A “softer” version of this problem arises when people agree that they don’t know if their reasoning is rational, either because they didn’t seek any evidence or didn’t try to come up with any arguments refuting their reasoning or models, or because they don’t know how to know if their theory is true or false
Can you demonstrate that you don’t have the same problem?
The problem is always relative (depends on the amount of energy you are willing to invest in improving your models, and thus the expected information gain and pragmatic value increases from these improvements), and, anyway, demonstrating that I don’t have a problem is not Popperian. Per Popper’s epistemology, only the existence of a problem could be demonstrated, not the absence of it.
The particular passage that you have cited concerns more with the cases when people conjecture some theories or simply make up their minds on some topic (though, per Deutsch, the latter is a special case of the former), without any explicit epistemology in mind, or with an explicit epistemic methodology which nevertheless resembles a cargo cult rather than a rational, criticised stance, as captured in the title of Feynman’s essay. Thus, the problem arises when people dismiss pointers towards the fact that their epistemology is “intuitive” or severely out of date, and suggested to base their further research/conjecturing/opinion-making on better epistemology, even if the theory in question (opinions) happens to be uncriticisable yet.
In this context, I try to follow Popperianism and Bayesianism, i. e., some explicit epistemology. I know there are some formal problems in connecting these two theories, but they don’t seem important (valuable) to me enough to study cutting-edge research on this topic, let alone conduct it myself. I know at least one leading world scientist, Sean Carroll, who advocates for the same combo. Thus, all the available evidence leaves me pretty comfortable with the epistemological framework that I currently use and not actively look for problems with it, however, if these problems (or better theories) reach my attention (e. g., via people pointing me to them) and they seem compelling, I will likely invest some effort into researching these problems or theories.
Can you demonstrate that you don’t have the same problem?
The problem is always relative (depends on the amount of energy you are willing to invest in improving your models, and thus the expected information gain and pragmatic value increases from these improvements), and, anyway, demonstrating that I don’t have a problem is not Popperian. Per Popper’s epistemology, only the existence of a problem could be demonstrated, not the absence of it.
The particular passage that you have cited concerns more with the cases when people conjecture some theories or simply make up their minds on some topic (though, per Deutsch, the latter is a special case of the former), without any explicit epistemology in mind, or with an explicit epistemic methodology which nevertheless resembles a cargo cult rather than a rational, criticised stance, as captured in the title of Feynman’s essay. Thus, the problem arises when people dismiss pointers towards the fact that their epistemology is “intuitive” or severely out of date, and suggested to base their further research/conjecturing/opinion-making on better epistemology, even if the theory in question (opinions) happens to be uncriticisable yet.
In this context, I try to follow Popperianism and Bayesianism, i. e., some explicit epistemology. I know there are some formal problems in connecting these two theories, but they don’t seem important (valuable) to me enough to study cutting-edge research on this topic, let alone conduct it myself. I know at least one leading world scientist, Sean Carroll, who advocates for the same combo. Thus, all the available evidence leaves me pretty comfortable with the epistemological framework that I currently use and not actively look for problems with it, however, if these problems (or better theories) reach my attention (e. g., via people pointing me to them) and they seem compelling, I will likely invest some effort into researching these problems or theories.