For oneself, caring about reasoning and correct predictions is well worthwhile. And it requires some acknowledgement that your beliefs are private, and that they are separate from your public claims. Forgetting that this applies to others as well as yourself seems a bit strange.
I may be a bit too far on the cynicism scale, but I start with the assumption that informal predictions are both oversimplified to fit the claimant’s model of their audience, and adjusted in direction (from the true belief) to have a bigger impact on their audience.
That is, I think most public predictions are of the form “you should have a higher credence in X than you seem to”, but for greater impact STATED as “you should believe X”.
For oneself, caring about reasoning and correct predictions is well worthwhile. And it requires some acknowledgement that your beliefs are private, and that they are separate from your public claims. Forgetting that this applies to others as well as yourself seems a bit strange.
I may be a bit too far on the cynicism scale, but I start with the assumption that informal predictions are both oversimplified to fit the claimant’s model of their audience, and adjusted in direction (from the true belief) to have a bigger impact on their audience.
That is, I think most public predictions are of the form “you should have a higher credence in X than you seem to”, but for greater impact STATED as “you should believe X”.