I’m pointing out that there is already a generally applicable enough set of safeguards that covers this case in particular, adequate or not. That is, this heuristic doesn’t automatically lead as astray.
I don’t think I can understand you properly; it reads like you’re saying that we can be confident in rejecting expert advice if we’ve already reached a contrary position with high confidence. That doesn’t sound Bayesian. I suspect the error is mine but I’d appreciate your help in finding and fixing it!
EDIT: I [not Vladimir] would say that if we have one position that we can be confident in (atheism) we can use it as an indicator of expert quality, and pay more attention to those experts on other issues (e.g. moral realism as philosophers define it).
And with respect to the selection effect among philosophers of religion, there’s overwhelming direct evidence on this in the form of the Catholic Church push on this front.
I would say so too, though I wasn’t saying that here. It is the mechanism through which we can reject expert opinion, but also as applied to the very claim that is being contested, not just the other slam-dunk claims.
Only where there’s a relationship of course. We would be unwise to reject medical expertise from a body where atheists were few, unless religion impinged on that advice eg abortion, cryonics. Here a relationship with religion is clear.
I would say that if on some matter of medical controversy atheist doctors and medical academics tended to come out one way, while the median opinion came out the other way, we should go with the atheist medical opinion, ceteris paribus. Atheism is a proxy for intelligence and scientific thinking, a finding which has a mountain of evidence in its favor.
Definitely if the majority opinion among atheist experts differed from the majority opinion among all experts, I’d go for the former, but if say the majority of doctors studying a disease were Catholic for simple geographic reasons, I’d still defer to their expertise.
(This discussion is about meta-level mechanism for agreement, where you accept a conclusion; experts might well have persuasive arguments that inverse one’s confidence.)
Are you proposing a safeguard here or setting out what the safeguard has to achieve?
I’m pointing out that there is already a generally applicable enough set of safeguards that covers this case in particular, adequate or not. That is, this heuristic doesn’t automatically lead as astray.
I don’t think I can understand you properly; it reads like you’re saying that we can be confident in rejecting expert advice if we’ve already reached a contrary position with high confidence. That doesn’t sound Bayesian. I suspect the error is mine but I’d appreciate your help in finding and fixing it!
EDIT: I [not Vladimir] would say that if we have one position that we can be confident in (atheism) we can use it as an indicator of expert quality, and pay more attention to those experts on other issues (e.g. moral realism as philosophers define it).
And with respect to the selection effect among philosophers of religion, there’s overwhelming direct evidence on this in the form of the Catholic Church push on this front.
Re: correction:
I would say so too, though I wasn’t saying that here. It is the mechanism through which we can reject expert opinion, but also as applied to the very claim that is being contested, not just the other slam-dunk claims.
Only where there’s a relationship of course. We would be unwise to reject medical expertise from a body where atheists were few, unless religion impinged on that advice eg abortion, cryonics. Here a relationship with religion is clear.
I would say that if on some matter of medical controversy atheist doctors and medical academics tended to come out one way, while the median opinion came out the other way, we should go with the atheist medical opinion, ceteris paribus. Atheism is a proxy for intelligence and scientific thinking, a finding which has a mountain of evidence in its favor.
Definitely if the majority opinion among atheist experts differed from the majority opinion among all experts, I’d go for the former, but if say the majority of doctors studying a disease were Catholic for simple geographic reasons, I’d still defer to their expertise.
I agree with this interpretation.
Zack is making basically the same point here.
(This discussion is about meta-level mechanism for agreement, where you accept a conclusion; experts might well have persuasive arguments that inverse one’s confidence.)
(cf. Argument Screens Off Authority.)