> And those are the people who have plenty of resources to tailor their message to you...
No.
> A heuristic for what exactly? That you shouldn't consider an argument at all?
No.
> How do you partition the world into distinct questions that you then somehow count to determine what percentage needs a compromise as the answer?
Sample the ones that come up in practice. We're all friends here, or should be, so it doesn't need to be perfectly formal.
> you don't ever ask the questions where the status quo is something that you find acceptable and where everyone else agrees with you
You sure know a lot about me. Oh wait, no you don't. I do my best to question things, which is all you can ask.
> Also, you can trivially transform any absolutist demand into a compromise by simply replacing it with a completely crazy demand.
Yes, lots of terrible things happen when you argue in bad faith. This isn't even the worst one.
> Also, how is it even relevant that it is in almost every other question when you are trying to determine whether it is in the case of this specific question?
Not much, which is another good reason not to bring up slavery. It's not relevant, which is basically all I was trying to say about it.
> You sure know a lot about me. Oh wait, no you don't. I do my best to question things, which is all you can ask.
Which is besides the point. Whether it's all I can ask or not, it doesn't give you a useful answer. And yes, I am pretty sure I know about you that you are a human being, and therefore, general human psychology most likely applies, nothing more, nothing less.
Have you ever asked yourself whether it is a good compromise that your left thumb has not been removed when you were a child because of your hair color?
You haven't, right?
You haven't because it's just a completely crazy idea that there would never be any reason for you to consider it. One of presumably at the very least millions of equally crazy ideas that you could make up that you have never thought of, because, why would you? That is, except for the completely crazy idea that one should remove part of the genitals of children because of their gender. You probably have thought about that one, right?
And that is my point: The things that you have thought about are in no way a meaningfully representative sample of the set of all facts about how society operates, simply as a result of basic human psychology.
> Yes, lots of terrible things happen when you argue in bad faith. This isn't even the worst one.
Yeah, it's even worse when people reject arguments as "absolutist", you can't really get much more bad faith than that.
> Not much, which is another good reason not to bring up slavery. It's not relevant, which is basically all I was trying to say about it.
Well, except it is. That is, not slavery itself is relevant, but what is relevant is the way how people thought and argued about slavery before it became the consensus that slavery is bad. And if you agree that they were wrong about slavery being a good thing, then maybe it would be a good idea to understand how their thinking went wrong at the time. To understand how they convinced themselves that slavery was the right thing to do. Because if the method of reasoning that they used lead them to the conclusion that slavery was a good idea, then that probably means that their method of reasoning was unreliable, right?
So, if we can understand how they arrived at their conclusion, we can maybe use that understanding to see whether there are any conclusions that we arrive at today using the same kind of reasoning, and to then examine whether those conclusions maybe are also unreliable, and possibly wrong.
Whether slavery was in any way comparable to whatever conclusion we are examining now is completely irrelevant to this. The point is not to determine whether something is as bad as slavery. The point is to determine whether the method we use to conclude that something is right is the same that people used to conlude that slavery was right. And the reason why slavery is used as the reference for this is not because it was terrible, the reason is that it's something that is familiar. People nowadays generally have some understanding of how people back then justified slavery. Noone knows how the unfair distribution of bread in the year 1537 in some spanish village was justified, so it's a useless reference point, even if it might be a closer analogue to whatever we are discussing now.
No.
> A heuristic for what exactly? That you shouldn't consider an argument at all?
No.
> How do you partition the world into distinct questions that you then somehow count to determine what percentage needs a compromise as the answer?
Sample the ones that come up in practice. We're all friends here, or should be, so it doesn't need to be perfectly formal.
> you don't ever ask the questions where the status quo is something that you find acceptable and where everyone else agrees with you
You sure know a lot about me. Oh wait, no you don't. I do my best to question things, which is all you can ask.
> Also, you can trivially transform any absolutist demand into a compromise by simply replacing it with a completely crazy demand.
Yes, lots of terrible things happen when you argue in bad faith. This isn't even the worst one.
> Also, how is it even relevant that it is in almost every other question when you are trying to determine whether it is in the case of this specific question?
Not much, which is another good reason not to bring up slavery. It's not relevant, which is basically all I was trying to say about it.