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You are defending the actions taken, the question was about the reasoning. Choosing to not court controversy is very different to choosing what to believe. No matter how his beliefs were discovered they would have ellicited the same reaction. But he didn't choose them.
Beliefs are supported by the assessment of evidence. Assessment is judgement. Judgement is choice.
Evidence is acquired by searching for it. Searching or not is a choice.
You and others in this thread are looking at heavily supported, highly-reinforced beliefs, and noting that they are not easily changed on a whim. In the same way, addictions, phobias, and other heavily-supported or highly reinforced mental constructs are also difficult to change on a whim. The fact that you can choose to make some choices much easier or harder to make than they might otherwise be may obfuscate the choices being made, but does not obviate them.
Free will is an illusion*. A judgement is a choice in the sense that it is the selection of one option out of many, it is not necessarily a conscious decision. If you dislike a burger because of its taste you have judged it, but you didn't have a choice between "mmm I just can't get enough of this disgusting burger" and "snakes alive what did I just put in my mouth?"
Which is beside the point that Adams choosing to not court controversy is very different to choosing what he believes.
*But you should behave as if it's real regardless.
That is certainly a belief one can choose to hold, but the entire context of this discussion is over whether the paper should choose to treat Adams other than how they have. To the exact extent that Adams' actions are not chosen, neither are those of the people punishing him, or those of us arguing about the situation. It's not that this line of thinking can't have an internally consistent logic, it's just completely pointless to the exact extent it's not selectively applied.
Not necessarily, no. Biases and priors weigh heavily on most judgements. But the biases and priors are themselves formed largely by previous choices, some large, some very small and almost imperceptible. The chains of causality are tightly knotted, but our consciousness and the will that directs it are, I think, dispositive in the final analysis.
If you have disliked a burger because of its taste, you have reacted to it. Instinctive reactions can, with effort, be overridden. Tastes can be acquired, associations changed, biases shaped and altered. All these are completely normal things that people do every day, as part of teaching, social interaction, and personal growth.
I have spoken only about Adams' beliefs, but should go a step further: Adams is not a good-faith communicator. He is not, strictly speaking, honest, either about his beliefs or his intentions. His normal modus operandi is to say things not because they are true, but to elicit desired reactions from his audience and from the public at large. I am normally quite leery of the "they're just saying it for attention, they're a grifter" argument applied to people who speak out against woke orthodoxy, but it seems to me that "grifter" is a reasonably accurate description of Adams, and I am pretty sure he is, in fact, doing it for the attention. My guess is that he's done the math, newspapers are dying, and so he's getting himself "cancelled" out of a market that does him limited good, in exchange for public attention that will boost his various entertainment properties.
This is not true. The objecvtion to Adams having "chosen" isn't a general one about all sorts of choices, it's about his beliefs. Beliefs are not-chosen in a stronger sense than actions are.
Belief is always an action.
Some actions are trivial, and some are not. Closing my laptop is an action. Becoming a billionaire is also an action. Closing my laptop and becoming a billionaire can be thought of as a single process, or a whole series of complex sub- and sub-sub and sub-sub-sub processes, but either way, they are both accomplished by will put into practice. The difference is that closing my laptop is a trivial action for me, while becoming a billionaire is not, because the necessary actions involve much greater effort and will. On the other hand, the last step in the billionaire process, signing the contract that will secure one's fortune, for example, can easily become trivial once all the rest of the work has already been done.
In the same way, some beliefs are trivial, and some are not. I could ask you which of three random pieces of art you preferred, and to give your reasons as to why it was the best. Selecting a piece could be done on instinct, but interrogating the instinct, making it a real choice, is going to result in making decisions, active effort, action. You would in fact be choosing a belief, and it is in fact easy to do for such trivial questions, because the choice being made is isolated.
Other beliefs are non-trivial to change, not because the questions are somehow fundamentally different, but because some of their answers can put one in tension with large constellations of previously-chosen beliefs. Usually such tension is most easily resolved by simply rejecting the answers that cause them, but this, again, is still a choice. One could instead accept the tension, and begin re-evaluating those previous choices, and the choices supporting them, and so on as far back as necessary until the tension is resolved. For many questions, this would be very hard to do, but the choice being hard does not preclude it from being a choice.
Fine. If you're going to be that pedantic, beliefs are not-chosen in a stronger sense than central actions are.
It's not pedantry. Beliefs are a central example of an action. They are a thing you actively do. People are not computers, and human cognition is not deterministic. If they were, if beliefs were not subject to the will, arguments between humans would work very, very differently than they do.
I understand that this runs counter to what a great many people have often said, but you can literally observe the effect at both small and large scales, all around you every day. It is not subtle. We weigh evidence, and that weighing is fundamentally subjective, and the biases, priors and axioms of that subjectivity are derived from discrete acts of will, either from ourselves or from those around us. We choose what to question, how to question, whether an answer satisfies us, where to look for more information, when to move on, what to listen to. Any question of substance leads to a web of further questions, infinite in branchings, and we choose a finite set of those questions to explore before drawing conclusions. People observably draw different conclusions based on similar evidence every day, even when examining the same evidence in good faith! You can follow the branchings to any conclusion you wish, if you want to. When you stop at any particular conclusion, you stop because you want to, not because the evidence forced you to. How could it be otherwise, when there are always more questions available?
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