You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Punoxysm comments on Terminology Thread (or "name that pattern") - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: sixes_and_sevens 03 July 2014 11:47AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (51)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Punoxysm 07 July 2014 10:45:23PM 1 point [-]

This happens when the debaters' personal level of knowledge and expertise has been exceeded by external sources introduced to the debate. Essentially, then, each person is using an appeal to authority with different ideas of what level of authority their sources have, since it well beyond their abilities to verify their sources' arguments. Terms like Epistemic Closure in political contexts address the related phenomena of conflicting but self-consistent networks of authoritative sources.

I'd call the underlying issue an "Epistemic Divide"