Given that someone is being a clever arguer, the evidence of their argument may be taken to be evidence about the conclusion relative to what you might have expected they could come up with.
If a “clever arguer” says “Ten witnesses, named [...], all report seeing Bob murder Joe, and there are also multiple security cameras that caught it”, then that’s pretty damn strong evidence (assuming one follows up with the witnesses and gets the footage).
If a “clever arguer” says “Bob once got into a fight in middle school, so we see he has violent tendencies”, and that’s the best he managed to come up with, then it probably makes sense to update away from the conclusion that Bob murdered Joe.
Zvi has written about things of this ilk, vaguely connected to “bounded distrust”. I’ll see if I can find a link… Ok, this is a decent example of the general principle, although the counterparty isn’t a “clever arguer”:
Then we need to consider what we saw relative to what we expected to see. In general, no news is good news. If ‘nothing happens’ regarding Omicron, that continuously makes us less worried, whereas most news will make us more worried. Getting a constant string of bad news is expected, but how much of it did we get, how fast and how bad?
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The person linking to this [“Gauteng hospitalizations” going up rapidly] thought it was bad news, but given the rate at which cases are increasing, it looks to me like good news. Not easy to interpret, but the hospitalization rate per infection is what matters here. Note also that positive test rate is now >20%, which means a higher percentage of cases are being missed than before.
Given that someone is being a clever arguer, the evidence of their argument may be taken to be evidence about the conclusion relative to what you might have expected they could come up with.
If a “clever arguer” says “Ten witnesses, named [...], all report seeing Bob murder Joe, and there are also multiple security cameras that caught it”, then that’s pretty damn strong evidence (assuming one follows up with the witnesses and gets the footage).
If a “clever arguer” says “Bob once got into a fight in middle school, so we see he has violent tendencies”, and that’s the best he managed to come up with, then it probably makes sense to update away from the conclusion that Bob murdered Joe.
Zvi has written about things of this ilk, vaguely connected to “bounded distrust”. I’ll see if I can find a link… Ok, this is a decent example of the general principle, although the counterparty isn’t a “clever arguer”: