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Brillyant comments on Open thread, Jul. 11 - Jul. 17, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Three types exist.
1) Belief as association AND Belief as anticipation
2) Belief as anticipation ONLY
3) Belief as association ONLY
Only #3 Type beliefs would leave the believer making excuses in advance. They don't actually believe a claim to be true (anticipation), but they believe that assenting to the belief is important (association).
See Dennet's Belief in Belief and Sagan's Garage Dragon for more info.
I don't think it's quite and cut and dry as this, by the way. People have their personal probabilities in regard to how strongly they hold anticipatory beliefs. It's not all or nothing.
Empirically I don't find this to be the case. I think most skeptics do have believes of anticipation that various paranormal effects won't happen. At the same time bring a skeptic in situations where his beliefs about the domain might reasonably get challenged they might make excuses in advance.
Most people don't use probability for their beliefs. They use mental processes such as the availability heuritistic, that doesn't correspond directly to probabilities.
Neither Dennet nor Sagan are a psychologist or have similar experience with working with beliefs in other context. If you use their discussions that are essentially about ontology as being discussions about how humans reason you are going to make mistakes.
I meant "personal probability" as the confidence at which people intuit a belief as actually anticipatory (vs. a belief they merely assent to as an association.) This level of confidence is on a sliding scale (vs. all or nothing).
Moat-and-bailey. I don't think there was a suggestion in the above post that you meant with probability something that doesn't follow Kolmogorov's axioms and where you can't directly apply Bayes rule. Especially on LW I think it's valuable to call things that don't follow those axioms and therefore aren't what's usually meant with 'probability', 'probability'.
I don't normally point out typos (and it's probably better on balance for LW not to be the sort of nitpicky place where everyone does) but this one is (1) almost exactly backwards and (2) sufficiently plausible-sounding to be dangerous :-). It's motte and bailey. The motte is the raised mound with a fortification on it. The moat is the big ditch around the castle, usually filled with water.
Thanks.
The bailiffs got drunk on Baileys, crossed the moat, and demolished the motte leaving nothing but bay leaves and motes of dust floating in the air...
Okay.
My point was only that there is a spectrum. Some beliefs are anticipatory (i.e. people actually believe them) and others are just associations (i.e. people don't believe them, but they find the idea of saying they believe in them to be so important they swear up and down they believe in them)...
But most beliefs are somewhere in the grey middle, with people assigning a "gut feeling probability" to each belief, without doing any math.
With those semantics people not only have a "gut feeling probability" but also a "heart feeling probability" and various similar "probabilities". Those don't have to be the same and depending on the context the person is going to use a different one.
Meh. Not really. There is a strong connotation in American English for "gut feeling" that means essentially instinct or intuition.
Here's a definition I found via Google's first page results: "an instinct or intuition; an immediate or basic feeling or reaction without a logical rationale"
This is what I meant. I think that would be clear to a high percentage of readers.
Here's again the problem that you don't look at the way humans reason but against the abstract concepts defined in the dictionary.
The way terms are defined in the dictionary has little to do with the empiric reality that some people give different intuitive answers when they feel into their gut or when they feel into their heart.
I can guess that if you were to meet a flat-earther with the intent of engaging with his ideas, you would start thinking of what things he might show you and why those things wouldn't actually demonstrate a flat earth. That does not mean you are making "excuses in advance".
"He's probably going to show me how ships disappear on the horizon, but I know that is affected by air refraction." "Oh, you're just making an excuse in advance."
What empiric standard would you use to classify things as making excuses in advance?
I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that "I can respond to any claim he's likely to make" isn't it. I'm not sure there is such a thing at all, short of having your idea be outright unfalsifiable.
It seems like there something that the OP means with "making excuses in advance". It might not what you think would be rightly called "making excuses in advance".
I don't think that category exists in a way where it can be successfully used to distinguish people who have anticipations and are identified with a belief from people who are just identified with it.