I take your point to be that I have taken something that is really a matter of degree “how much weight should I give to the opinion of this or that person?” and turned it into something dichotomous “is this person a good guide for me or not?”
You have. To quote from your article:
One kind of adviser is someone whose opinion, by your lights, constitutes strong evidence regarding the answer...But they are only providers of valuable input, not good guides. I think the distinction between these two types of advisers is often missed...The point is that there should be two buckets for two different types of prestigious advice-giver, but we only really have one.
When I boil down your post+comment and look for sense, what I get is something prosaic like ‘some people are so expert in a narrow area that their opinion alone is enough for me, but otherwise aren’t very good on average; other people are that expert, but in a broader area’.
The point is that these are two very different kinds of valuable advisers, but the distinction is often missed.
And while I do think in real life there is something of a dichotomy between “people whose final judgment I trust on questions like X,” and “people whose final judgment I don’t trust but who I still want to hear what they have to say,” I think a similar point could be made with more than two categories.
Perhaps you mean to divide the population into the following three categories: (1) people who can convince you without argument, (2) people who can convince you with argument, and (3) people who can’t convince you even with argument; and the thesis of the post is “Not everyone in (2) is in (1)”.
You have. To quote from your article:
When I boil down your post+comment and look for sense, what I get is something prosaic like ‘some people are so expert in a narrow area that their opinion alone is enough for me, but otherwise aren’t very good on average; other people are that expert, but in a broader area’.
The point is that these are two very different kinds of valuable advisers, but the distinction is often missed.
And while I do think in real life there is something of a dichotomy between “people whose final judgment I trust on questions like X,” and “people whose final judgment I don’t trust but who I still want to hear what they have to say,” I think a similar point could be made with more than two categories.
Perhaps you mean to divide the population into the following three categories: (1) people who can convince you without argument, (2) people who can convince you with argument, and (3) people who can’t convince you even with argument; and the thesis of the post is “Not everyone in (2) is in (1)”.