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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 evid

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.

tshaddox 6y ago
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.”
- emmett 6y ago
  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.
  - tshaddox 6y ago
    > 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?
    - drdeca 6y ago
      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".
      - tshaddox 6y ago
        > 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.
        joshuamorton 6y ago
        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.
- jbay808 6y ago
  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.
  - tshaddox 6y ago
    > 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.
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  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.

tshaddox 6y ago

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.”

emmett 6y ago
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.
- tshaddox 6y ago
  > 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?
  - drdeca 6y ago
    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".
    - tshaddox 6y ago
      > 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.
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        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.
jbay808 6y ago
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.
- tshaddox 6y ago
  > 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.
andrewflnr 6y ago
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.