4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3yr ago
"Rationalisation" is just a label you applied to my reasoning though, and from what I can tell you have at no point actually argued in what way it failed to be a rational argument. You don't prove that something is a not-X by labelling it a Y and then asserting without proof that Y implies not-X.
But, before I leave, since you asked "Can you quote where you think I said that?" - it was from the part I already quoted above, "For most everyone else, it would be more rational to ignore the essay, leave your prior largely unshifted" which is code for saying "Yea, continue trusting what you have read from Scott, even though this gigantic rebuttal is claiming he is not fully right." instead of saying, for example, "Realize that what you understood from Scott may not be entirely right; if you want to know for sure however you must read this gigantic rebuttal." I guess you have overlooked the implicit authority bias in this whole thing.
How do you figure it is code for that completely different statement? Telling me what my statement is supposedly code for is pretty silly; I might as well go and say that in your post, "See you around." is code for "I am the most rational being to ever exist and you should all bow before me", with the same level of authority. Did you miss the part where I said that you should leave your prior unshifted, that is, if you already believe Scott's post to be wrong and Ivermectin to work against COVID, you should also continue believing that? This is markedly different from suggesting that people trust me, or Scott, or anyone on the topic of whether Ivermectin works. At most you could take what I wrote as arguing that reading this essay is probably not worth the typical reader's time, not because I believe it is probably wrong (though I do) but because I believe that it is a waste of time even if it is right. Rather than leaning on mine or anyone's authority, I believe I outlined a fairly reproducible argument, along with a set of inputs that lead to the conclusion. If your inputs are different, your mileage may naturally vary.
(Perhaps it is necessary to reiterate that something can be true and not worth wasting time on for 99.99...% of people, e.g. the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. In the realm of maths, I will also continue believing that the abc conjecture is unproven and not invest time in reading Mochizuki's claimed proof, even though I think it's still possible that it does wind up checking out, and would likewise consider the same stance rational without claiming even an inkling of authority.)
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Notes -
"Rationalisation" is just a label you applied to my reasoning though, and from what I can tell you have at no point actually argued in what way it failed to be a rational argument. You don't prove that something is a not-X by labelling it a Y and then asserting without proof that Y implies not-X.
How do you figure it is code for that completely different statement? Telling me what my statement is supposedly code for is pretty silly; I might as well go and say that in your post, "See you around." is code for "I am the most rational being to ever exist and you should all bow before me", with the same level of authority. Did you miss the part where I said that you should leave your prior unshifted, that is, if you already believe Scott's post to be wrong and Ivermectin to work against COVID, you should also continue believing that? This is markedly different from suggesting that people trust me, or Scott, or anyone on the topic of whether Ivermectin works. At most you could take what I wrote as arguing that reading this essay is probably not worth the typical reader's time, not because I believe it is probably wrong (though I do) but because I believe that it is a waste of time even if it is right. Rather than leaning on mine or anyone's authority, I believe I outlined a fairly reproducible argument, along with a set of inputs that lead to the conclusion. If your inputs are different, your mileage may naturally vary.
(Perhaps it is necessary to reiterate that something can be true and not worth wasting time on for 99.99...% of people, e.g. the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. In the realm of maths, I will also continue believing that the abc conjecture is unproven and not invest time in reading Mochizuki's claimed proof, even though I think it's still possible that it does wind up checking out, and would likewise consider the same stance rational without claiming even an inkling of authority.)
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