I see lots of ways for Russell’s proposal to fail in practice. Whose evidence? If he is suggesting confining yourself to evidence that you have gathered in person, he is proposing an unreasonably tight confinement that will certainly make the world worse. For example running your own double-blind trial of a drug requires that you trust your collaborators, so most of medicine is off limits to those who want evidence that they have seen with their own eyes.
Granting trust in your close associates doesn’t get you very far. You are still going to have to read the B.M.J. and trust “evidence” from people that you have never met and against whom you have no prospect of redress.
Right from the start we must read Russell as asking us to get into the habit of basing convictions upon third-party evidence. How then are we to grant only that degree of certainty which the evidence warrants? It is not our evidence. We didn’t gather it in person. Clearly it is not just evidence that it at issue but also trust. Who do we trust and why?
I started with a legal perspective; what kind of custody chain conveys remote events to us? Turning to an accounting text book, the key words are relevance and reliability. There is a terrible tension between them. Two examples.
One argument in favour of the 2nd Amendment of the US constitution is that governments go bad and massacre their own citizens. One can read the history of the twentieth century as the story of governments disarming their citizens and then ruling badly; unconstrained, since they need no longer fear revolt. Is this a good argument? It is a coarse grained argument, based on rare events of huge importance. Rare events mired in their own detail and circumstance. There is a strong temptation to look finer grained aspects of the issue. The use of fire arms in ordinary criminal murders is common enough and random enough to permit the deployment of the statistical tools of social science. Many prefer to discuss the issue in terms of guns and murder rates. Looking at events that happen every day instead of looking at events that happen every century gives us reliability, but what price have we paid in relevance?
Meditation involves noticing what your mind is up to. One claims that one is studying the mind. The relevance of the thoughts going through your mind to the thoughts going through your mind is 100%. Excellent! But wait! You are studying introspection. That is only a tiny part of the life of the mind. If you generalise to the mind in toto what becomes of reliability? Is there any reliability left at all?
I hope my two examples don’t distract from my broader point. An emphasis on evidence usually results in prioritising reliability over relevance. A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, if it became general, would lead us to take decisions based on irrelevant considerations about which we were certain.
I see lots of ways for Russell’s proposal to fail in practice. Whose evidence? If he is suggesting confining yourself to evidence that you have gathered in person, he is proposing an unreasonably tight confinement that will certainly make the world worse. For example running your own double-blind trial of a drug requires that you trust your collaborators, so most of medicine is off limits to those who want evidence that they have seen with their own eyes.
Granting trust in your close associates doesn’t get you very far. You are still going to have to read the B.M.J. and trust “evidence” from people that you have never met and against whom you have no prospect of redress.
Right from the start we must read Russell as asking us to get into the habit of basing convictions upon third-party evidence. How then are we to grant only that degree of certainty which the evidence warrants? It is not our evidence. We didn’t gather it in person. Clearly it is not just evidence that it at issue but also trust. Who do we trust and why?
I started with a legal perspective; what kind of custody chain conveys remote events to us? Turning to an accounting text book, the key words are relevance and reliability. There is a terrible tension between them. Two examples.
One argument in favour of the 2nd Amendment of the US constitution is that governments go bad and massacre their own citizens. One can read the history of the twentieth century as the story of governments disarming their citizens and then ruling badly; unconstrained, since they need no longer fear revolt. Is this a good argument? It is a coarse grained argument, based on rare events of huge importance. Rare events mired in their own detail and circumstance. There is a strong temptation to look finer grained aspects of the issue. The use of fire arms in ordinary criminal murders is common enough and random enough to permit the deployment of the statistical tools of social science. Many prefer to discuss the issue in terms of guns and murder rates. Looking at events that happen every day instead of looking at events that happen every century gives us reliability, but what price have we paid in relevance?
Meditation involves noticing what your mind is up to. One claims that one is studying the mind. The relevance of the thoughts going through your mind to the thoughts going through your mind is 100%. Excellent! But wait! You are studying introspection. That is only a tiny part of the life of the mind. If you generalise to the mind in toto what becomes of reliability? Is there any reliability left at all?
I hope my two examples don’t distract from my broader point. An emphasis on evidence usually results in prioritising reliability over relevance. A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, if it became general, would lead us to take decisions based on irrelevant considerations about which we were certain.