People can be wrong without being willfully ignorant. There's no reason to assume bad faith. You could make a perfectly good argument along the lines of what

People can be wrong without being willfully ignorant. There's no reason to assume bad faith. You could make a perfectly good argument along the lines of what you say without that accusation. Why add it in? (Note that you haven't actually fully made that argument. We have multiple competing concerns here (as we always do[0]). Virgil has made an argument based on one; you are trying to make an argument based on another. The question then is, which one outweighs the other? Since neither of you are actually responding to the other's arguments, merely expressing different concerns, it is impossible to tell from your arguments alone. (To put it another way, in pg's "Hierarchy of Disagreement"[1], you're purely counterarguing with no attempt at refutation.) Calling Virgil "willfully ignorant" makes it sound like his argument carries no weight or has already been refuted, but this is not the case.) [0] http://lesswrong.com/lw/gz/policy_debates_should_not_appear_onesided/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/gz/policy_debates_should_not_appear_... [1] http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html