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Yeah I agree, and it's been one of my frustrations with ymeshkout. I think there's lots of things that are reasonable to believe / valid to discuss without having ironclad evidence one way or the other, but with him everything turns into a trial where you have to prove everything beyond reasonable doubt.
IME:
-Weakly justified beliefs resist close examination.
-Loose thinkers dislike rigor taking all the fun out of it. Theory is fun but details are a drag.
True, but if you insist on only discussing strongly justified beliefs, you won't have much to talk about. A fair application of the standard you're bringing up end with abolishing many of the ideas that the functioning of our society rests on.
False. It has nothing to do with the thinkers, but with the ideas. Rigorously justified ideas simply become a matter of fact. The theory of relativity might be mindblowing at first, but becomes rather mundane when you're taking time-dilation into account in your calculations for a living. The ideas that are fun are the ones that still have some mystery about them.
It’s fine to discuss any kind of belief. What’s problematic is having an imbalance between the strength of the belief and the strength of the evidence.
There’s a type of person who relishes gray areas and loose approaches towards grand theories. This type of person does not like systemic approaches to truth. Perhaps the classic example of this is when Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson tried to hash things out in multiple podcasts.
On a Motte podcast re: Jan 6, at some point toward the end Yassine’s counterpart said something to the effect of “you know I’m not following the exact details on that; I’m more of a big picture guy.” Same dynamic.
I don't think that's the case. Our entire society rests on very weak evidence. Is "abolish the police" a good idea? Is democracy the best way to organize society? We're no way near to rigorously answering those questions, but dicking around with them would most likely end in disaster.
I notice that your arguments rely a lot on psychologizing your opponents, and don't really contain much of a case for your approach to truth.
“Abolish the police” is a horrifically bad idea! I’m a bit flabbergasted you would propose that as an area with weak evidence.
“Democracy” empirically outperforms anything else we’ve tried at scale. Plenty of debate to be had over what “democracy” even means or if an even better system is possible.
My approach to truth is bog standard rationality(TM).
The dynamic of “loose vs. tight” thinking is issue-agnostic, by the way. On this issue, I’m psychologizing some posters who seem allergic to the lawyerly approach overall.
It wasn't tested very often, and definitely not under controlled conditions. If you think it has strong evidence, your standards are pretty low.
Historically "democracy" has been a spit in the bucket, and in pre-democratic times, it's rarity as a system of government was used as proof that it cannot work, the same way you are currently trying to claim it is clearly superior. I will also note the lack of controlled conditions. If this is your idea of rigor, you're using the word differently then I am.
Yeah, rationality(TM) isn't a great approach to truth for many issues.
Right, and you are not engaging with their arguments against the lawyerly approach, and not providing your own arguments for it.
It’s incredible to me that you assert here that we do not have sufficient evidence regarding policing or democracy to make reasonably confident assertions, at a broad level at least…
…but that there’s room to believe there was significant fraud in the 2020 election.
Whatever system of epistemology you’re using is alien to me.
“Controlled conditions” is a red herring because it’s a laughably impossible standard for say the type and level of policing and its effect on crime. The best we can do is observe natural experiments and adjust accordingly. We can also use available evidence and a bit of extrapolation to judge the proposals to defund the police to be a very bad idea for improving crime rates.
Also, I have directly engaged with several arguments against the lawyerly approach. You might think I’m wrong, but please don’t accuse me of not engaging them.
You can find it incredible if you like, but it doesn't change the fact that the arguments for these things are very wishy-washy. As for "sufficient" it depends what you mean by that. Sufficient to not uproot our entire system of government? Why yes, I agree, and that was my point from the start.
I'm not sure this is even true. At first I thought it might be, but your responses re: controlled conditions show that in practice our epistemologies are not that different, you're just applying different t standards to things you like vs. things you don't like.
I agree, it is impossible to have a rigorous justification for that belief.
And what is the best we can do when discussing fraud in elections with secret ballots?
Fair enough, but in the course of our conversation, you seem a lot more interested in psychologizing and slapping adjectives on your opponents, than in discussing the substance of their ideas.
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