[Original post: Why I'm Staying Out Of The Substack Religion Debate]

Ben Smith writes:

This post sure reads like participating in the object level debate, not just "writing a post about how I won't participate".

I did joke about this at the end, but I also want to defend calling this a post about how I won't participate.

This essay presented a kind of hand-wavey heuristic for why I'm not spending lots of time examining the details of every individual argument. This is fine, everyone has to do this or be overwhelmed, but I think it's important to keep hand-wavey heuristics for not participating in arguments, vs. actual participation in arguments, distinct. Little annoys me more than when I spend weeks carefully gathering citations and making a substantive contribution in a domain, and somebody responds with "well that's obviously all bullshit because it vaguely reminds me of something I have negative affect towards". It's not necessarily wrong to deprioritize a topic because it vaguely reminds you of something that you have negative affect toward, but I would prefer these people admit they're dismissing/ignoring it rather than claim to be engaging with it. I'm working on a longer post about this topic.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-491