Ok, so it sounds like a crux for you is that Ben in fact had high confidence in what he was relaying from Alice being true. In a dispute like this I don’t think you can do very good due diligence when avoiding the people who are most likely to have counter-evidence; even if it is well-intentioned, it’s a sort of conscious confirmation bias. Ben sort of admits to using poor epistemics in his disclaimer (at the top of his original post) about how to update from reading his post, but doesn’t seem to update much on this himself (?), which seems like an error to me particularly when the stakes are this high. Perhaps it’s unnecessary, but I will also point out that deliberately using poor epistemics feels pretty contrary to the spirit of rationality, which for good reason has fought for truth and against poor epistemics.
(I further argue against the premise of the disclaimer and Ben posting without hearing both sides here).
Ok, so it sounds like a crux for you is that Ben in fact had high confidence in what he was relaying from Alice being true. In a dispute like this I don’t think you can do very good due diligence when avoiding the people who are most likely to have counter-evidence; even if it is well-intentioned, it’s a sort of conscious confirmation bias. Ben sort of admits to using poor epistemics in his disclaimer (at the top of his original post) about how to update from reading his post, but doesn’t seem to update much on this himself (?), which seems like an error to me particularly when the stakes are this high. Perhaps it’s unnecessary, but I will also point out that deliberately using poor epistemics feels pretty contrary to the spirit of rationality, which for good reason has fought for truth and against poor epistemics.
(I further argue against the premise of the disclaimer and Ben posting without hearing both sides here).