I’d think the Gish mindset isn’t limited to people like your dad. I’d think that rationalists are vulnerable to it as well in any complex domain. It’s not like we’re doing literal bayesian updates or closed form proofs for our actually important beliefs like how hard alignment is or what methods are promising. In those areas no argument is totally closed, so weighing preponderance of decent arguments is about all we can do. So I’d say we’re all vulnerable to the Gish Fallacy to an important degree. And therefore the implicit Motte-And-Bailey fallacy.
l
Well, yeah, it bothers me that the “bayesian” part of rationalism doesn’t seem very bayesian―otherwise we’d be having a lot of discussions about where priors come from, how to best accomplish the necessary mental arithmetic, how to go about counting evidence and dealing with ambiguous counts (if my friends Alice and Bob both tell me X, it could be two pieces of evidence for X or just one depending on what generated the claims; how should I count evidence by default, and are there things I should be doing to find the underlying evidence?)
So―vulnerable in the current culture, but rationalists should strive to be the opposite of the “gishy” dark-epistemic people I have on my mind. Having many reasons to think X isn’t necessarily a sin, but dark-epistemic people gather many reasons and have many sins, which are a good guide of what not to do.
Excellent point.
I’d think the Gish mindset isn’t limited to people like your dad. I’d think that rationalists are vulnerable to it as well in any complex domain. It’s not like we’re doing literal bayesian updates or closed form proofs for our actually important beliefs like how hard alignment is or what methods are promising. In those areas no argument is totally closed, so weighing preponderance of decent arguments is about all we can do. So I’d say we’re all vulnerable to the Gish Fallacy to an important degree. And therefore the implicit Motte-And-Bailey fallacy. l
Well, yeah, it bothers me that the “bayesian” part of rationalism doesn’t seem very bayesian―otherwise we’d be having a lot of discussions about where priors come from, how to best accomplish the necessary mental arithmetic, how to go about counting evidence and dealing with ambiguous counts (if my friends Alice and Bob both tell me X, it could be two pieces of evidence for X or just one depending on what generated the claims; how should I count evidence by default, and are there things I should be doing to find the underlying evidence?)
So―vulnerable in the current culture, but rationalists should strive to be the opposite of the “gishy” dark-epistemic people I have on my mind. Having many reasons to think X isn’t necessarily a sin, but dark-epistemic people gather many reasons and have many sins, which are a good guide of what not to do.