= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Lumifer comments on Open thread, June 27 - July 3, 2016 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (79)
Being a believer in X inherently means, for a rationalist, that you think there are no good arguments against X. So this should be impossible, except by deliberately including arguments that are, to the best of your knowledge, flawed. I might be able to imitate a homeopath, but I can't imitate a rational, educated, homeopath, because if I thought there was such a thing I would be a homeopath.
Yes, a lot of people extoll the virtues of doing this. But a lot of people aren't rational, and don't believe X on the basis of arguments in the first place. If so, then producing good arguments against X are logically possible, and may even be helpful.
(There's another possibility: where you are weighing things and the other side weighs them differently from you. But that's technically just a subcase--you still think the other side's weights are incorrect--and I still couldn't use it to imitate a creationist or flat-earther.)
Huh? You are proposing a very stark, black-and-white, all-or-nothing position. Recall that for a rationalist a belief has a probability associated with it. It doesn't have to be anywhere near 1. Moreover, a rationalist can "believe" (say, with probability > 90%) something against which good arguments exist. It just so happens that the arguments pro are better and more numerous than the arguments con. That does not mean that the arguments con are not good or do not exist.
And, of course, you should not think yourself omniscient. One of the benefits of steelmanning is that it acquaints you with the counterarguments. Would you know what they are if you didn't look?