ChristianKl comments on Open thread, August 4 - 10, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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There is a common idea in the “critical thinking”/"traditional rationality" community that (roughly) you should, when exposed to an argument, either identify a problem with it or come to believe the argument’s conclusion. From a Bayesian framework, however, this idea seems clearly flawed. When presented with an argument for a certain conclusion, my failure to spot a flaw in the argument might be explained by either the argument’s being sound or by my inability to identify flawed arguments. So the degree to which I should update in either direction depends on my corresponding prior beliefs. In particular, if I have independent evidence that the argument’s conclusion is false and that my skills for detecting flaws in arguments are imperfect, it seems perfectly legitimate to say, “Look, your argument appears sound to me, but given what I know, both about the matter at hand and about my own cognitive abilities, it is much more likely that there’s a flaw in your argument which I cannot detect than that its conclusion is true.” Yet it is extremely rare to see LW folk or other rationalists say things like this. Why is this so?
In my experience there are LW people who would in such cases simply declare that they won't be convinced of the topic at hand and suggest to change the subject.
I particularly remember a conversation at the LW community camp about geopolitics where a person simply declared that they aren't able to evaluate arguments on the matter and therefore won't be convinced.
That was probably me. I don't think I handled the situation particularly gracefully, but I really didn't want to continue that conversation, and I couldn't see whether the person in question was wearing a crocker's rules tag.
I don't remember my actual words, but I think I wasn't trying to go for "nothing could possibly convince me", so much as "nothing said in this conversation could convince me".
It's still more graceful than the "I think you are wrong based on my heuristics but I can't tell you where you are wrong" that Pablo Stafforini advocates.