There’s an important and underappreciated point here, but it’s not quite right.
Conspiracy theorists come up with crazy theories, but they usually aren’t so crazy that average people can see for themselves where the errors are. You can have flat earthers debate round earthers and actually make better points, because your average round earther doesn’t know how to deduce the roundness themselves and is essentially just taking people’s word for it. For the round earther to say “Hm. I can’t see any problem with your argument” and then to be convinced would be an error. Their bias towards conformity is an active piece of how they avoid reaching false conclusions here.
However I don’t think any of the round earthers in those debates would say that the flat earthers were convincing, because they were never charitable enough to those arguments for it to sound reasonable to them and the opposing arguments never felt strong relative to the force of conformity. “Don’t change your beliefs” doesn’t just protect against being persuaded by flat earthers as a round earther, it protects from being persuaded by round earthers as a flat earther, and being persuaded that you don’t have a boyfriend anymore after he dumped you. If something *actually* seems convincing to you, that’s worth paying attention to.
The defense here isn’t to ignore evidence, it’s to recognize that it isn’t evidence. When you’ve fallen for three or four scams, and you pay attention to the fact that these kinds of things haven’t been panning out, they actually get less convincing. Like how most people just don’t find flat earth arguments convincing even if they can’t find the flaw themselves (“Yeah, but you could make up arguments of that quality about anything”).
And if you try critical thinking, you’ll either agree with the expert consensus (having wasted your time thinking), disagree with the experts (in which case you’re still more likely than not to be incorrect), or suspend judgment (in which case you’ve both wasted your time and are still likely to be incorrect). Exceptions only exist when the expert class is biased or otherwise unsuitable for deference. It’s better in most cases to avoid thinking for yourself.
This presupposes that you are not giving the experts the respect they deserve. It’s certainly possible to err on this side, but people err on the other side all the time too. “Expert class is biased or otherwise unsuitable for deference” isn’t a small exception, and your later point “most of the views you hear aren’t independent at all” further supports this.
The goal is to take expert opinion, and your own ability to reason on the object level, for what they’re worth. No more, no less.
Any advice to simply trust one or the other is going to be wrong in many important cases.
Don’t take ideas seriously. Disagree with them even without any arguments in your favor.
Don’t take ideas any more seriously than you can take your own ability to reason, and don’t ignore your own inability to reason. If you can’t trust your own ability to reason, don’t take seriously the idea that any given idea is wrong either. Humility is important.
I note one of my problems with “trust the experts” style thinking, is a guessing the teacher’s password problem.
If the arguments for flat earth and round earth sound equally intuitive and persuasive to you, you probably don’t actually understand either theory. Sure, you can say “round earth correct”, and you can get social approval for saying correct beliefs, but you’re not actually believing anything more correct than “this group I like approves of these words.”
It’s not that flat earth arguments sound equally persuasive to people (they don’t). It’s that the reason they don’t sound persuasive is that “this group they like” says not to take the arguments seriously enough to risk being persuaded by them, and they recognize that they don’t actually understand things well enough for it to matter. The response to a flat earth argument is “Haha! What a silly argument!”, but when you press them on it, they can’t actually tell you what’s wrong with it. They might think they can, but if pressed it falls apart.
This is more subtle than the “guessing the teachers password” problem, because it’s not like the words have no meaning to them. People grasp what a ball is, and how it differs from a flat disk. People recognize bas things like “If you keep going long enough in the same direction, you’ll end up back where you started instead of falling off”. It’s just that the reasoning required to figure out which is true isn’t something they really understand. In order to reason about what it implies when things disappear over the horizon, you have to contend with atmospheric lensing effects, for example.
In a case like that, you actually have to lean on social networks. Reasoning well in such circumstances has to do with how well and how honestly you’re tracking what is convincing you and why.
There’s an important and underappreciated point here, but it’s not quite right.
Conspiracy theorists come up with crazy theories, but they usually aren’t so crazy that average people can see for themselves where the errors are. You can have flat earthers debate round earthers and actually make better points, because your average round earther doesn’t know how to deduce the roundness themselves and is essentially just taking people’s word for it. For the round earther to say “Hm. I can’t see any problem with your argument” and then to be convinced would be an error. Their bias towards conformity is an active piece of how they avoid reaching false conclusions here.
However I don’t think any of the round earthers in those debates would say that the flat earthers were convincing, because they were never charitable enough to those arguments for it to sound reasonable to them and the opposing arguments never felt strong relative to the force of conformity. “Don’t change your beliefs” doesn’t just protect against being persuaded by flat earthers as a round earther, it protects from being persuaded by round earthers as a flat earther, and being persuaded that you don’t have a boyfriend anymore after he dumped you. If something *actually* seems convincing to you, that’s worth paying attention to.
The defense here isn’t to ignore evidence, it’s to recognize that it isn’t evidence. When you’ve fallen for three or four scams, and you pay attention to the fact that these kinds of things haven’t been panning out, they actually get less convincing. Like how most people just don’t find flat earth arguments convincing even if they can’t find the flaw themselves (“Yeah, but you could make up arguments of that quality about anything”).
This presupposes that you are not giving the experts the respect they deserve. It’s certainly possible to err on this side, but people err on the other side all the time too. “Expert class is biased or otherwise unsuitable for deference” isn’t a small exception, and your later point “most of the views you hear aren’t independent at all” further supports this.
The goal is to take expert opinion, and your own ability to reason on the object level, for what they’re worth. No more, no less.
Any advice to simply trust one or the other is going to be wrong in many important cases.
Don’t take ideas any more seriously than you can take your own ability to reason, and don’t ignore your own inability to reason. If you can’t trust your own ability to reason, don’t take seriously the idea that any given idea is wrong either. Humility is important.
I note one of my problems with “trust the experts” style thinking, is a guessing the teacher’s password problem.
If the arguments for flat earth and round earth sound equally intuitive and persuasive to you, you probably don’t actually understand either theory. Sure, you can say “round earth correct”, and you can get social approval for saying correct beliefs, but you’re not actually believing anything more correct than “this group I like approves of these words.”
It’s not that flat earth arguments sound equally persuasive to people (they don’t). It’s that the reason they don’t sound persuasive is that “this group they like” says not to take the arguments seriously enough to risk being persuaded by them, and they recognize that they don’t actually understand things well enough for it to matter. The response to a flat earth argument is “Haha! What a silly argument!”, but when you press them on it, they can’t actually tell you what’s wrong with it. They might think they can, but if pressed it falls apart.
This is more subtle than the “guessing the teachers password” problem, because it’s not like the words have no meaning to them. People grasp what a ball is, and how it differs from a flat disk. People recognize bas things like “If you keep going long enough in the same direction, you’ll end up back where you started instead of falling off”. It’s just that the reasoning required to figure out which is true isn’t something they really understand. In order to reason about what it implies when things disappear over the horizon, you have to contend with atmospheric lensing effects, for example.
In a case like that, you actually have to lean on social networks. Reasoning well in such circumstances has to do with how well and how honestly you’re tracking what is convincing you and why.