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I think the author only means you're "doomed" in the sense that "your fate is sealed": you'll find it very hard to change your mind in the face of contrary evidence, because your observations will start to feel like they always reinforce your conclusion.

Right, but the implication is that your fate is sealed and that your belief doesn’t reflect reality or isn’t “rational.” I’m assuming the author wouldn’t use the same terminology to describe one’s unwillingness to change their views from something he considers “rational” to something he considers “irrational,” e.g. he probably wouldn’t say “if you believe the Earth is not flat, and you won’t change your beliefs unless presented with compelling evidence and explanations that the Earth is flat, then you are doomed.”

That's not perfectly parallel as a belief. The parallel statement would be "If you believe that flat-Earth advocates don't actually care about whether the Earth is flat or not, they just want to prevent space exploration to keep us trapped on Earth"...that would be equivalent. And I can't speak for Scott, but I think he'd say if you believed that, your ability to reason about the Earth being flat is basically dead. It happens to be that you have the right answer (the Earth is round), but only by chance...if you were wrong, you wouldn't be able to be convinced to change your mind.

> The parallel statement would be "If you believe that flat-Earth advocates don't actually care about whether the Earth is flat or not, they just want to prevent space exploration to keep us trapped on Earth"

But...isn’t that statement either true or false, just like the statement “the Earth is flat” is either true or false? What’s the difference between the two statements? Is knowledge about one statement possible, but not the other?

It's the connection between the two statements.

If you believe "flat-Earth advocates don't actually care about whether the Earth is flat or not, they just want to prevent space exploration to keep us trapped on Earth" , this would pose difficulty for changing the belief "the earth isn't flat".

If someone believed "people who claim that 'flat-Earth advocates don't actually care about whether the Earth is flat or not, they just want to prevent space exploration to keep us trapped on Earth' don't actually care about whether flat-Earth advocates really [...], they just [idk, some absurd motivation for making the claim] ", that would pose difficulty for changing the belief "flat-Earth advocates really do believe that the Earth is flat".

> If you believe "flat-Earth advocates don't actually care about whether the Earth is flat or not, they just want to prevent space exploration to keep us trapped on Earth" , this would pose difficulty for changing the belief "the earth isn't flat".

I’m not sure why. The normal simple tests to distinguish between a flat Earth and a ball-shaped Earth ought to still work independent of what flat-Earth advocates believe.

The crux of the issue here is that it's not possible to know what someone else truly believes. You hear various forms of this argument all the time. Was Trump unable to string together a coherent sentence, or was his speech style a conscious choice to appeal to certain people? Are people who identify as LGBT doing so because that's what they truly feel about themselves, or because they want to be popular and fit in?

The statements being made aren't about the earth, but about people's perception of the earth. And ultimately you can't objectively determine someone else's qualia.

What GP is suggesting is that if the claimed flat-earth belief is simply a justification for a different goal (prevent space exploration), then providing contrary evidence doesn't matter, because the belief isn't core of the issue. But you can't really know that independently. And this is especially true where you get a sort of metacircularity in beliefs and belief systems. Identifying what the "real" axiom someone subscribes to is difficult.

To look at the conspiracy theory about flat earthers that GP proposed, imagine that tomorrow, suddenly, the Earth was flat. All of the historical record was the same. We have evidence and recordings that it was round, and that the Greeks agreed, but tomorrow we couldn't reproduce those experiments. The horizon suddenly looked different. A reasonable conclusion here might be that we're all suffering from a collective delusion (and that in fact the earth is still round[0]), because our prior that the earth could rearrange itself overnight is low. But, this person might believe that the collective delusion is the result of machinations of the flat earthers, trying to trick us all into stopping further space exploration by convincing us that the earth is flat. This despite there being no evidence that flat earthers were at fault, or even capable, of causing such a worldwide event.

[0]: This actually objectively doesn't make a whole lot of sense, if we're capable of being subject to a massive collective delusion at worldwide scale, it could be that we were doing so before, and that the change is the delusion wearing off, but I digress.

> The crux of the issue here is that it's not possible to know what someone else truly believes.

I don’t think there’s some process to follow to acquire knowledge with a guarantee that we haven’t made a mistake, but I don’t think that means it’s impossible to acquire knowledge. I think we can and do acquire knowledge about people’s beliefs and intentions and use that knowledge to solve problems. Obviously examples are convicting people of fraud and various crimes where the person’s intentions are relevant.

This gets more complex in the realm of, let's call it politics, where the quest for knowledge may be adversarial, and is played over long periods. With fraud and crimes of intent, you often have very clear evidence where the person was unguarded (they said a slur as they committed the crime, making it a hate crime, for example).

I'm not saying reliably discovering intentions is always impossible. I'm saying that it is not always possible.

I think you're reading that implication in, when it wasn't there. Nobody can know with certainty what's really true or false, and the author isn't claiming to know either or judge people for disagreeing. We can only work on improving our processes for deciding what's true, and noticing that sometimes we can end up in a situation where our beliefs will become immune to contrary evidence is an important part of that. When that happens it doesn't mean those beliefs are certainly mistaken, but it does mean your fate is, more or less, sealed.

If your faith in a flat earth is strong enough that you'll come up with new theories of optics to justify continuing to believe in it even after you're launched into orbit to see it firsthand, your belief is unshakable. But that doesn't guarantee that you're wrong, maybe you're a genius who just revolutionized cosmology and optics. But you're probably wrong.

> Nobody can know with certainty what's really true or false, and the author isn't claiming to know either or judge people for disagreeing.

Yeah, that’s the kind of epistemological meat we really need to slice into. My view is that certainty is impossible but that knowledge is possible, and that we get ourselves into a lot of messes when we confuse knowledge with certainty. The quest for knowledge should not be a quest for certainty (either in the emotional sense or the Bayesian sense) or a quest for a perfect method of obtaining or justifying knowledge.

Reflecting reality is different from being rational. It's related to the old idea that true knowledge is believing the right thing for the right reason. The problem is that if your reasoning process is incorrect, what you believe is independent of reality, so whether you believe the truth is mostly random. Your opponents have equally strong (i.e. not) reasons to believe what they do. You should aim to do better.

That quote is NOT Scott saying that pro-life advocates are right about abortion or wrong about abortion. That quote is Scott saying that once you start to believe that "the enemy" is a cackling evil villain, who is lying about their true motivations and secretly is only advocating for their preferred policies because they want to do evil things...you are doomed, at least in terms of seeking truth. Because once you believe that, there is nothing that "the enemy" can ever say or do that will change your mind. It's always just a tactic to advance their evil plot.

Of course, Scott could be wrong about this thesis. It's possible that maybe believing that pro-life conservatives don't care at all about fetuses doesn't actually indicate that you have a trapped prior that will prevent you from ever hearing new arguments on the abortion issue. But that is the argument that Scott is advancing, not that you can't form opinions about the truth or falsehood of someone's political views at all.

I guess my question is whether the author believes that it’s possible to have knowledge about these sorts of things or not. Everything he says in this article sounds like he’s saying that obtaining such knowledge is impossible, or at least that neither side has obtained knowledge. He seems to only judge the validity of the opposing views by how strongly their proponents believe the views, and since the two views seem to be held equally strongly, he seems to conclude that there is no discernible difference in the validity of the views. But if it were possible to obtain such knowledge, then it would be possible to correctly say “both sides believe their views equally strongly, but side A is more correct and side B is less correct.”

There are outside groups with less of that type of bias that will often be able to see things in a more nuanced way that more closely reflects reality. For example, maybe someone from another country who is uninterested in politics.

That doesn't mean there are some people who have no bias at all. Just different ones that apply to other things.

In the examples you quoted, he was deliberately listing views extreme enough to be inaccurate. For example, both the liberal and conservative examples said the characterization applied to _everyone_ in those groups. The less-biased interpretations might be: _some_ conservatives really _do_ care about fetuses and lives, and _some_ liberals _do_ care about preventing COVID deaths.

Agnosticism about particular partisan issues is very appropriate when discussing general patterns of thinking and failure modes. And I think he would agree with your last paragraph to the extent of thinking it too obvious to say out loud. His own politics are clear enough from his other writing.

> Isn’t it possible that there actually are some powerful political groups who have honest and good intentions and others which do not?

I think it's important to really carefully spell out what we mean by "not having good intentions". Because there are two different reasonable things that that can mean, and they're _really_ different, but the incentive to flip-flop between them can be strong.

The first meaning sounds like "having bad ideas". For example, let's say I'm in favor of some new law to...promote the arts. (Trying to pick a bland example.) You might think my law is actually going to hurt the arts, and argue against it for that reason. Or maybe you agree that it'll help the arts, but you think its other downsides outweigh its upsides. At maximum generality, maybe you don't object to my idea per se, but you'd just rather spend the same money on something else.

The second meaning sounds like "having bad values". For example, you could claim that I'm not actually interested in art, and just trying to divert money to my friends. Or maybe I could paint you as some sort of uncultured caveman, who can't understand why normal people like art.

When we put it that way, I think it's clear that we usually say "good intentions" to talk about the second meaning. Like, the whole point of saying it is usually to _contrast_ someone's good values with some bad outcome they're associated with, right?

On the other hand, it's much easier to take an argumentative position using the first meaning. The world is complicated, everything has downsides, etc. Plus object level arguments tend to be more sophisticated and interesting, with expertise and fancy math getting involved. So a tempting strategy can be to equivocate between "having bad ideas" and "having bad values", by making an argument about ideas or outcomes and yet drawing or implying a conclusion about values. This is the sort of fallacy that internet rationalists complain about constantly, calling it a "motte and bailey" or something like that. And I'm really sympathetic to that complaint: I think that it's very easy to make this sort of bad argument, that it's actually kind of hard _not_ to make it without some sort of shared community or commitment, and that the effect of this sort of argument on discourse is frustrating, unproductive, and ultimately dehumanizing.

So all that said, do I think that some groups objectively have bad values? I...oof...I feel kind of forced to admit that it's true sometimes. I can't sustain a really extreme position here like "everyone's values are special and lovely in their own way", at least not without diluting the concept of values so much that it's not very interesting anymore. But at the same time, I just feel...super skeptical of most "bad values" arguments in practice.

I think it's also worth remembering that many versions of "bad values" might not be bad faith feigning of good values, but it might be a disagreement over values (in the same way that you might agree on values, but disagree on ideas as you described).

Two people may have different weights on the proper tradeoffs of safety versus liberty, and each might think the other has "bad values" without disagreeing with the others ideas, or thinking they are being dishonest or underhanded in any way.

> Isn’t it possible that there actually are some powerful political groups who have honest and good intentions and others which do not?

There are people who have bad values, and want things that are bad, yes. (Though generally they don't want them because they think they are bad.)

> Isn’t that possible even if most people have a tendency to believe that their own groups are the good ones, and that belief is just as strong for each group?

yes.

> Is it impossible for me to believe my group’s intentions are honest and good, and you believe just as strongly that your group’s intentions are honest and good, but that only one of us is correct?

I'm not sure what precisely you mean by intentions being "honest and good". If I believe that my intent is honest -- well, I suppose I could be fooling myself, thinking that some behavior of mine is "honest" by twisting the meaning of the word "honest" in my mind, while still intending to cause others to have a belief which I believe to be false. Also, by intentions being "good", do you mean that the things one intends are actually good things, or that the one intending them thinks them good for those they impact, and intends them for that reason?

> Is knowledge nothing more than a feeling of certainty? Or is knowledge simply impossible?

Knowledge is more than a feeling of certainty, yes. And, either knowledge, or something very similar to knowledge, is possible.

For example, both of the beliefs quoted, are false. There may be related claims which are true, but neither of the claims, as stated, are. (I don't see the no true Scotsman aspect of either though?)

The point isn't that different sides are equally correct. The point is demonstrating a kind of error that can be made, and giving an example on multiple sides makes it easier to understand. If one only gave examples of a type of error being made by the side the reader agrees with, there would be a danger of this being interpreted as simply an attack on the side the reader agrees with, and so the reader would be less likely to appreciate the point. On the other hand, if one only gave examples of the type of error being made by the side the reader disagrees with, while the reader may take a more positive view of what is being written, they are less likely to internalize the point as a kind of error that they, or others on their side, are prone to.

For something to be a general type of error, the type of error should be one that can be made in multiple contexts/directions/ways.

Then, to demonstrate that something is a general type of error, why not demonstrate that, by showing that it can be made in multiple contexts/directions/ways ?

The point isn't nihilism or relativism. The point is vigilance.

> I'm not sure what precisely you mean by intentions being "honest and good".

It could mean something objectively moral, or if you’re not into that sort of thing, it could just mean intentions that both groups in question would agree are good.

Thanks for clarifying.

I do believe that at least many moral questions have an objective/real/true answer, and maybe all well-formed ones do. (And I’m confident that at least almost all of the ones that are relevant in practice have a true answer.)

Ok, so you meant that the intent is for something which is good.

Then yes, people can have an intent for something which they think is good, and have their intent for it be because they think it is good, while they are incorrect, and in truth the thing they intend is bad.

The reason I was unsure is because I think there’s an idiom or something(?) where “good intentions” vs “ill intentions” refers to whether they intend to do what they think is beneficial to the target, vs to do something they think is against the target.

Thanks again for clarifying .