If you are rational, you both are already more likely believe things that are true (or less wrong than your competitors) and more able to defend your false beliefs using knowledge of argument and cognitive biases.
“Well-armed” makes a little more sense, but I still don’t think it’s a good analogy. Lions destroy people who aren’t well-armed, so it’s disingenous for a well-armed person to say that a fair procedure for who lives is to let the lions attack and see who survives. Truth destroys false ideas, not people, and people frequently don’t know in advance which ideas will be destroyed by the truth. People, even rational ones, are often wrong in their predictions, unlike the well-armed man.
A precommitment to letting experiments and truth decide what ideas will survive doesn’t stack the deck in your favor, unlike in the lions example. The whole point is that you are willing to take the chance of having your ideas die, as long as the true ideas survive.
I think you could say that the truth does destroy people. You can’t be the same person once you’ve really accepted an entirely new, important idea, and rejected an old belief.
When someone says “that which should be destroyed by the truth should be” and he’s talking to a Christian or a white supremacist or thousand other people defined by the silly idea they take very seriously, you are often asking them to do something a lot more scary than go up against a lion.
If you’ve already seen the truth and accepted it, the deck is as stacked as it could be. And if you haven’t but are otherwise making your bet rationally, while the other is not, then you’ve still got a lot better chance.
If you are rational, you both are already more likely believe things that are true (or less wrong than your competitors) and more able to defend your false beliefs using knowledge of argument and cognitive biases.
Substitute well armed for strong if you like.
“Well-armed” makes a little more sense, but I still don’t think it’s a good analogy. Lions destroy people who aren’t well-armed, so it’s disingenous for a well-armed person to say that a fair procedure for who lives is to let the lions attack and see who survives. Truth destroys false ideas, not people, and people frequently don’t know in advance which ideas will be destroyed by the truth. People, even rational ones, are often wrong in their predictions, unlike the well-armed man.
A precommitment to letting experiments and truth decide what ideas will survive doesn’t stack the deck in your favor, unlike in the lions example. The whole point is that you are willing to take the chance of having your ideas die, as long as the true ideas survive.
I think you could say that the truth does destroy people. You can’t be the same person once you’ve really accepted an entirely new, important idea, and rejected an old belief.
When someone says “that which should be destroyed by the truth should be” and he’s talking to a Christian or a white supremacist or thousand other people defined by the silly idea they take very seriously, you are often asking them to do something a lot more scary than go up against a lion.
If you’ve already seen the truth and accepted it, the deck is as stacked as it could be. And if you haven’t but are otherwise making your bet rationally, while the other is not, then you’ve still got a lot better chance.