From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Fri May 30 2003 - 10:33:18 MDT
lcorbin@tsoft.com (Lee Corbin) writes:
>I agree that everything he has said here is true; I simply don't
>think that evolution erred to make us this way. But first of all,
I think there's general agreement that evolution didn't "err". It's not
hard to find a theory for why it selected for something other than pursuit
of the truth, e.g. http://hanson.gmu.edu/showcare.pdf, or the theory in
The Mating Mind which implies that many recently evolved features of the
human mind amount to advertising. You sound as if you think evolution's
"goals" are always praiseworthy.
>It must be held in mind that mixed evidence DOES NOT knock down a
>belief! Mixed evidence does not refute anything, and a conjecture
You are thinking as if there were only two possible opinions we could
hold about a theory - that it is reasonable, or that it has been conclusively
falsified. If you rephrase your argument in Bayesian terms (i.e. talk in
terms of evidence altering the probability we assign to a belief), you
should find that your criticism either attacks a straw man or amounts to a
rejection of Bayes theorem. Bayes theorem is central to this argument, and
if you are confused about whether you agree with Bayes theorem, you should
expect to be confused about the argument that Huemer and Robin make. (PCR
is sometimes phrased as if it rejects Bayes theorem, but I've never heard
an argument that suggests this is intentional).
> This is illustrated by the capital punishment study mentioned
> above (section 5, d): subjects scrutinized the study whose
> conclusion they disagreed with closely, seeking methodological
> flaws, but accepted at face value the study with whose conclusion
> they agreed. Almost all studies have some sort of epistemological
> imperfections, so this technique almost always enables one to hold
> the factual beliefs about society that one wants.
>
>Well, as the skeptics say, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary
>evidence! If someone presents me with what appears to be an airtight
>argument that people are not affected by incentives, and that (say)
>redistribution of income won't affect total production, then I'm going
>to apply much stronger filters to that argument than I would its simple
>converse. This too is only natural, isn't it?
That is natural, but it isn't epistemically rational for it to result
in predictable disagreements. If that happens, then somewhere along the
line, such as when deciding what to believe about how people are affected
by incentives, someone adopted a belief for reasons other than an interest
in the truth.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter McCluskey | "To announce that there must be no criticism of http://www.rahul.net/pcm | the President, or that we are to stand by the | President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic | and servile, but morally treasonable to the | American public." - Theodore Roosevelt
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