Actively disbelieving people when they state explicitly what will convince them to change their mind seems like a bad policy.
I suppose I should be more specific - I disbelieve people when they ask for additional evidence about something they are treating adversarially, claiming it would reverse their position. Because people ask for additional evidence a lot, and in my experience it's much more likely that it's what they think sounds like a good justification for their point of view, or an interesting thing to mention. The signal is lost in the noise.
Also see the story here.
I was wondering - what fraction of people here agree with Holden's advice regarding donations, and his arguments? What fraction assumes there is a good chance he is essentially correct? What fraction finds it necessary to determine whenever Holden is essentially correct in his assessment, before working on counter argumentation, acknowledging that such investigation should be able to result in dissolution or suspension of SI?
It would seem to me, from the response, that the chosen course of action is to try to improve the presentation of the argument, rather than to try to verify truth values of the assertions (with the non-negligible likelihood of assertions being found false instead). This strikes me as very odd stance.
Ultimately: why SI seems certain that it has badly presented some valid reasoning, rather than tried to present some invalid reasoning?
edit: I am interested in knowing why people agree/disagree with Holden, and what likehood they give to him being essentially correct, rather than a number or a ratio (that would be subject to selection bias).