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  Edwin de Wit commented on idea #2063.

While I could simply refute bad criticisms and move on, there’s also the matter of efficiency and opportunity cost: I don’t want to waste time repeatedly refuting poor criticisms, or worse, get stuck in circular debates with people who don’t recognize that some arguments aren’t good criticisms at all.

That’s a fair concern if you’re talking about duplicate criticisms, which public intellectuals do field. The solution here is to publicly write a counter-criticism once and then refer to it again later. It is then on the other party to present some new reasoning or evidence, pending which you don’t need to change your mind or focus any more attention on the matter.

For example, people’s knee-jerk reaction to libertarianism is ‘who would build the roads if there were no government?’ That’s one of the reasons Logan and I wrote the Libertarian FAQ, which answers that question. We can now just link to that whenever it comes up.

If you’re talking about new criticisms, however, I think you should address and not dismiss them.

#2063·Dennis HackethalOP, 8 days ago