Is adjusting probabilities towards 50% a good thing?
I don't think that openness is mainly about probabilities but most people are heavily overconfident about most of their political positions so moving the probabilities closer to 50% is a good thing.
The world would be a much better place if more people would respond to Is policy A better than policy B? with I don't know instead of Policy A is better because my tribe says it's better.
I have never seen an atom, never been in Paris, still believe they exist. A community I consider trustworthy about the topic has decided that they exist, and I don't have time to personally verify everything.
Let's ask instead of are there atoms? is helium a molecule?. Thomas Kuhn wrote about the issue:
An investigator who hoped to learn something about what scientists took the atomic theory to be asked a distinguished physicist and an eminent chemist whether a single atom of helium was or was not a molecule. Both answered without hesitation, but their answers were not the same. For the chemist the atom of helium was a molecule because it behaved like one with respect to the kinetic theory of gases. For the physicist, on the other hand, the helium atom was not a molecule because it displayed no molecular spectrum. Presumably both men were talking of the same particle, but they were viewing it through their own research training and practice.”
You get a different answer to the question depending on who you ask is helium a molecule?.Does that mean that you should adjust probabilities towards 50% on the question of is helium a molecule?? No, that wouldn't make any sense to average the 100% certainity of the physicist that helium is no molecule with the 100% certainity of the chemist that it is towards 50%.
I would want participants who read a political dicussion come away with thinking that there are multiple ways of looking at the debate in question.
But inputs without conclusion is still an incomplete work.
That's basically rejecting skepticism. Skepticism is about being okay with the fact that you don't have a conclusion to every question. Keeping questions open for years is important for understanding them better.
is helium a molecule?
That's a very special kind of question: one that's almost entirely about definitions of words. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone here that different people or groups use words in different ways, and therefore that questions about definitions often don't have a definite answer.
Many many questions have some element of this (e.g., if some etymology enthusiast insists that an "atom" must be indivisible then the things most people call atoms aren't "atoms" for him, and for all we know there may actually be no "...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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