geniuslevel20 comments on The Hostile Arguer - LessWrong
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Which leads to reminder of a common failure on these topics: use of "believe" in a confusing way. For many mind-killing topics, don't focus on epistemology - it's really not easy to get enough agreement on terms that a useful discussion can be had. Instead, focus on predictions.
Not "why do you believe X", but "what do you predict will happen based on X".
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This sounds like an excellent way of cutting through mindkill. If there's not a post on it somewhere, I think there should be.
[ETA: Bit of a brain fart, sorry. This is making arguments pay rent in the same sense that one should make beliefs pay rent.]
I think there's at least half a dozen of Eliezer's old founding posts that make explicit reference to this concept: real belief has to include likelihood functions.