The point on crazy nonsense applies to meddlers and non meddlers alike.
What would it take for me to change my views with respect to how much crazy I estimate in other people's heads? It would help, if upon examination, they could routinely provide sensible explanations for what seems to me nonsense.
I have confidence that I could take the ideological Turing test and pass myself off as being quite sensible to most of them. Few of them could do it to me.
I have confidence that I could take the ideological Turing test and pass myself off as being quite sensible to most of them.
Well, honestly, I doubt it - take e.g. your methodological individualism. From what I've read of it, (a few blog posts by Austrian economists) it basically appears as a crazy nonsensical fairytale, to be invoked as ideological justification for a "libertarian" narrative of society.
I claim that the historical dynamics of actually existing societies can't be usefully explained by it - that a massive amount of historical......
So you're playing the credence game, and you’re getting a pretty good sense of which level of confidence to assign to your beliefs. Later, when you’re discussing politics, you wonder how you can calibrate your political beliefs as well (beliefs of the form "policy X will result in outcome Y"). Here there's no easy way to assess whether a belief is true or false, in contrast to the trivia questions in the credence game. Moreover, it’s very easy to become mindkilled by politics. What do you do?
In the credence game, you get direct feedback that allows you to learn about your internal proxies for credence, i.e., emotional and heuristic cues about how much to trust yourself. With political beliefs, however, there is no such feedback. One workaround would be to assign high confidence only to beliefs for which you have read n academic papers on the subject. For example, only assign 90% confidence if you've read ten academic papers.
To account for mindkilling, use a second criterion: assign high confidence only to beliefs for which you are ideologically Turing-capable (i.e., able to pass an ideological Turing test). As a proxy for an actual ideological Turing test, you should be able to accurately restate your opponent’s position, or be able to state the strongest counterargument to your position.
In sum, to calibrate your political beliefs, only assign high confidence to beliefs which satisfy extremely demanding epistemic standards.