I updated slightly downwards on Open Borders after reading Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith's book on it.
None of their arguments were bad, it's just that I already were fairly sold on Open Borders and they didn't make any great additional arguments whereas before reading the book I thought there might be some great (or at least very good) arguments I haven't heard of.
When I mentioned this epistemic move, some people acted like I was doing black magic.
But isn’t the key premise here that the only possible observations are “good argument for X” and “bad argument for X”? If you also include “good argument for not-X” and “bad argument for not-X”, we could consistently have negligible change to our beliefs after hearing bad arguments so long as the good arguments balance in expectation.
Another way to say this: if we are discussing updating our credence based on observing just the goodness/badness of one person’s argument, we implicitly have *already* updated on the fact that they are arguing for X (rather than not-X). Given that, it’s not too unintuitive that our credence would go down when we observe that the argument is bad since we are merely “undoing” the earlier upward change.
I updated slightly downwards on Open Borders after reading Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith's book on it.
None of their arguments were bad, it's just that I already were fairly sold on Open Borders and they didn't make any great additional arguments whereas before reading the book I thought there might be some great (or at least very good) arguments I haven't heard of.
When I mentioned this epistemic move, some people acted like I was doing black magic.
Yeah, I wrote the post because of similar experiences.
But isn’t the key premise here that the only possible observations are “good argument for X” and “bad argument for X”? If you also include “good argument for not-X” and “bad argument for not-X”, we could consistently have negligible change to our beliefs after hearing bad arguments so long as the good arguments balance in expectation.
Another way to say this: if we are discussing updating our credence based on observing just the goodness/badness of one person’s argument, we implicitly have *already* updated on the fact that they are arguing for X (rather than not-X). Given that, it’s not too unintuitive that our credence would go down when we observe that the argument is bad since we are merely “undoing” the earlier upward change.