> But often things are a bit fuzzier, and it makes sense to take the speaker's identity and character into account when making a snap judgment on how seriously to take them.
In all honesty I think this mindset is precisely why we've ended up in this massively polarized situation. When you "take the speaker's identity and character into account", you're obviously ("you" here being people in general not you in particular) to lend more credence to someone who's priors match your own. In other words, you give the benefit of the doubt to people like you, and interpret more uncharitably the words of someone who you think isn't like you. This creates a destructive cycle where everything eventually devolves into an echo chamber, increasing polarization and creating more echo chambers.
That's why I like how one of the principles behind Hacker News is to employ the "principle of charity" – try to interpret people's words in the best possible light, regardless of their priors or your own.
It absolutely can (and often does) lead to a cycle of reinforcing one's own biases. But I'm not convinced it would be either possible or desirable to completely avoid it. You simply can't thoroughly evaluate every claim you hear, or independently fill every gap in every apparently cogent but not absolutely watertight argument, or determine exactly how cherry-picked the evidence being presented to you is. You can't even pay full attention to more than a fraction of the ideas you encounter. At some point you've got to make judgments about the credibility of the speaker, the biases and incentives that might cause them to make mistakes or mislead you, the fundamental moral disagreements that might render your opinions on certain issues mutually irrelevant. If you're not doing it consciously I strongly suspect you are doing it unconsciously.
I agree wholeheartedly that the problem is information overload, but I disagree on the solution.
If you don't have the bandwidth to process all the arguments you're receiving... receive fewer arguments. Get involved in fewer shitposting threads on the internet. Have fewer arguments about politics at work. The solution is not to assume / reduce / summarize until the arguments become tidy little things you can stick in boxes, it is to just reduce your workload so that you can give the arguments you care most about the attention they deserve.
You must be filtering by speaker at some level and in some contexts, though, right? I assume you have opinions on e.g. scientific topics that you don't understand in depth. The only way I know to form those opinions is by doing my best to work out who to (provisionally, partially) trust.
Likewise, you talk about devoting your attention to the most important arguments -- but how do you decide which arguments deserve that attention? You can't be doing that 100% independently, you must at some point be allowing other people to raise issues to your attention, and to shift your priors a bit by virtue of the credibility they have earned via their track record (of being right, of being honest, of caring about things you care about).
In all honesty I think this mindset is precisely why we've ended up in this massively polarized situation. When you "take the speaker's identity and character into account", you're obviously ("you" here being people in general not you in particular) to lend more credence to someone who's priors match your own. In other words, you give the benefit of the doubt to people like you, and interpret more uncharitably the words of someone who you think isn't like you. This creates a destructive cycle where everything eventually devolves into an echo chamber, increasing polarization and creating more echo chambers.
That's why I like how one of the principles behind Hacker News is to employ the "principle of charity" – try to interpret people's words in the best possible light, regardless of their priors or your own.