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RichardKennaway comments on I'm Not Saying People Are Stupid - Less Wrong
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What leads you to suggest Aumann isn't thinking that? Are you saying he is unaware that his ideological beliefs conflict with evidence to the contrary? Of course he is aware he could update on rational evidence and chooses not to, that's what smart religious people do. That's what faith is. The meaning of "capable but unwilling" should be clear: it is the ability to maintain belief in something in the face of convincing evidence opposing it. The ability to say, "Your evidence supporting y is compelling, but it doesn't matter, because I have faith in x." And that's what I think crazy is.
This crazy?
Not the same thing.
The behavior eirenicon complained of amounts to denying modus ponens. "I accept X, and I accept X->Y, but I deny Y."
Defying the data, otoh, is a correct application of a contrapositive. "You claim X, and I accept X->Y, but I deny Y, and therefore I deny X. I have updated on your claim, but that wasn't nearly enough to reverse the total weight of evidence about Y." The difference is that this doesn't involve saying that logical contradictions are ok, so if you ever see enough evidence for X that you can't deny it all, you know something's wrong.
Wouldn't defying the data more mean "I deny that X, on it's own, is sufficient to justify Y. I've updated based on X, but there was plenty of reason to have really low prior belief in Y and X, on it's own, isn't sufficient to overcome that, although it definitely is something we should look into, replicate the experiment, see what's going on, etc..."?
Yes, but there's also the part about "~Y predicts ~X, so I predict a decent chance that X will turn out to not be what you thought it was." Which is why replication is one of the proposed next steps; and is also, I think, the part that RichardKennaway pointed to as a parallel.