As I’m often in the habit of proposing reforms, I hear many objections. Some are thoughtful and helpful but, alas, most are not. Humans are too much in the habit of quickly throwing out simple intuitive criticisms to bother to notice whether they actually make much of a logical difference to the criticized claim.

Here are some common but relatively useless objections to a proposed reform. I presume a moment’s reflection will show why:

1. Your short summary didn’t explicitly consider issue/objection X.
2. You are not qualified to discuss this, as you don’t have Ph.D.s in all related areas.
3. Someone with evil intent might propose this to achieve evil ends.
4. You too quickly talked details, instead of proving that you share our values.
5. As most proposals for change are worse than the status quo, yours is likely so as well.
6. There would be costs to change from our current system to this.
7. We know less about how this would work, compared to the status quo.
8. If this was a good idea, it would have already been adopted.
9. Less capable and cooperative people tend to be more interested in radical proposals, so that applies to you.
10. You haven’t offered a supporting analysis of type X (yet none is offered for status quo).
11. Your supporting analysis makes assumptions which might be wrong.
12. Your supporting analysis doesn’t include effect X (not included in most related analyses).
13. This sort of situation is so complex that any explicit analysis can only be misleading.
14. A naive application of your proposal seems to have problem X, therefore so must all variations.
15. It would be better to do X (when one can do both X and this).
16. If this makes X better, other bad systems in our world might use that fact to make Y worse.
17. Nothing ever changes much; why pretend change is possible?

Many useless objections begin with “Under your proposal,”:

1. we might see problem X (which we also see in status quo).
2. people might sometimes die, or be unhappy.
3. people might make choices without being fully informed.
4. poor folks might be worse off than rich folks.
5. poor folks may pick more risk or inconvenience to get more $.
6. not all decisions are made with full democratic participation.
7. governments sometimes coerce citizens.
8. some people would end up worse off than otherwise.
9. some people would suffer X, so you lack moral standing here unless you immediately make yourself suffer X.

So what do useful objections look like? Try these:

1. I reject your goals, and so see no value in your method.
2. A naive application of your proposal has problem X; can anyone think of better variations?
3. Problem X seems robustly larger under your proposal, relative to status quo.
4. Benefit X seems robustly smaller under your proposal, relative to status quo.
5. I’d bet that if we added effect X to your supporting analysis, we’d see your proposal is worse on metric Y.
6. According to this analysis I now provide, your proposal looks worse on many metrics, better on only a few.
7. Here is why the parameter space where your proposal looks good is unusually small, making it unusually fragile.
8. This reform is unusually feasible to have been considered and tried  in the past, making it is especially important to understand why not.