I'm gonna assume this post is serious but not literal. I think you raise legitimate problems with updating. I agree this is a core problem.
I'll add some other problems:
- Experts are bad at predicting advances in their own fields. The future is what matters and on average experts can't predict it.
- Experts are bad at changing their minds. We aren't scouts so much as messengers from the scouts. Our actual scouts are not using scout mindset.
You retreat to pessimism. Instead I suggest:
1. Bayesianism provides other options - Scott can say that he's extremely confident a flood didn't happen and so it's very unlikely he'll be convinced otherwise. Many conflicting pieces of evidence back this up (or suggest he shouldn't take a view)
2. Understand expert models. My work is on finding wants to understand and pull apart expert models with less effort. I think the present is bad, but we can do better. Where do the experts disagree?
I'm gonna assume this post is serious but not literal. I think you raise legitimate problems with updating. I agree this is a core problem.
I'll add some other problems:
- Experts are bad at predicting advances in their own fields. The future is what matters and on average experts can't predict it.
- Experts are bad at changing their minds. We aren't scouts so much as messengers from the scouts. Our actual scouts are not using scout mindset.
You retreat to pessimism. Instead I suggest:
1. Bayesianism provides other options - Scott can say that he's extremely confident a flood didn't happen and so it's very unlikely he'll be convinced otherwise. Many conflicting pieces of evidence back this up (or suggest he shouldn't take a view)
2. Understand expert models. My work is on finding wants to understand and pull apart expert models with less effort. I think the present is bad, but we can do better. Where do the experts disagree?
I would go one step further, which is sometimes some of the arguments for the /most/ odious things are often the /most/ persuasive. This is because they undergo a sort of natural selection.
The most odious beliefs are, of course, very unconvincing. The people who advocate for them get the most push back.
This means their arguments get more and more refined with each time they encounter resistance, adapting to the particular arguments people made against them, becoming more and more convincing.
Paradoxically acceptable beliefs get very little push back, so there’s no pressure to for those arguments for them to evolve.
For example:
Outright support for murdering Jews gets watered down to claiming the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust were exaggerated. Behind this belief, of course, there are people who full on support Jew murder. But this is how they initially rope people in. A surface appearance of reasonability, just an academic argument quibbling over a figure… and then, bam, you’re a Nazi.
This is the usefulness of ethos, one of the three pillars of rhetroic (the other two being logos and pathos). It is useful to know if a person is a moral, upstanding person and not a hateful Jew murderer because it helps inform you of the /function/ of their argument.
Every argument has a function, and some are designed for ill. They idea you can have an argument based purely on logos and not pathos or ethos is at its core, foolish.
The Holocaust denial to full out Nazi trap is of course, obvious, but there are a great many that are a great deal more subtle.
I'm gonna assume this post is serious but not literal. I think you raise legitimate problems with updating. I agree this is a core problem.
I'll add some other problems:
- Experts are bad at predicting advances in their own fields. The future is what matters and on average experts can't predict it.
- Experts are bad at changing their minds. We aren't scouts so much as messengers from the scouts. Our actual scouts are not using scout mindset.
You retreat to pessimism. Instead I suggest:
1. Bayesianism provides other options - Scott can say that he's extremely confident a flood didn't happen and so it's very unlikely he'll be convinced otherwise. Many conflicting pieces of evidence back this up (or suggest he shouldn't take a view)
2. Understand expert models. My work is on finding wants to understand and pull apart expert models with less effort. I think the present is bad, but we can do better. Where do the experts disagree?
Glorious argument. Hasn't persuaded me.
I'm gonna assume this post is serious but not literal. I think you raise legitimate problems with updating. I agree this is a core problem.
I'll add some other problems:
- Experts are bad at predicting advances in their own fields. The future is what matters and on average experts can't predict it.
- Experts are bad at changing their minds. We aren't scouts so much as messengers from the scouts. Our actual scouts are not using scout mindset.
You retreat to pessimism. Instead I suggest:
1. Bayesianism provides other options - Scott can say that he's extremely confident a flood didn't happen and so it's very unlikely he'll be convinced otherwise. Many conflicting pieces of evidence back this up (or suggest he shouldn't take a view)
2. Understand expert models. My work is on finding wants to understand and pull apart expert models with less effort. I think the present is bad, but we can do better. Where do the experts disagree?
I would go one step further, which is sometimes some of the arguments for the /most/ odious things are often the /most/ persuasive. This is because they undergo a sort of natural selection.
The most odious beliefs are, of course, very unconvincing. The people who advocate for them get the most push back.
This means their arguments get more and more refined with each time they encounter resistance, adapting to the particular arguments people made against them, becoming more and more convincing.
Paradoxically acceptable beliefs get very little push back, so there’s no pressure to for those arguments for them to evolve.
For example:
Outright support for murdering Jews gets watered down to claiming the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust were exaggerated. Behind this belief, of course, there are people who full on support Jew murder. But this is how they initially rope people in. A surface appearance of reasonability, just an academic argument quibbling over a figure… and then, bam, you’re a Nazi.
This is the usefulness of ethos, one of the three pillars of rhetroic (the other two being logos and pathos). It is useful to know if a person is a moral, upstanding person and not a hateful Jew murderer because it helps inform you of the /function/ of their argument.
Every argument has a function, and some are designed for ill. They idea you can have an argument based purely on logos and not pathos or ethos is at its core, foolish.
The Holocaust denial to full out Nazi trap is of course, obvious, but there are a great many that are a great deal more subtle.