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jimrandomh comments on The Most Important Thing You Learned - Less Wrong
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The intuitive breakthrough for me was realizing that given a proposition P and an argument A that supports or opposes P, then showing that A is invalid has no effect on the truth or falsehood of P, and showing that P is true has no effect on the validity of A. This is the core of the "knowing biases can hurt you" problem, and while it's obvious if put in formal terms, it's counterintuitive in practice. The best way to get that to sink in, I think, is to practice demolishing bad arguments that support a conclusion you agree with.
That sort of makes sense if what you mean is "whatever we humans think about A has no effect on the truth or falsehood of P in a Platonic sense" but surely showing that A is invalid ought to change how likely you think that P is true?
Similarly, if P is actually true, a random argument that concludes with "P is true" is more likely to be valid than a random argument that concludes with "P is false". So showing P is true ought to make you think that A is more or less likely to be valid depending on its conclusion.
(Given that this comment was voted up to 3 and nobody gave a counterargument, I wonder if I'm missing something obvious.)
I wrote that two years ago, and you're right that it's imprecise in a way that makes it not literally true. In particular, if a skilled arguer gives you what they think is the best argument for a proposition, and the argument is invalid, then the proposition is likely false. What I was getting at, I think, is that my intuition used to vastly overestimate the correlation between the validity of arguments encountered and the truth of propositions they argue for, because people very often make bad arguments for true statements. This made me reject things I shouldn't have, and easily get sidetracked into dealing with arguments too many layers removed from the interesting conclusions.
Ok, that makes a lot more sense. Thanks for the clarification.