I agreed with your basic point in the haunted house article, while disagreeing with your theoretical analysis of it. Aumann was not wrong; obviously his conclusions follow from his premises. But it is also obvious that his premises do not apply perfectly to real people. Consequently, in the sense that people can be reasonable (which means not perfectly reasonable) and in which they can have reasonable beliefs (which means not perfectly reasonable beliefs) reasonable people can have reasonable beliefs which are in opposition to one another.
So I do not assume that someone else’s belief is unreasonable as soon as he disagrees with me. I have at least one belief which would generally be considered to be a conspiracy theory. There is no reason for me to say what that belief is, because nearly all the readers of this comment would assume that I am wrong. And they would be perfectly reasonable in making that assumption, because judging from an outside view the belief would be very likely to be wrong. I do not think my belief is unreasonable, given my inside view, nor do I think the readers would unreasonable to assume that I am wrong, given their outside view.
Given someone that I consider overall reasonable, e.g. gjm, I am pretty sure that he and I could come to agreement regarding the truth of that belief, if we gave it sufficient time and discussion. But it almost certainly would not be worth the time and discussion, for either of us. Consequently there will necessarily be a persistent disagreement without that implying that anyone is unreasonable in the human sense of the term.
I think the same thing applies to religious / non-religious beliefs, at least in a general way, although I think that religious people have an extremely hard time distinguishing their motivations from their arguments (i.e. benefits from believing vs. evidence that those beliefs are true.) I know someone who seems to believe something like “My estimate based on my current evidence and analysis is that there is a 30% chance that my religion is true. Since there is a 70% chance it is false, it is probable that if I gave it sufficient thought and considered enough of the evidence, there is approximately a 70% chance that I could arrive at an estimate of a 99% chance it is false. But since I get instrumental benefits from believing, I do not intend to look at that evidence. So I will leave my estimate at 30%, which I am fairly comfortable with.”
Personally I would never be comfortable with such a situation; I want to know what is actually true. But people care about different things, and I don’t consider someone like that to be fundamentally unreasonable.
I agreed with your basic point in the haunted house article, while disagreeing with your theoretical analysis of it. Aumann was not wrong; obviously his conclusions follow from his premises. But it is also obvious that his premises do not apply perfectly to real people. Consequently, in the sense that people can be reasonable (which means not perfectly reasonable) and in which they can have reasonable beliefs (which means not perfectly reasonable beliefs) reasonable people can have reasonable beliefs which are in opposition to one another.
So I do not assume that someone else’s belief is unreasonable as soon as he disagrees with me. I have at least one belief which would generally be considered to be a conspiracy theory. There is no reason for me to say what that belief is, because nearly all the readers of this comment would assume that I am wrong. And they would be perfectly reasonable in making that assumption, because judging from an outside view the belief would be very likely to be wrong. I do not think my belief is unreasonable, given my inside view, nor do I think the readers would unreasonable to assume that I am wrong, given their outside view.
Given someone that I consider overall reasonable, e.g. gjm, I am pretty sure that he and I could come to agreement regarding the truth of that belief, if we gave it sufficient time and discussion. But it almost certainly would not be worth the time and discussion, for either of us. Consequently there will necessarily be a persistent disagreement without that implying that anyone is unreasonable in the human sense of the term.
I think the same thing applies to religious / non-religious beliefs, at least in a general way, although I think that religious people have an extremely hard time distinguishing their motivations from their arguments (i.e. benefits from believing vs. evidence that those beliefs are true.) I know someone who seems to believe something like “My estimate based on my current evidence and analysis is that there is a 30% chance that my religion is true. Since there is a 70% chance it is false, it is probable that if I gave it sufficient thought and considered enough of the evidence, there is approximately a 70% chance that I could arrive at an estimate of a 99% chance it is false. But since I get instrumental benefits from believing, I do not intend to look at that evidence. So I will leave my estimate at 30%, which I am fairly comfortable with.”
Personally I would never be comfortable with such a situation; I want to know what is actually true. But people care about different things, and I don’t consider someone like that to be fundamentally unreasonable.