Academic philosophers are better than average at evaluating object-level arguments for some claim. They don’t seem to be very good at thinking about what rationalization in search implies about the arguments that come up. Compared to academic philosophers, rationalists strike me as especially appreciating filtered evidence and its significance to your world model.
If you find an argument for a claim easily, then even if that argument is strong, this (depending on some other things) implies that similarly strong arguments on the other side may turn up with not too much more work. Given that, you won’t want to update dramatically in favor of the claim—the powerful evidence to the contrary could, you infer, be unearthed without much more work. You learn something about the other side of the issue from how quickly or slowly the world yielded evidence in the other direction. If it’s considered a social faux pas to give strong arguments for one side of a claim, then your prior about how hard it is to find strong arguments for that side of the claim will be doing a lot of the heavy lifting in fixing your world model. And so on, for the evidential consequences of other kinds of motivated search and rationalization.
In brief, you can do epistemically better than ignoring how much search power went into finding all the evidence. You can do better than only evaluating the object-level evidential considerations! You can take expended search into account, in order to model what evidence is likely hiding, where, behind how much search debt.
Academic philosophers are better than average at evaluating object-level arguments for some claim. They don’t seem to be very good at thinking about what rationalization in search implies about the arguments that come up. Compared to academic philosophers, rationalists strike me as especially appreciating filtered evidence and its significance to your world model.
If you find an argument for a claim easily, then even if that argument is strong, this (depending on some other things) implies that similarly strong arguments on the other side may turn up with not too much more work. Given that, you won’t want to update dramatically in favor of the claim—the powerful evidence to the contrary could, you infer, be unearthed without much more work. You learn something about the other side of the issue from how quickly or slowly the world yielded evidence in the other direction. If it’s considered a social faux pas to give strong arguments for one side of a claim, then your prior about how hard it is to find strong arguments for that side of the claim will be doing a lot of the heavy lifting in fixing your world model. And so on, for the evidential consequences of other kinds of motivated search and rationalization.
In brief, you can do epistemically better than ignoring how much search power went into finding all the evidence. You can do better than only evaluating the object-level evidential considerations! You can take expended search into account, in order to model what evidence is likely hiding, where, behind how much search debt.