The thing is, no one ever presents the actual strongest version of an argument. Their actions are never the best possible, except briefly, accidentally, and in extremely limited circumstances. I can probably remember how to play an ideal version of the tic-tac-toe strategy that’s the reason only children play it, but any game more complicated than that and my play will be subpar. Games are much smaller and simpler things than arguments. Simply noticing that an argument isn’t the best it could is a you thing, because it is always true. Basically no one is a specialist in whatever the perfect argument turns out to be, (and people who are will often be wrong). Saying that a correct argument that significantly changes likelihoods isn’t real evidence because it could be stronger allows you to always stick with your current beliefs.
Also, if I was a juror, I would like to hear that the accused was overheard telling his buddy that he was out of town the night before, having taken a trip to the city where the murder he is accused of happened. Even though just being one person in that city is an incredibly weak piece of evidence, and it is even weaker for being someone uninvolved in the conversation saying it, it is still valuable to include. (And indeed, such admissions are not considered hearsay in court, even though they clearly are.) There are often cases where the strongest argument alone is not enough, but the weight of all arguments clearly is.
That type of reporting of statements is not considered hearsay because it is directly observed evidence about the defendant, made under oath. It is not treated as evidence that the defendant was in that other city, but as evidence that they said they were. It can be used to challenge the trustworthiness of the defendant’s later statements saying that they weren’t, for example. The witness can be cross-examined to find flaws in their testimony, other witnesses to the conversation can be brought in, and so on.
Hearsay is about things that are reported to the witness. If Alice testifies that Bob said he saw the defendant in the other city, the court could in principle investigate the fact of whether Bob actually said that, but that would be irrelevant. Bob is not on trial, was not under oath, cannot be cross-examined, and so on.
I am aware of the excuses used to define it as not hearsay, even though it is clearly the same as all other cases of such. Society simply believes it is a valuable enough scenario that it should be included, even though it is still weak evidence.
Whether something is hearsay is relative to the proposition in question.
When Charlie testifies that Bob said that he saw Alice at the club, that’s hearsay when trying to establish whether Alice was at the club, or was alive at all, or any other facts about Alice. Charlie is not conveying any direct knowledge about Alice.
It is not hearsay in establishing many facts about Bob at the time of the conversation. E.g. where Bob was at the time of the conversation, whether he was acquainted with Alice, or many other such propositions. It also conveys facts about Charlie. Charlie’s statement conveys direct knowledge of many facts about the conversation that are not dependent upon the veracity of Bob’s statements, and are therefore not hearsay in relation to them.
It depends upon how strong the argument actually is compared with how strong you would expect it to be if the conclusion were true. It doesn’t have to be a perfect argument, but if you have a high prior for the person making the argument to be competent at making arguments (as you would for a trial lawyer, for example) then your expected strength may be quite high and a failure to meet it may be valid evidence toward the conclusion being false.
If the person making the argument is a random layperson and you expected them to present a zero-knowledge cryptographic protocol in support, then your model of the world is poorly calibrated. A bad world model can indeed result in wrong conclusions, and that together with bounded rationality (such as failure to apply an update to your world model as well as the target hypothesis) can mean being stuck in bad equilibria. That’s not great, and it would be nice to have a model for bounded rationality that does guarantee converging toward truth, but we don’t.
The examples used don’t really seem to fit with that though. Blind signatures are things many/most people haven’t heard of, and not how things are done; I freely admit I had never heard of them before the example. Your HR department probably shouldn’t be expected to be aware of all the various things they could do, as they are ordinary people. Even if they knew what blind signatures were, that doesn’t mean it is obvious they should use them, or how to do so even if they thought they should (which you admit). After reading the Wikipedia article, that doesn’t seem like an ordinary level of precaution for surveys. (Maybe it should be, but then you need to make that argument, so it isn’t a good example for this purpose, in my opinion.)
I also don’t blame you for not just trusting the word of the HR department that it is anonymous. But fundamentally speaking, wouldn’t you (probably) only have their word that they were using Chaumian blind signatures anyway? You probably wouldn’t be implementing the solution personally, so you’d have to trust someone on that score. Even if you did, then the others would probably just have to trust you then. The HR department could be much sneakier about connecting your session to your identity (which they would obviously claim is necessary to prevent multiple voting), but would that be better? It wouldn’t make their claim that you will be kept anonymous any more trustworthy.
Technically, you have to trust that the math is as people say it is even if you do it yourself. And the operating system. And the compiler. Even with physical processes, you have to count on things like them not having strategically placed cameras (and that they won’t violate the physical integrity of the process.).
Math is not a true replacement for trust. There is no method to avoid having to trust people (that’s even vaguely worth considering). You just have to hope to pick well, and hopefully sway things to be a bit more trustworthy.
Interestingly, you admit that in your reply, but it doesn’t seem to have the effect it seems like it should.
A better example to match your points could be fans of a sports team. They pay a lot of attention to their team, and should be experts in a sense. When asked how good their team is, they will usually say the best (or the worst). When asked why, they usually have arguments that technically should be considered noticeably significant evidence in that direction, but are vastly weaker than they should be able to come up if it were true. Which is obvious, since there are far more teams said to be the best (or worst) than could actually be the case. In that circumstance, you should be fairly demanding of the evidence.
In other situations though, it seems like a standard that is really easy to have be much stronger against positions you don’t like than ones you do, and you likely wouldn’t even notice. It is hard to hold arguments you disdain to the same standards as ones you like, even if you are putting in a lot of effort to do so, though in some people it is actually reversed in direction, as they worry too much.
If the cryptography example is too distracting, we could instead imagine a non-cryptographic means to the same end, e.g. printing the surveys on leaflets which the employees stuff into envelopes and drop into a raffle tumbler.
The point remains, however, because (just as with the blinded signatures) this method of conducting a survey is very much outside-the-norm, and it would be a drastic world-modeling failure to assume that the HR department actually considered the raffle-tumbler method but decided against it because they secretly do want to deanonymize the surveys. Much more likely is that they simply never considered the option.
But if employees did start adopting the rule “don’t trust the anonymity of surveys that aren’t conducted via raffle tumbler”, even though this is epistemically irrational at first, it would eventually compel HR departments to start using the tumbler method, whereupon the odd surveys that still are being conducted by email will stick out, and it would now be rational to mistrust them. In short, the Adversarial Argument is “irrational” but creates the conditions for its own rationality, which is why I describe it as an “acausal negotiation tactic”.
That sort of strategy only works if you can get everyone to coordinate around it, and if you can do that, you could probably just get them to coordinate on doing the right things. I don’t know if HR would listen to you if you brought your concerns directly to them, but they probably aren’t harder to persuade on that sort of thing than convincing the rest of your fellows to defy HR. (Which is just a guess.) In cases where you can’t get others to coordinate on it, you are just defecting against the group, to your own personal loss. This doesn’t seem like a good strategy.
In more limited settings, you might be able to convince your friends to debate things in your preferred style, though this depends on them in particular. As a boss, you might be able to set up a culture where people are expected to make strong arguments in formal settings. Beyond these, I don’t really think it is practical. (They don’t generalize -for instance, as a parent, your child will be incapable of making strong arguments for an extremely long time.)
The thing is, no one ever presents the actual strongest version of an argument. Their actions are never the best possible, except briefly, accidentally, and in extremely limited circumstances. I can probably remember how to play an ideal version of the tic-tac-toe strategy that’s the reason only children play it, but any game more complicated than that and my play will be subpar. Games are much smaller and simpler things than arguments. Simply noticing that an argument isn’t the best it could is a you thing, because it is always true. Basically no one is a specialist in whatever the perfect argument turns out to be, (and people who are will often be wrong). Saying that a correct argument that significantly changes likelihoods isn’t real evidence because it could be stronger allows you to always stick with your current beliefs.
Also, if I was a juror, I would like to hear that the accused was overheard telling his buddy that he was out of town the night before, having taken a trip to the city where the murder he is accused of happened. Even though just being one person in that city is an incredibly weak piece of evidence, and it is even weaker for being someone uninvolved in the conversation saying it, it is still valuable to include. (And indeed, such admissions are not considered hearsay in court, even though they clearly are.) There are often cases where the strongest argument alone is not enough, but the weight of all arguments clearly is.
That type of reporting of statements is not considered hearsay because it is directly observed evidence about the defendant, made under oath. It is not treated as evidence that the defendant was in that other city, but as evidence that they said they were. It can be used to challenge the trustworthiness of the defendant’s later statements saying that they weren’t, for example. The witness can be cross-examined to find flaws in their testimony, other witnesses to the conversation can be brought in, and so on.
Hearsay is about things that are reported to the witness. If Alice testifies that Bob said he saw the defendant in the other city, the court could in principle investigate the fact of whether Bob actually said that, but that would be irrelevant. Bob is not on trial, was not under oath, cannot be cross-examined, and so on.
I am aware of the excuses used to define it as not hearsay, even though it is clearly the same as all other cases of such. Society simply believes it is a valuable enough scenario that it should be included, even though it is still weak evidence.
Whether something is hearsay is relative to the proposition in question.
When Charlie testifies that Bob said that he saw Alice at the club, that’s hearsay when trying to establish whether Alice was at the club, or was alive at all, or any other facts about Alice. Charlie is not conveying any direct knowledge about Alice.
It is not hearsay in establishing many facts about Bob at the time of the conversation. E.g. where Bob was at the time of the conversation, whether he was acquainted with Alice, or many other such propositions. It also conveys facts about Charlie. Charlie’s statement conveys direct knowledge of many facts about the conversation that are not dependent upon the veracity of Bob’s statements, and are therefore not hearsay in relation to them.
It depends upon how strong the argument actually is compared with how strong you would expect it to be if the conclusion were true. It doesn’t have to be a perfect argument, but if you have a high prior for the person making the argument to be competent at making arguments (as you would for a trial lawyer, for example) then your expected strength may be quite high and a failure to meet it may be valid evidence toward the conclusion being false.
If the person making the argument is a random layperson and you expected them to present a zero-knowledge cryptographic protocol in support, then your model of the world is poorly calibrated. A bad world model can indeed result in wrong conclusions, and that together with bounded rationality (such as failure to apply an update to your world model as well as the target hypothesis) can mean being stuck in bad equilibria. That’s not great, and it would be nice to have a model for bounded rationality that does guarantee converging toward truth, but we don’t.
The examples used don’t really seem to fit with that though. Blind signatures are things many/most people haven’t heard of, and not how things are done; I freely admit I had never heard of them before the example. Your HR department probably shouldn’t be expected to be aware of all the various things they could do, as they are ordinary people. Even if they knew what blind signatures were, that doesn’t mean it is obvious they should use them, or how to do so even if they thought they should (which you admit). After reading the Wikipedia article, that doesn’t seem like an ordinary level of precaution for surveys. (Maybe it should be, but then you need to make that argument, so it isn’t a good example for this purpose, in my opinion.)
I also don’t blame you for not just trusting the word of the HR department that it is anonymous. But fundamentally speaking, wouldn’t you (probably) only have their word that they were using Chaumian blind signatures anyway? You probably wouldn’t be implementing the solution personally, so you’d have to trust someone on that score. Even if you did, then the others would probably just have to trust you then. The HR department could be much sneakier about connecting your session to your identity (which they would obviously claim is necessary to prevent multiple voting), but would that be better? It wouldn’t make their claim that you will be kept anonymous any more trustworthy.
Technically, you have to trust that the math is as people say it is even if you do it yourself. And the operating system. And the compiler. Even with physical processes, you have to count on things like them not having strategically placed cameras (and that they won’t violate the physical integrity of the process.).
Math is not a true replacement for trust. There is no method to avoid having to trust people (that’s even vaguely worth considering). You just have to hope to pick well, and hopefully sway things to be a bit more trustworthy.
Interestingly, you admit that in your reply, but it doesn’t seem to have the effect it seems like it should.
A better example to match your points could be fans of a sports team. They pay a lot of attention to their team, and should be experts in a sense. When asked how good their team is, they will usually say the best (or the worst). When asked why, they usually have arguments that technically should be considered noticeably significant evidence in that direction, but are vastly weaker than they should be able to come up if it were true. Which is obvious, since there are far more teams said to be the best (or worst) than could actually be the case. In that circumstance, you should be fairly demanding of the evidence.
In other situations though, it seems like a standard that is really easy to have be much stronger against positions you don’t like than ones you do, and you likely wouldn’t even notice. It is hard to hold arguments you disdain to the same standards as ones you like, even if you are putting in a lot of effort to do so, though in some people it is actually reversed in direction, as they worry too much.
If the cryptography example is too distracting, we could instead imagine a non-cryptographic means to the same end, e.g. printing the surveys on leaflets which the employees stuff into envelopes and drop into a raffle tumbler.
The point remains, however, because (just as with the blinded signatures) this method of conducting a survey is very much outside-the-norm, and it would be a drastic world-modeling failure to assume that the HR department actually considered the raffle-tumbler method but decided against it because they secretly do want to deanonymize the surveys. Much more likely is that they simply never considered the option.
But if employees did start adopting the rule “don’t trust the anonymity of surveys that aren’t conducted via raffle tumbler”, even though this is epistemically irrational at first, it would eventually compel HR departments to start using the tumbler method, whereupon the odd surveys that still are being conducted by email will stick out, and it would now be rational to mistrust them. In short, the Adversarial Argument is “irrational” but creates the conditions for its own rationality, which is why I describe it as an “acausal negotiation tactic”.
That sort of strategy only works if you can get everyone to coordinate around it, and if you can do that, you could probably just get them to coordinate on doing the right things. I don’t know if HR would listen to you if you brought your concerns directly to them, but they probably aren’t harder to persuade on that sort of thing than convincing the rest of your fellows to defy HR. (Which is just a guess.) In cases where you can’t get others to coordinate on it, you are just defecting against the group, to your own personal loss. This doesn’t seem like a good strategy.
In more limited settings, you might be able to convince your friends to debate things in your preferred style, though this depends on them in particular. As a boss, you might be able to set up a culture where people are expected to make strong arguments in formal settings. Beyond these, I don’t really think it is practical. (They don’t generalize -for instance, as a parent, your child will be incapable of making strong arguments for an extremely long time.)