Thank you. Your representation of my argument has all the flaws you find, but look again to make sure it's the right representation of my argument.
Ad hom attacks may be radically honest in the way that any other violence to sincere engagement is, but the radical honesty to admire admits one's own potential for motivated reasoning in the same breath. I don't see that humility from the authors.
I'm not concerned that they are primed to expect motivated disagreement, but that they are primed to expect only motivated disagreement; that no one who disagrees is capable of engaging sincerely; that there is no rational disagreement. It's OK to think that. That's what it means to be axiomatic. The rule is you've got to say so. And I'm certainly not alone in noting that the authors are very dismissive of failures to accept their axiom-in-argument's-clothing.
It's entirely possible I haven't read enough outside the book, refs are welcome. If I am stuck in the labyrinth of emotional resistance to such brave truths, I don't have to be reminded of that possibility. What will give me a chance at peeling the scales from my eyes is 1. engagement with the counterarguments in their strongest form assuming equally rational interlocutors, or 2. an invitation to just take that particular point as given and see where it leads.
I think a lot about signal detection theory, and I think that's still the best I can come up with for this question. There are false positives, there are false negatives, they are both important to keep in mind, the cost of reducing one is an increase in the other, humans and human systems will always have both.
So, for example, even the most over-generous public welfare system will have deserving people off the dole and even the most stingy system will have undeserving recipients (by whatever definition), so the question (for a welfare system, say) isn't how do we prevent abuse, but how many abusers are we willing to tolerate for every 100 deserving recipients we reject? Also useful in lots of medical discussions, legal discussions, pop science discussions, etc.
Maybe this says more about me than about the world, but if this was StackOverflow, this comment would get the star. Thanks.
I believe you're confusing arrogance and closedmindedness.
Well, maybe that's the question. They're different, and you can have one without the other, but do they cooccur above chance? Maybe arrogance reduces your exposure to the occasional clever ideas that will inevitably come from people you've dismissed. That isn't closemindedness, it something more like as-if-closemindedness, but it would come to the same thing.
I don't buy arguments of the form "it must be good otherwise we wouldn't do it," but that's just a quibble. I'd buy a signaling argument and you're right that I'm not clear on my terms. This is a stab, but the way I think I'm using arrogance is as using your high abilities to justify a inflated sense of self worth. OK, applying that back to the question, I don't see how an inflated sense of self-worth could make you a worse critical thinker. Maybe? I have to think about it more.
This work articulates an attack on the use of conjugate priors in a Bayesian analysis: http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS?service=UI&version=1.0&verb=Display&handle=euclid.ba/1340369826 In their words, "conjugate priors may lead to a dogmatic analysis."
Sorry for necro.
This post is less about The Truth that and more about science as a personal endeavor, as something you do on yourself to be a better thinker, or not.
Sorry if I wasn't clear. I want to be good at admitting that I was in error, and to collect cases of great thinkers who failed to do that. So yes, I want to be less wrong. Admitting one's errors is a tool in the less wrong toolbox. We like to think we're good at it, that its easy, that we're detached, but I've seen that being content with my level of self-criticality creates complacency and fosters lapses. These examples demonstrate it.
On the subject of admitting one's errors, I think DanArmak is right that Newton doesn't belong on the list if his opinions of alchemy were representative of the time. To replace him, two others from my list of leads: Ernst Haeckel on Lemuria and Jagadish Chandra Bose on sensation/perception in plants and inorganic compounds.
> That’s different from failing to address the arguments in their strongest form. I think you are equating these two separate critiques.
I think not. You'll find elsewhere on the site that the variations of Steelmanning, the Principle of Charity, and Assume Good Faith are all cited adjacently to each other. The quite reasonable and unremarkable epistemic standard I'm setting is the neighborhood of these ideas, and I'm surprised to see so little interest in it.
> Sometimes you can’t assume equally rational interlocutors, because your interlocutors are not equally rational, and that would be a false assumption.
And there is no interlocutor. It's a book, with a wide audience that won't talk back. A writer lacks full dossiers on their complete readership, and so usefully/incorrectly assumes an audience capable and invested in understanding. Otherwise why write? Having assembled such an audience to tell them there's no reasonable disagreement with a key premise of the book just feels like a missed opportunity, and out of the spirit of like the whole enterprise.
> What is the strongest argument, in your view, that was not addressed?
In the interest of staying scoped, I'll call it a subject for another thread post. As a summarizing statement, I'm coming away from this exchange at least as concerned that I'm engaging in a community that has rationalized itself into thinking that ad hominum attacks and dismissive assumptions of bad faith are how we arrive at shared truth. I would of course love to be wrong. Thank you for engaging to this point.