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Misovlogos comments on Reverse engineering of belief structures - Less Wrong
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Interesting stuff. I am all for trying to improve peoples reasoning skills, and understanding how particular people think initially is a good place to start, but I'm a bit concerned about the way you talked about knowledge in here (and where it comes from).
Frankly, I wouldn't really look to any person as a source of knowledge in the way you seem to be implying here.
Here's how knowledge & experts work: There's a whole bunch of information out there - literally more than any one person could/cares to know - and we simply don't have the time (or often the background) to fully understand certain fields and more importantly to evaluate which claims are true and which aren't. Experts are people who do have the background in a given field, and they usually know what research has been done in their field and can answer questions/make statements with legitimate authority when speaking on the subject with which they are well versed. Once you have a consensus of opinion between many such experts, you have raised the authority of that opinion further because you've reduced the likelihood of one guy misspeaking, making stuff up, being dishonest, etc. Also note that experts talking on subjects outside of their field of study have no more authority than anyone else (though they often are well informed on other subjects) - this is where the argument from authority fallacy comes from, e.g. "Einstein said that the sky is green" ... so what?
I suspect you know all of this already (I don't mean to come off as lecturing too much, just reiterating some baseline stuff)
After all that rambling about experts, the important thing to take away is that the knowledge (and by knowledge in this context I mean being aware of information which corresponds with reality, i.e. the truth) doesn't come from the experts; experts are just the people who go about investigating the truth and report back to the rest of humanity what they've found. In other words, reality is objective and claims should be evaluated based on their evidence, not the person who proposes them.
All of the examples you've used deal with things which actually do have an objective answer, whether or not we have or feasibly can test them empirically. (also, as a side note, that bit about the 50% chance of being true is ridiculous even if you don't have any knowledge going into it - you would simply say "I don't know if these claims are true")
People definitely have biases, and we should be particularly cautious when dealing with any claims that are related to contentious issues. Further, I'd like to stress the point that just because a large majority of the experts in a field say something it doesn't make it true - but it does mean that we should believe that it is true until new information says otherwise, because frankly an expert consensus is one of the highest certainties we can come up with as a species.
I guess the main thing I am trying to say that directly ties into your post is that we shouldn't really care how someone formed their beliefs when evaluating the veracity of a claim; when we should care is:
When we suspect that a bias may have lead to a false reporting of real information (in which case we would want independent, unbiased research/reporting)
When we want to change someone's mind about something
When we want to keep someone's faulty & infectious belief structure from propagating to other people (ex. Dark Side Epistemology) by teaching other people critical thinking/rationality and common mistakes like said structure.
Still, figuring out how people think has always been an interesting area of science that is worth pursuing, and the tools/sample size have gotten a lot bigger since the time of case studies. I hope you find more interesting stuff to share.
"I guess the main thing I am trying to say that directly ties into your post is that we shouldn't really care how someone formed their beliefs when evaluating the veracity of a claim".
This is an absurd proposition on several accounts. Firstly, a great deal of utterance meaning can only be recovered relative to a particular context, for it has complex and variable uses shifting within and across contexts, i.e. the exchange of agreement formalising marriage is not a mono-semantical reference to an internal psychological state, but does something only understandable relative to a particular convention of marriage. The upshot being that a condition of intelligibility is contextual awareness. Secondly, it is important to at least be aware of the structures of understanding through which particular intellectual subcultures and traditions give rise to scholarly output (i.e. you can't satisfactorily understand and evaluate a Marxist-Leninist work independently the sociological reality of post-Cold War vanguard parties, or modern European intellectual history).
The meaning of a claim can, in fact, change based on the context. Moreover, the truth of a claim may change with time (for instance, the claim "Elvis is alive" was at one point true and is now false. Also note that, in the context of me making up a simple example of a claim to demonstrate my point, the meaning is likely referring to the famous performer Elvis Presley rather than any person named Elvis.
Thus we can see how there are a few things that we need to keep in mind when we address a claim, much as you have said above. However, the truth of the claim, given that you understand the meaning and you are evaluating it at a particular time, does not depend on the belief structure.
The reason I said "we shouldn't really care how someone formed their beliefs" is because the words that followed are "when evaluating the veracity of a claim," i.e. whether or not it is accurate. This is entirely independent of the person's reasons for making the claim.
This appears to in one stroke admit qualification:
"Thus we can see how there are a few things that we need to keep in mind when we address a claim, much as you have said above. However, the truth of the claim, given that you understand the meaning and you are evaluating it at a particular time, does not depend on the belief structure."
And in the next revoke it:
"The reason I said "we shouldn't really care how someone formed their beliefs" is because the words that followed are "when evaluating the veracity of a claim," i.e. whether or not it is accurate. This is entirely independent of the person's reasons for making the claim."
The truthful content of a claim is not independent of the utterances which comprise it, such than an understanding of those utterances is a condition of finding intelligible that claim and thus the candidature of that claim for truth/falsity.
Let me distill this and see if you follow:
We need to know what a claim is actually claiming - that can depend on context.
Given that you do know what a claim is claiming, its veracity does not depend on context, nor the belief structure of the person behind the claim.
I understand exactly what you're saying, but the qualification is divergent from your initial statement, from which this discussion arose, and to which you returned in the second paragraph cited above:
"we shouldn't really care how someone formed their beliefs when evaluating the veracity of a claim"
A condition of evaluating the veracity of an utterance is to register the utterance as intelligible, for which the aforementioned considerations to context are necessary, i.e. 'how someone formed their beliefs'.
If it is divergent, then this
is what I meant. To provide an example, (which can quite often help in these situations):
I claim that the earth is approximately round.
You don't need to know how I came to that conclusion in order to evaluate my claim.
Had I claimed something a bit more complex, maybe related to the society that I currently live in, then you would probably need to know something about my society in order to see if my claim was correct. But you actually wouldn't need to know how I came to the conclusion - you just need to know what I'm talking about.
I feel like this is circular: you state your claim, I state my rebuttal, you concede in qualification, and then you return to your original claim.
I need to know how you came to that conclusion, which is slightly ambiguous here, in the sense that I can't understand the claim independently of the linguistic practice in terms of which your intended meaning is given.
In the case of basic and well-worn facts about the natural world, I think I understand their utterance - although I could be unaware of a particular convention or idiom - because I am already very aware of the linguistic practices which endow them which intersubjective force (if I was a peasant in the Holy Roman Empire, I would doubtlessly have no idea what you were attempting to convey or do).
Alright, since you could not verify the Earth being round without knowing my belief structure...
2+2 = 4
You don't know my belief structure. Is it true?
I'm not asking you if you know that off the top of your head, I'm asking if you could go out and check to see if it's actually true!
That's what I mean by evaluating a claim - can you verify it? I'm sorry, but it's asinine to say that you cannot verify it because you don't know how I came to the conclusion. You seem to be arguing something about sharing my language as maintaining your point. I'm past that. If you understand the claim, you can test it.
I don't really understand what your problem is; to evaluate a claim, you have to find it intelligible, for which you have to know contingent things about the empirical practice of the relevant language-game - which, yes, is pretty much equivalent to the ordinary language statement 'if you understand the claim, you can test it'.