Poignant short story about truth-seeking that I just found. Quote:
"No," interjected an internal voice. "You need to prove that your dad will appear by a direct argument from the length of your nails, one that does not invoke your subsisting in a dream state as an intermediate step."
"Nonsense," retorted another voice. "That we find ourselves in a dream state was never assumed; rather, it follows so straightforwardly from the long-nail counterfactual that the derivation could be done, I think, even in an extremely weak system of inference."
The full thing reads like a flash tour of OB/LW, except it was written in 2001.
Unless you have actually tracked down and interviewed the greatest epistemic rationalist on earth, how do you know? Maybe (s)he is very tolerant of such things. (When does intolerance win on a personal scale?)
This sounds like scientism.
Because I have experience with good rationalists, and the kind of people they have relationships with, and I am a bayesian so I can assign degrees of belief to propositions that I haven't tested directly. In this case, it seems reasonable that similar people have similar relationship-behaviors, and so my existing knowledge is relevant.
Rather like "how do you know that the fastest dog in the world can't outrun a formula one car?" - I know this with high certainty because I believe that similar animals behave in similar ways.