You realize that such epistemic habits would never lead you to truth if you were indoctrinated with a different prior? "I don't care what the atheists say about he Problem of Evil, they would be wrong for a host of other reasons even if the theologians' arguments suck."
Then in that case it's not just a different prior I'd need, it's the "host of other reasons", and more specifically, strong reasons among those.
I agree that there's an important distinction between "argument A can be ignored because there are much stronger arguments for the same position" (roughly my position) and "argument A can ignored because there are many more arguments for the same position("arguments are soldiers", leads to the problem you describe).
My purpose is to mostly avoid long debates that won't change either side's mind anyway even if one convinces the other on that particular issue (like "does Barack Obama pick his nose?").
Sometimes I run into people that have rather strong opinions on some topic, and it turns out that they are basing them on quite shallow and biased information. They are aware that their knowledge is quite limited compared to mine, and they admit that they don't want to put in the effort needed to learn enough to level the field.
But that's not really a problem. What is bothering me is that, sometimes, that declaration of ignorance is expressed with some kind of pride.
This behaviour is noticeable on other levels too, in politics or in the sciences-humanities culture clash.
I came up with several hypotheses which might account for this:
Do you notice this behaviour too? What do you think causes it?
EDIT: formatting, style, grammar