Whether you change beliefs in response to a new case will depend on the nature of the selection or sampling process . If you go through a history of quack medicine, you’d get lots of new case-studies but you might not change your beliefs about typical human epistemic performance at all.
Even if new cases are selected to be examples of human stupidity, they might still be roughly random within that class. So cases that are more extreme than one’s expectation will shift your beliefs. But this might leave your beliefs about the frequency of incidence of human gullibility unchanged. (Maybe I come to think that believers in quack medicine are even more stupid than I previously thought, but not that such believers are any more common).
It’s very hard to judge whether one’s new information is selection-biased in some way. In areas like psychology and political science, it’s not so hard to find academic papers that support either side on a debate. Even if you can’t find that, it could be because of file-drawer effects or because of topic has not been investigated much by academics.
Whether you change beliefs in response to a new case will depend on the nature of the selection or sampling process . If you go through a history of quack medicine, you’d get lots of new case-studies but you might not change your beliefs about typical human epistemic performance at all.
Even if new cases are selected to be examples of human stupidity, they might still be roughly random within that class. So cases that are more extreme than one’s expectation will shift your beliefs. But this might leave your beliefs about the frequency of incidence of human gullibility unchanged. (Maybe I come to think that believers in quack medicine are even more stupid than I previously thought, but not that such believers are any more common).
It’s very hard to judge whether one’s new information is selection-biased in some way. In areas like psychology and political science, it’s not so hard to find academic papers that support either side on a debate. Even if you can’t find that, it could be because of file-drawer effects or because of topic has not been investigated much by academics.