Can you think of another behavior pattern that is more accurate than this?
Assuming that someone isn’t going to hold a belief they know to be false, they are teaching you perceived truth. Why wouldn’t you adapt those beliefs? If you, the student, possessed the ability to denounce those beliefs in a manner fitting rational discussion it seems likely that the master would have been able to do so as well.
This isn’t to say all masters are all right all the time, but what else do we have to go on until we go into the territory ourselves? These people went ahead and brought back a map. Different trailblazers saw the territory differently and now they get to bicker about which has a more accurate map.
When learning from people, I assume we copy portions from their map. They are lined up next to my discoveries and observations and are assimilated as best as possible. At some point, when I wander through that territory, I get to compare my map to what I see.
Am I wrong or missing something? Or is that the whole point of the post? Or… ?
Lots of biases still live in your head doing their thing even when you know about them. This one, though, puts you in an awfully weird epistemic situation. It’s almost like the opposite of belief in belief—disbelief in belief. “This is true, but my situation made me more prone than I should have been to believe it and my belief is therefore suspect. But dang, that argument my teacher explained to me sure was sound-looking! I must just be lucky—those poor saps with other teachers have it wrong! But of course I would think that...”
Emphasis mine. I don’t see how the emphasized part is a bias issue. I don’t see how thinking about how a certain area of your map was colored causes the weird epistemic situation. I think the problem is this:
I must just be lucky—those poor saps with other teachers have it wrong!
A predictor is right or wrong. Your teachers are irrelevant once the belief is in your map. Treating beliefs transported from a teacher as a lucky event has a few problems:
It implies that your teacher is your teacher because you were lucky. Choose your teacher better.
It implies that teacher A and teacher B have the same map quality of a particular territory but they disagree. This is irrelevant until you get to look at the competing maps or the territory involved. Your teacher is still the best guess you have. Why would your map look like anything else?
It implies that you cannot change you (or your unlucky friend’s) beliefs as new evidence or more maps become available.
But all of this seems obvious and you address these points elsewhere in your post.
So perhaps you are saying that once you believe something, it becomes entrenched and now has an unfair advantage? I certainly understand this. As far as I can tell, this is one of the problems that rationality was supposed to address. Is the teacher scenario merely a special case?
Can you think of another behavior pattern that is more accurate than this?
Assuming that someone isn’t going to hold a belief they know to be false, they are teaching you perceived truth. Why wouldn’t you adapt those beliefs? If you, the student, possessed the ability to denounce those beliefs in a manner fitting rational discussion it seems likely that the master would have been able to do so as well.
This isn’t to say all masters are all right all the time, but what else do we have to go on until we go into the territory ourselves? These people went ahead and brought back a map. Different trailblazers saw the territory differently and now they get to bicker about which has a more accurate map.
When learning from people, I assume we copy portions from their map. They are lined up next to my discoveries and observations and are assimilated as best as possible. At some point, when I wander through that territory, I get to compare my map to what I see.
Am I wrong or missing something? Or is that the whole point of the post? Or… ?
Emphasis mine. I don’t see how the emphasized part is a bias issue. I don’t see how thinking about how a certain area of your map was colored causes the weird epistemic situation. I think the problem is this:
A predictor is right or wrong. Your teachers are irrelevant once the belief is in your map. Treating beliefs transported from a teacher as a lucky event has a few problems:
It implies that your teacher is your teacher because you were lucky. Choose your teacher better.
It implies that teacher A and teacher B have the same map quality of a particular territory but they disagree. This is irrelevant until you get to look at the competing maps or the territory involved. Your teacher is still the best guess you have. Why would your map look like anything else?
It implies that you cannot change you (or your unlucky friend’s) beliefs as new evidence or more maps become available.
But all of this seems obvious and you address these points elsewhere in your post.
So perhaps you are saying that once you believe something, it becomes entrenched and now has an unfair advantage? I certainly understand this. As far as I can tell, this is one of the problems that rationality was supposed to address. Is the teacher scenario merely a special case?