Draco seemed far too easily convinced by the evidence that the decline in magic wasn’t caused by muggle interbreeding, especially since the largest piece of evidence presented was based on muggle knowledge of genetics that Draco was nearly completely ignorant of. You’re not going to be convinced that everything you know is wrong just because an 11-year old tells you that a bunch of allegedly smart people figured out some things which conflict with what you know, in the judgment of said 11-year-old.
At the beginning of Chapter 25, Eliezer writes about the evidence that convinced Draco:
everything Harry presents as strong evidence is in fact strong evidence—the other possibilities are improbable
This is true… but only from Harry’s perspective. Harry assigns extremely high confidence to everything that muggle geneticists have figured out, and also believes that he understands the theory well enough to have high confidence in the predictions he makes using that theory. For Draco to find the same evidence equally convincing, he would also have to assign high confidence to the theory that Harry claims muggle geneticists figured out, and high confidence to Harry’s ability to use the theory correctly to make predictions.
I am probably modeling Draco as way more Bayesian than he actually is in this analysis. But my interactions with individuals with other strongly held beliefs also lead to the same conclusion, that Draco should have resisted more.
Issues of how I think Draco would have acted aside, I would have liked to see more interaction between the two of them on this question, more investigations. Maybe Draco would want to perform some of the experiments testing Granger’s parentage that Harry suggested, rather than immediately predicting the same results as Harry would have? I would have enjoyed seeing more of how a budding experimentalist copes when confronted with not just one but a series of experimental results leading inexorably to a chilling (to Draco) conclusion.
Draco seemed far too easily convinced by the evidence that the decline in magic wasn’t caused by muggle interbreeding, especially since the largest piece of evidence presented was based on muggle knowledge of genetics that Draco was nearly completely ignorant of. You’re not going to be convinced that everything you know is wrong just because an 11-year old tells you that a bunch of allegedly smart people figured out some things which conflict with what you know, in the judgment of said 11-year-old.
At the beginning of Chapter 25, Eliezer writes about the evidence that convinced Draco:
This is true… but only from Harry’s perspective. Harry assigns extremely high confidence to everything that muggle geneticists have figured out, and also believes that he understands the theory well enough to have high confidence in the predictions he makes using that theory. For Draco to find the same evidence equally convincing, he would also have to assign high confidence to the theory that Harry claims muggle geneticists figured out, and high confidence to Harry’s ability to use the theory correctly to make predictions.
I am probably modeling Draco as way more Bayesian than he actually is in this analysis. But my interactions with individuals with other strongly held beliefs also lead to the same conclusion, that Draco should have resisted more.
Issues of how I think Draco would have acted aside, I would have liked to see more interaction between the two of them on this question, more investigations. Maybe Draco would want to perform some of the experiments testing Granger’s parentage that Harry suggested, rather than immediately predicting the same results as Harry would have? I would have enjoyed seeing more of how a budding experimentalist copes when confronted with not just one but a series of experimental results leading inexorably to a chilling (to Draco) conclusion.
My experience with confronting fellow Christians with scientific evidence is for them to bog us down into discussions about the validity of science.