My framing was meant to be encouraging you to disproportionately question beliefs which, if false, make you worse off.
But motivated skepticism is disproportionately questioning beliefs that you want to be false. That’s an important difference, I think.
Are you claiming that my version is also a form of motivated skepticism (perhaps a weaker form)? Or do you think my version’s fine, but that I need to make it clearer in the text how what I’m encouraging is different from motivated skepticism?
The implicit idea is that any improvement in beliefs is beneficial, but it’s not what comes to mind when reading that section, it sounds as if suggesting that there is this special kind of beliefs whose revision would be beneficial, as opposed to other kinds of beliefs (this got me confused for a minute). So the actual idea is to focus on belief revisions with high value of information. This is good, but probably needs to be made more explicit and distanced a bit from the examples representative of a different idea (inconvenient beliefs that you would like to go away).
If you focus on questioning the beliefs whose presence is particularly inconvenient, that’s genuine motivated skepticism (motivations could be different). I think this section needs to be revised in terms of value of information, so that there’s symmetry in what kinds of change of mind are considered. Focus on researching the beliefs that, if changed, would affect you most (in whatever way). Dispelling uselessly-hurting prejudices is more of a special case of possible benefits than a special case of the method.
My framing was meant to be encouraging you to disproportionately question beliefs which, if false, make you worse off. But motivated skepticism is disproportionately questioning beliefs that you want to be false. That’s an important difference, I think.
Are you claiming that my version is also a form of motivated skepticism (perhaps a weaker form)? Or do you think my version’s fine, but that I need to make it clearer in the text how what I’m encouraging is different from motivated skepticism?
The implicit idea is that any improvement in beliefs is beneficial, but it’s not what comes to mind when reading that section, it sounds as if suggesting that there is this special kind of beliefs whose revision would be beneficial, as opposed to other kinds of beliefs (this got me confused for a minute). So the actual idea is to focus on belief revisions with high value of information. This is good, but probably needs to be made more explicit and distanced a bit from the examples representative of a different idea (inconvenient beliefs that you would like to go away).
If you focus on questioning the beliefs whose presence is particularly inconvenient, that’s genuine motivated skepticism (motivations could be different). I think this section needs to be revised in terms of value of information, so that there’s symmetry in what kinds of change of mind are considered. Focus on researching the beliefs that, if changed, would affect you most (in whatever way). Dispelling uselessly-hurting prejudices is more of a special case of possible benefits than a special case of the method.