Why is it assumed that someone who is convinced by arguments is prone to wrong ideas? Wouldn't that type of person become iteratively closer to the truth every time they hear a new argument and compare to the others they've heard?
Many arguments especially advanced ones are building on a presumed level of knowledge that many people do not have or are even aware that they should have. Doing the work to adequately evaluate an argument in every domain is probably not worth their time.
This might be my misunderstanding of the article. How do you gain knowledge at all without considering new arguments you hear?
> Doing the work to adequately evaluate an argument in every domain is probably not worth their time
Sure, but why not admit you just don't know then instead of "sticking to your prior" and believing something you have no evidence to believe?
You might still be wrong but your chances are probably improved in the correct direction most of the time.
If two diametrically opposed arguments are equally convincing, it's not intuitive to me that the "correct" solution is a middle ground. Especially if both argument state that a middle ground is not possible.
What if the conclusion forces behavior though? For voting, you can abstain from voting if you're unclear, but what if you're in a position where you have to choose two distinctly different options.
In this case, I think you pretty much have to stick with your prior, but I'm curious if you have a more nuanced approach here.
Yeah, at least to me that makes sense if you're forced to make a choice. Although in some ways if you really have no clear evidence it doesn't matter what choice you make, since both are equally reasonable.
> I'm curious if you have a more nuanced approach here
Not really :D. I do think things are often more complicated than "you must choose two options", for example you might have to choose between two candidates (in the US at least), but if you are more uncertain maybe you don't put a giant poster in your front yard or get upset at neighbors if they have a different opinion.
Most decisions you'll ever make are "You have ___ seconds/minutes/hours to make a choice". And depending on the pressures you're under you will skip the expensive logical/rational processing as needed and fall back to heuristics.
>Why is it assumed that someone who is convinced by arguments is prone to wrong ideas?
To put this a different way, if humans actually behaved in this manner in any significant numbers then humanity should have discovered the sciences and been uplifted a long time ago.
Instead that's not what we see at all. A more likely reason is Bullshit Asymmetry, that is, humans throw out so much made up crap that using arguments alone will burn the observable universe away in a puff of entropy.
If we could solve the Bullshit Asymmetry problem, imagine the progress we could make as a species.
Someone reads that "ACKCHYUALLY, if you're operating a car for personal reasons, and not for hire, then you're not actually 'driving', you're just traveling, and you're not legally required to have a driver's license or car registration! The cops and the courts have it wrong!" just one time, and it's now a permanent belief, and absolutely nothing you do or say can convince them otherwise, and now you've got another Sovereign Citizen.
That's just one example. Flat Earthers, various conspiracy theories, some anti-vax beliefs...
If removing bullshit puts an undue burden on that learning process that causes students to refrain from asking the questions that will help them understand the topic, then you didn't ACKCHYUALLY remove it, you only moved it. :)