This doesn’t seem to be what I or the people I regularly interact with do… I wish people would give some examples or link to conversations where this is happening.
My own silly counter-model is that people take the sum, but the later terms of the sum only get added if the running total stays above some level of plausibility. This accounts for idea inoculation (where people stop listening to arguments for something because they have already heard of an absurd version of the idea). It also explains the effect Ronny mentions about how “you may very quickly find that everyone perceives the anti-T-ers as being much more reasonable”: people stopped listening to the popular-and-low-quality arguments in favor of T.
I’ve noticed it happening a bunch in conversations about timelines. People ask me why my timelines are ‘short’ and I start rattling off reasons, typically in order from most to least important, and then often I’ve got the distinct impression that I would have been more persuasive if I had just given the two most important reasons instead of proceeding down the list. As soon as I say something somewhat dubious, people pounce, and make the whole discussion about that, and then if I can’t convince them on that point they reject the whole set of arguments. Sometimes this can be easily explained by motivated cognition. But it’s happened often enough with people who seem fairly friendly & unbiased & curious (as opposed to skeptical) that I don’t think that’s the only thing that’s going on. I think Ronny’s explanation is what’s going on in those cases.
I think it’s often easiest/most tempting to comment specifically on a sketchy thing that someone says instead of being like “I basically agree with you based on your strongest arguments” and leaving it at that (because the latter doesn’t seem like it’s adding any value). (I think there’s been quite a bit of discussion about the psychology of nitpicking, which is similar to but distinct from the behavior you mention, though I can’t find a good link right now.) Of course it would be better to give both one’s overall epistemic state plus any specific counter-arguments one thought of, but I only see a few people doing this sort of thing consistently. That would be my guess as to what’s going on in the situations you mention (like, I could imagine myself behaving like the people you mention, but it wouldn’t be because I’m taking averages, it would be because I’m responding to whatever I happen to have the most thoughts on). But you have a lot more information about those situations so I could be totally off-base.
Yeah idk, what you say makes sense too. But in at least some cases it seemed like the takeaway they had at the end of the conversation, their overall update or views on timelines, was generated by averaging the plausibility of the various arguments rather than by summing them or doing something more complex.
(And to be clear I’m not complaining that this is unreasonable! For reasons Ronny and others have mentioned, sometimes this is a good heuristic to follow.)
This doesn’t seem to be what I or the people I regularly interact with do… I wish people would give some examples or link to conversations where this is happening.
My own silly counter-model is that people take the sum, but the later terms of the sum only get added if the running total stays above some level of plausibility. This accounts for idea inoculation (where people stop listening to arguments for something because they have already heard of an absurd version of the idea). It also explains the effect Ronny mentions about how “you may very quickly find that everyone perceives the anti-T-ers as being much more reasonable”: people stopped listening to the popular-and-low-quality arguments in favor of T.
I’ve noticed it happening a bunch in conversations about timelines. People ask me why my timelines are ‘short’ and I start rattling off reasons, typically in order from most to least important, and then often I’ve got the distinct impression that I would have been more persuasive if I had just given the two most important reasons instead of proceeding down the list. As soon as I say something somewhat dubious, people pounce, and make the whole discussion about that, and then if I can’t convince them on that point they reject the whole set of arguments. Sometimes this can be easily explained by motivated cognition. But it’s happened often enough with people who seem fairly friendly & unbiased & curious (as opposed to skeptical) that I don’t think that’s the only thing that’s going on. I think Ronny’s explanation is what’s going on in those cases.
I think it’s often easiest/most tempting to comment specifically on a sketchy thing that someone says instead of being like “I basically agree with you based on your strongest arguments” and leaving it at that (because the latter doesn’t seem like it’s adding any value). (I think there’s been quite a bit of discussion about the psychology of nitpicking, which is similar to but distinct from the behavior you mention, though I can’t find a good link right now.) Of course it would be better to give both one’s overall epistemic state plus any specific counter-arguments one thought of, but I only see a few people doing this sort of thing consistently. That would be my guess as to what’s going on in the situations you mention (like, I could imagine myself behaving like the people you mention, but it wouldn’t be because I’m taking averages, it would be because I’m responding to whatever I happen to have the most thoughts on). But you have a lot more information about those situations so I could be totally off-base.
Yeah idk, what you say makes sense too. But in at least some cases it seemed like the takeaway they had at the end of the conversation, their overall update or views on timelines, was generated by averaging the plausibility of the various arguments rather than by summing them or doing something more complex.
(And to be clear I’m not complaining that this is unreasonable! For reasons Ronny and others have mentioned, sometimes this is a good heuristic to follow.)