How To Have An Opinion

A Worked Example, adapted from a recent conversation where someone was stressed not to have an opinion, and the process I ad hoc came up with, that I liked enough to want to write down here, subject to edits as I hone this.

Meta point: I think often the question can be “is this action relevant?” and if the answer is no, you don’t have to have an opinion. But it can be fun, useful and/or good practice to have one anyway. And some things are action relevant.

Is it good or bad if Elon Musk buys twitter?

1. What are the things you’ve heard?

   • Elon is doing this for free speech reasons and twitter is bad now. He could censor speech less.

2. What are the empirical uncertainties that that brings up?

   • What is twitter’s level of “censorship” and moderation like now?

   • Is Elon twitter better than non Elon twitter at the level of:

     • Level of groups

     • Good for the world

     • Good for EA

   • If Elon has good things in mind for twitter, will he be able to pull them off?

   • what does Elon!twitter even look like?

3. What are some predictions you would make about these uncertainties? With probabilities.

   • Conditional on elon taking over, new public moderation decision that is more lax: 80-85%

4. What are the values at play?

   • What amount / kind of censorship do you think is good?

5. What are the stakes?

   • Consolidation of power over public discourse / conversation might be really bad

   • Empower bad actors to cause harm via content

     • Less recourse with harassment 

     • Maybe less information gets shared

   • Fueling divide among American political groups

     • What if liberals all leave and no one can talk to each other

     • Heuristic: talking to each other is good (is that true?)

     • So maybe the only things that matter are things that bear on these stakes (or stakes you add later)

6. Be creative

   • Maybe the dominant consideration is whether Elon encrypts DMs and it’s 100x more important than anything else, so figure out what you think about that

   • Maybe it’s bad when people of different political parties talk to each other more, it would be good to have more echo chambers because people find the worst elements of each others’ groups and then hate them more

   • Or twitter could get way more powerful and that would be bad because monopolies are bad

   • Maybe twitter could put contradicting tweets next to each other when one goes viral (Robby Bensinger idea)

7. What are some plausible (or concrete but implausible) stories for what the world looks like in different cases?

   • Can you make a world of way more harassment seem real? What bits seem most plausible or implausible?

     • Seemed really plausible that accounts run by, say racial minorities, could get a lot more harassment and not have any recourse

   • Can you make a world of Elon making twitter better seem real? What bits seem most plausible or implausible?

     • Maybe twitter will get way better products (better threads, better selecting of who sees what tweets), some of which will be better for discourse