Here are the relevant LW keywords:
Motivated Stopping = "I have evidence for X (which I like), so I make my conclusion now and refuse to look at further evidence"
Motivated Continuation = "I have evidence for X (which I dislike), so I avoid making conclusions and keep looking for more evidence"
...and in situations where it seems obvious that both the existing and the future evidence will mostly point towards X (which I dislike), I can go more meta and use...
Fallacy of Gray = "there will never be a perfect evidence for X (nor a perfect evidence against X), so my conclusion is that one cannot rationally make any conclusion about this topic"
Thanks! Very clear answer.
Just to clarify: Do you say that going into aporia is actually a fallacy of gray? Wouldn't it only be so if I then insisted on staying there, avoiding evidence that could relatively easily clear up the case?
If not, then I really don't know how to respond rationally to the Charlie Hebdo case. Should I just go with my gut feeling (which would say that this is a genuine terror attack)?
After the terrorist attacks at Charlie Hebdo, conspiracy theories quickly arose about who was behind the attacks.
People who are critical to the west easily swallow such theories while pro-vest people just as easily find them ridiculous.
I guess we can agree that the most rational response would be to enter a state of aporia until sufficient evidence is at hand.
Yet very few people do so. People are guided by their previous understanding of the world, when judging new information. It sounds like a fine Bayesian approach for getting through life, but for real scientific knowledge, we can't rely on *prior* reasonings (even though these might involve Bayesian reasoning). Real science works by investigating evidence.
So, how do we characterise the human tendency to jump to conclusions that have simply been supplied by their sense of normativity. Is their a previously described bias that covers this case?