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All epistemic methods I'm aware of have issues. I'm not aware of one with fewer issues than weighing evidence, making predictions, and tracking results. Certainly you have not presented an alternative, nor explained why that alternative is better.
You are pointing out that peoples' assessment of evidence can be flawed, and their assessment of outcomes can also be flawed, and that correlation between these flaws can compromise their assessments. This is true. Unfortunately, there is no general solution to the epistemic problem, and all the evidence I've seen indicates that this is as good as it gets.
When I was much younger, I was a deep-blue progressive atheist deeply embedded in the Blue Tribe narrative machine. I believed that Bush did 9/11, that he was a fascist, and that he intended to overthrow American democracy, probably by conducting another false-flag terror attack and then using it as a pretext to suspend elections. This was a quite popular belief among Blues back then, and I bought it all hook, line and sinker. I believed it so firmly that I moved to Canada and seriously considered renouncing my American citizenship. Only, none of the things I believed would happen, the things the people I was listening to predicted would happen, actually happened. There never was another major terror attack anywhere close to the scale of 9/11, false-flag or otherwise. Bush was re-elected in an election I and most of my social circle was certain was rigged, but then four years later Obama trounced Romney, and power transferred as normal.
I had invested heavily in predictions that were decisively falsified. Much that I had theorized, much that I had assumed was true, came apart. I took a hard look at much of the information economy I'd been patronizing, and downgraded the voices who had clearly fed me bad data and bad predictions. I updated my model of how the world worked. Nor was there much room for ambiguity in these predictions.
In 2016, immediately following the election of Donald Trump, I had a considerable amount of savings, and wanted to invest it. I'd been reluctant to do so for years, due to distrust in the economy after living through both the dotcom crash and the housing crisis. Still, it seemed to me that my fear of economic conditions was increasingly irrational, and I thought I should probably bite the bullet and put my money to work. While researching the question online, I found Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman's post-election predictions that Trump was absolutely going to trash the market and destroy the American economy. I looked around and found plenty of other economic authorities offering the same line. Having spent well over a decade immersed in Blue Tribe culture, and having spent considerable time reading and discussing Rationalist literature, I had great respect for Credentialed Experts. I sat on my money, and missed out on one of the best stock market runs of my adult life.
Again, I had invested (or not invested, as it were) heavily in the predictions of a particular data stream. That data-stream's predictions were falsified very thoroughly. I noted this, and updated accordingly: I no longer listen to Paul Krugman, nor to people who employ or cite Paul Krugman, and I place significantly less weight on the opinions of economists generally. This has stood me in good stead ever since, from holding crypto to noting the presence of inflation that was officially denied, to refusal to accept the economic case against Trump in the 2024 election.
What predictions have you invested in? Where have you been wrong? What have you learned?
I would place the odds of the reality-knowing alien agreeing with me fairly high. You are correct that all humans are biased, and that it is hard to see one's own bias. That does not mean it is impossible, and I have spent a long time testing my understanding in a fairly rigorous and notably adversarial environment, while going a fair distance out of my way to encounter and engage with contrary opinions and perspectives. I do my best to maintain epistemic humility, and to consider that I might be wrong, but at this point I do not think it is unreasonable to expect something more concrete than a looping claim of "maybe you're wrong even if you can't see how or why and no evidence has been presented". Yes, maybe I am wrong. Maybe all the evidence I've accumulated and all the predictions I've tracked and all the outcomes I've updated off were flawed in some subtle way. And if so, then the best way to know it is to see outcomes that falsify my expectations or evidence that contradicts my understanding, not to reject assessment and action due to endless, self-referential doubt.
What is the alien in this model? You are familiar with the is/ought problem, yes? It seems that your scenario only makes sense if the alien is "ought", if the alien represents moral correctness, and you are asking "are you confident in your moral judgements". As it happens, I am reasonably confident in my moral judgements and, from the way you write, somewhat skeptical of yours, but I do agree that the best way to ensure one maintains the moral high ground is to stick to one's principles. Unfortunately, I have also learned that actual principles are exceedingly costly, and I find that I cannot afford to maintain very many of them. It has proved crucial to choose which to keep and which to discard, and while you have not even begun to adequately define this "freedom" you speak of, I am pretty sure that's not one of the ones I'm holding on to. "Freedom", as popularly understood and as taught to me in my youth, is a spook, a non-entity, a linguistic confusion. It seems to me there are some specific freedoms worth paying dearly for, but the model you appear to be appealing to here and certainly have appealed to elsewhere in the thread is, in my assessment, worthless, pointless and hopeless.
Krugman literally days after was like yeah ok that's too alarmist, protectionism and short term thinking on the climate are going to be economic issues in the long run but it's not like they explode everything right away https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/opinion/trump-slump-coming.html
Which yeah, protectionism is pretty terrible in the long run. We had a whole bout about it in the 1700s with free traders like Adam Smith and Hume tearing into the idea of mercantilist style trade theory. Capitalism exists with the concept that markets and trade are good.
People being hyperbolic doesn't mean real issues don't exist, it just means people are hyperbolic. I've heard plenty of hyperbolic conservatives talk about how Covid vaccines was going to be used to insert nanochips into people, heck I overheard a neighbor once say that everyone who was vaccinated will die within a year. That didn't happen.
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