand. This is just another easy excuse not to explore ideas and instead rely on customs or heuristics.

If an idea or a person shocks your conscience and triggers moral outrage, you should be able to explain why and—at least in principle—tolerate hearing and responding to the arguments, even if you don’t think it’s a great use of time.

The way to actually let yourself follow ideas where they lead in a practical sense is to control your own emotions. The three principles above each rely on notions of what is socially acceptable or unacceptable, i.e. weird. If you get past those and are willing to engage and potentially agree with any proposition, you still need to remain consistently calm and focused on using plain language and precise meanings. A general air of positivity probably helps here too.

The issue is that failing to embody these traits is strong evidence that you’ve let some non-argued-for factor take over. This is because ideas should be free-flowing and allowed to go whichever way the arguments point. You as the one pursuing ideas should be happy for them to do that.

Getting upset that ideas have failed to flow in a particular direction is a clear sign that you’re not fully committed to exploring them wherever they lead.

Further internalizing things, you should be able to recognize—and indeed applaud—perspectives that are ‘good,’ and ‘very good,’ even if they do not match your own ‘best’ view. If you’ve personally explored ideas to the furthest extent you’re able and reached a stable conclusion, you should make an effort to understand reasonable grounds for disagreement based on unshared assumptions about the subject at hand. If you are unwilling to accept assumptions which aren’t yours, you likely underexamined the foundations (and fundamental uncertainty) of your own beliefs. This means it will be hard to unmoor you from any belief, including false ones.