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Nick_Tarleton comments on Causes of disagreements - Less Wrong
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You haven't really addressed the fundamental paradox of disagreement:
Given that two people disagree, which side should you assume is right, a priori? Clearly the symmetry of the situation makes it impossible to give an a priori rule if this is all the information you have.
Now let us add one piece of information: you are one of the two people. Does this give you grounds to assume that your view is the one which is right? And if so, does it not argue equally well that the other person should assume that his own view is right? But this is a contradiction, because both opposing views can't be simultaneously more likely to be right than the other.
Hence, knowing only that you are in a disagreement, you should a priori assume your view is equally likely to be right or wrong. This should be the starting point for any analysis of disagreement, yet it is seldom adopted.
I may have non-indexical information about my own intelligence, rationality, honesty, expertise, etc., the comparison of which with my prior expectations of those features of the other person might swing me in either direction.
Right, but realistically most of the time people start with the assumption that they are right. Also consider that probably more than 50% of people think they're smarter than average, and probably the better advice is to start off most disagreements assuming you're wrong!
And most of the people around here are right!
Maybe a better heuristic is to consider whether your degree of assurance in your position is more or less than your average degree of assurance over all topics on which you might encounter disagreements. Hopefully there would be less of a bias on this question of whether you are more confident than usual. Then, if everyone adopted the policy of believing themselves if they are unusually confident, and believing the other person if they are less confident than usual, average accuracy would increase.