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Cute, but then how many ideas we've been fighting over can be described as "strongly justified"? Is mass immigration good or bad for a country? Are differences in performance between groups down to genetics or systemic oppression? Will AI be our doom, and what steps should we take to prevent it?
Take either position you want on these, and neither one will be "strongly justified. You could argue that the proper approach to that would be to say "we just don't know", and I suppose I agree, but there still decisions to be made on these issues. Rationalists have their Bayesian schtick, but as far as I've seen it's just a mathematical expression of whatever opinion they wanted to hold anyway.
My conclusion is that there are issues that aren't going to be proven rigorously, and in these cases it's fine to have strongly held beliefs without strong justification. The best way to get at the truth in these cases is to create an environment where people with strongly held opposing beliefs are forced to interact with each other. You're not going to get a particularly accurate answer, and half the time might not even be directionally correct, but it blows "rigor" out of the water.
Most of your examples are either claims about the future (AI) or questions about values (democracy, immigration) where there is no "right" answer, at least right now. It's unusual to find questions about objective, observable facts of the near past or present like "did event X factually happen?" or "what is the objective shape of the planet?" where either position can be strongly justified.
Where people do retreat away from the bailey of agreements and factual claims to the motte of "it's fine to hold my belief!" it reflects a deep detachment from reality, to an extent that there's nothing that could bring them back. The arguments are just window dressing, they are not the point, trying to address them is just bad form.
I don't think I ever heard anyone say "I would be for mass immigration even if it was caused a massive spike in crime!", so taking people at their word, I don't think these are purely questions of about values. You might say we shouldn't take people at their word, but given how we went from "there is no immigration crisis" to "the republicans are the ones preventing us from fixing the immigration crisis", it feels like people's opinions on the issue are connected to some consequences, and aren't just an expression of their values.
That could be a different phrasing of exactly what I'm getting at. I would say that there is a right answer, but we have no way of knowing it. In these cases the best way to find it's approximation is creating a contested territory, and letting people fight it out.
I disagree. For years claims about Epstein were "detached from reality" "conspiracy theories" right up until they were proven right. It would have been wrong to rely on the "rigorous" approach here, as it would result in the issue being dropped, and hard evidence never being found. Same applies to things like election fraud, barring a dumb stroke of luck, or an outright confession (though I think even a confession could be dismissed), we are never going to get hard evidence on this question, and it's disingenuous to act like if the claim was true evidence for it should be accessible.
I'm someone in favor of open borders and would bite this bullet. It's fair to say my position is primarily (but not exclusively) based on valuing freedom of movement over a consequential analysis. It's hard to cleanly break the two however, because a significant objection I have against immigration restrictions is that they're insufficiently narrow. If I had to pick a restriction, I would always pick something like "anyone with IQ >150 is allowed in" over something like "only 10,000 Cambodians per year".
That's fair, in your case I'd say the disagreement is values based, and to be fair there's a significant values component to my opinion on the issue as well, but the public debate seems to revolve around consequences.
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“Was there significant fraud in the 2020 US election” is a different kind of question than “will AI pose a threat to humanity” or the effects of immigration or group differences.
Some people confidently assert there was significant election fraud, in stark contrast to available evidence.
Reasonable people can disagree on say nature vs. nurture (though not blank slatism), but it doesn’t seem reasonable to assert significant election fraud, given the dearth of evidence and abundance of bad evidence.
"AI will pose a threat to humanity" is different in because it's about the future, and the only way to verify it is to wait and see, so I can agree it's not the best example. Still, despite there being no evidence that it will, some of the most prominent figures of the rationalist movement confidently assert that claim, to the point they will argue for bombing countries that would defy their proposed policies.
The question of group differences or immigration is not a different type of question. In theory they can both be resolved factually, the same way the question of election fraud could. The biggest difference is that these questions don't have the destruction of evidence baked into them like elections necessarily do, as a result of the secret ballot.
While there's not enough evidence to conclusively prove election fraud, there has been enough suspicious behavior that I cannot blame anyone for coming to the conclusion that there was. The issue is a lot closer to nature vs. nurture, where both sides are floating in a sea of unknowns, than to blank slatism, where one side has been conclusively BTFO'd.
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