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Comment by SiempreViernes | Hacker News Reader

> You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. In order to do that, you must put yourself in the position of one who believes the opposite of what you do.

No, "both sidesing" is not at all how philosophers or mathematicians train to establish the truth: they learn to identify overt and hidden assumptions and question the validity of this assumptions.

This might happen when you imagine you truly hold some other position, but it is clear from the structure you describe (mostly unstructured talking to an opponent) that this is incidental learning and not the focus of the exercise.

What you describe is plainly a exercise in rhetoric, the central conceit that one can simply switch positions after a fixed period of debate is clear enough evidence that truth seeking is not the goal.

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> No, "both sidesing" is not at all how philosophers or mathematicians train to establish the truth: they learn to identify overt and hidden assumptions and question the validity of this assumptions.

I disagree with this.

It's not "both sidesing" in the same sense as debate, but for sure mathematicians often engage in similar ways of learning. Almost always, you'd learn something new, like a new definition, by considering other ways to define the same thing and see how that affects things.

And at the high level of maths, there sometimes are actual debates about which direction to go with certain axioms/etc.

> What you describe is plainly an exercise in rhetoric, the central conceit that one can simply switch positions after a fixed period of debate is clear enough evidence that truth seeking is not the goal.

Hard disagree. Being able to switch sides is essential to being able to understand why one side is better than the other. If you're trying to decide which ice cream flavor to order, but literally cannot see one of the options, it is meaningless to say you chose not to take that one. Only by actually seeing it, tasting it, and deciding against it, have you actually made a choice that one flavor is better than another.

> It's not "both sidesing" in the same sense as debate, but [emphasis mine]

Ha! Seeing you use a literal non-sequitur to as a counter is a perfect illustration of why rhetoric exercises aren't an automatic pathway to sound logical reasoning.

(Explicitly the argument by edanm goes: "I hold the proposition 'A does not do B' is not true, because A does C")

Note that you shifted the argument to "truth" while the above comment you replied simply talked about "beliefs". Not everything in life can be mathematically proven, after all (and very few people practice professional philisopical rigor to begin with, so we need to lower the assumptions here).

The goal here isn't to find truth, because sometimes the truth doesn't exist. It's to understand and be ready to counter-argue conflicting stances when necessary. Knowing what your opponent will say lets you better strengthen your own argument.

If the truth doesn't exist, whats the point of debating at all?

The truth exists, but often we cannot know it, ie incomplete information, biases, etc. Or sometimes you may be predicting the future where it absolutely doesn't exist yet - you plan a new policy to improve something, but you can never find "the truth" in advance, eg whether it will work or not.

But if we challenge our opinions, we can make better decisions. If we challenge and they hold, we are more confident in them. If we challenge and they don't hold, maybe there's a better idea to explore.

In short, what I believe is: you can aim for the truth, and you will be better for it, but you will never reach it.

First of all: lies, damn lies and statistics. Even if we had hard raw data on a census of a population, we are going to interpret the causes differently. Because there never is one answer to a sociological issue. Truth also doesn't determine the best course of action for any given society either.

Tame example: say that we know that objectively 100% of the time that browsing Facebook leads to depression. Okay... what do we do with this? Do we force facebook to change, maybe even ban it from a country? do we strongly regulate people using Facebook? Maybe only regulate minors? How does that information affect Instagram or any other Meta product? One "truth" doesn't answer these questions.

Second of all: debate is ultimately communication, and communication is about being able to express your own thoughts, often while trying to appeal to other person's thoughts. These core factors of society are important no matter the topic. It should also ideally teach one to consider multiple points of view and make for a more well rounded understanding on comlpex issues, but well... here's the article talking about modern debate.

Sure, maybe the original poster was thinking of beliefs purely as "statements made within the internal logic of pieces of fiction", the only type of belief where truth has no place.

On the other hand they were talking about religious training, and religions are pretty clear that they do teach (some sort) of truth.

> No, "both sidesing" is not at all how philosophers or mathematicians train to establish the truth

In math, proof by counterexample is pretty directly what you'd call "both-sidesing" above; you make a thorough, detailed, and compelling argument for a case against your hypothesis, then demonstrate why it can't be true.

If you can't do the work of the making such a detailed counterexample, then the proof of your actual hypothesis falls apart too.

Being able to make the strongest argument against your beliefs is necessary for you to hold your own beliefs most strongly.

That's not a proof by counter-example, that's a proof by reduction to absurdity, and you don't need to make a case for what you're disproving, you just need to show it leads to something false. Whatever argument anyone has towards it being true is pointless and doesn't need to be mentioned.

A proof by counter-example can get even more terse, you simply have to construct an object which breaks a hypothesis. You don't need to consider the incorrect arguments either. Sometimes these proofs are only a sentence long.

As someone with a degree in Philosophy, I'm going to disagree with you here. I've often found the best way to hone my own argument is to think about what someone would say if they opposed it. This helps you hone in on potential weak points, but it has also caused me to change my point of view when I discovered that my original viewpoint didn't just appear to have weaknesses: it actually was flawed.

My central claim is that you were not taught how to find flaws in an argument by being paired up with a classmate and taking turns arguing in favour of positions like "tormenting Jonah to do gods will was justified", I did not say "pretending to hold a different opinion is never done".

Hmm... The post you responded to - and you quoted - said :

"You can never truly arrive at or trust your own beliefs if you can't completely understand and articulate the best possible case against them. In order to do that, you must put yourself in the position of one who believes the opposite of what you do."

It seems to me that your post doesn't make the point you think it does and you ascribe a viewpoint to the post you're responding to which is not in evidence.

I'm not sure what you are saying, you think that post was talking of "beliefs" in the sense "opinions about pure fiction"? I'll also state here that for me "beliefs" about anything except fiction will by definition have the last turtle rest on the firmament of empirical reality.

Anyway, that seems a distinct debate from the one you opened with, that you were trained according to: > Students were paired off and given a biblical passage to examine, say, Jonah and the whale. One student would have to defend Jonah while the other defended, basically, God. After ten minutes, the teacher would say "switch" and they would have to defend the opposite side with equal logic and vigor. This was the making of a mind.

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