Followup to: The Rhythm of Disagreement

At the age of 15, a year before I knew what a "Singularity" was, I had learned about evolutionary psychology. Even from that beginning, it was apparent to me that people talked about "disagreement" as a matter of tribal status, processing it with the part of their brain that assessed people's standing in the tribe. The peculiar indignation of "How dare you disagree with Einstein?" has its origins here: Even if the disagreer is wrong, we wouldn't apply the same emotions to an ordinary math error like "How dare you write a formula that makes e equal to 1.718?"

At the age of 15, being a Traditional Rationalist, and never having heard of Aumann or Bayes, I thought the obvious answer was, "Entirely disregard people's authority and pay attention to the arguments. Only arguments count."

Ha ha! How naive.

I can't say that this principle never served my younger self wrong.

I can't even say that the principle gets you as close as possible to the truth.

I doubt I ever really clung to that principle in practice. In real life, I judged my authorities with care then, just as I do now...

But my efforts to follow that principle, made me stronger. They focused my attention upon arguments; believing in authority does not make you stronger. The principle gave me freedom to find a better way, which I eventually did, though I wandered at first.

Yet both of these benefits were pragmatic and long-term, not immediate and epistemic. And you cannot say, "I will disagree today, even though I'm probably wrong, because it will help me find the truth later." Then you are trying to doublethink. If you know today that you are probably wrong, you must abandon the belief today. Period. No cleverness. Always use your truth-finding skills at their full immediate strength, or you have abandoned something more important than any other benefit you will be offered; you have abandoned the truth.

So today, I sometimes accept things on authority, because my best guess is that they are really truly true in real life, and no other criterion gets a vote.

But always in the back of my mind is that childhood principle, directing my attention to the arguments as well, reminding me that you gain no strength from...

Andrew5

Andrew5

Andrew5

Andrew5

Andrew5

Andrew5