The existence of an epistemic peer who holds a contrary belief is more devastating than any argument.Of course the standard solution to this obvious truth is to deny peerage to anyone who disagrees with you. As soon as you stop doing that, on reflexive monkeybrain status-management tricks...you have to drop your certainty ranges on roughly all positions into the sub-80% range.
The only people writing on the web that I can think of who appear to take this position seriously are Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, and Megan McArdle...hence my immense respect for them.
Others, who ignore this deep and important truth get massively downgraded because of it. No Aumann updating means you're playing in idea-spaces, not seriously chasing truth.
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I assume you at least know of the existence of Lawrence Auster. Like a good intellectual Christian, he denies evolution wrought mankind. However he is quite intelligent.
So: does this leave you:
(a) denying he's a "peer"?
(b) questioning evolution?
(c) other? Will you downgrade yourself?
Leonard,
Short version: (b).
More complexity, when I find more time.
So you honestly feel that evolution really has no more than an 80% chance of being correct? Come on. Auster might have shaken me down from like 99.9% certainty to, say, 99.5%, but that is all.
My own response is I don't end up questioning evolution in any serious way. I mean, I entertain "for the sake of argument" doubts but I do not actually doubt. I am interested in trying to understand how Auster believes what he does, and I do not find much progress on this. (Auster and I fence most directly in this post.)
So my route is more (a). I respect Lawrence Auster and feel he a "peer" in many respects, but I do not feel that the "peer" relationship must be boolean but more fuzzy. Auster is not my peer on the particular topic of evolution. Therefore I disregard his POV on it.
Leonard,
The question comes about peer-ness. AFAIK, Auster is among the only people who might qualify as "peer" who seriously question evolution. If there are 100s, or 1000s, of 4 sigma folks on each side of an issue...then I have a much stronger social epistemology reason to question evolution. If there's 10,000 informed 4-sigma folks on one side of the issue, and Auster is making a very intelligent but very limited qualification on the other side... I agree with your line that the certainty drop falls.
2. There are two questions in place...
A. is evolution the way that life generally operates, and the correct default assumption for how current systems got to be...which is a math-deductive game theory argument about iterative systems, completely free of ANY facts about the world...and roughly equivalent to 2+2 or the fundamental theorem of calculus.
B. Is evolution the way that humans got consciousness. Auster's core line (from your comments)...
"I affirm that Darwinians have plausible reasons to believe in their theory, most importantly the genetic similarities among different life forms, but no proof that the theory is true, while there remain ample reasons to doubt the theory."
...is a suspicion that Consciousness might be a special case, and we have some positive reason to believe that consciousness is NOT like everything else.
Some positive probability here. May downgrade some.
3. I personally hold that evolution (as a subset of game-theory in general) is humankind's single greatest intellectual achievement... eclipsing the calculus by a hair.
What's your reason to think consciousness might be special?
Alrenous,
Social epistemology, again. I don't actually have one...but other folks have one, and I don't count myself as that much smarter...which means I should take their concern somewhat seriously, especially given how many of them there are, even with the Dennettesque skyhook insult.
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