Rational beliefs should be able to withstand scrutiny and opposing arguments. The inability to do so indicates that the belief is more about personal bias and emotional investment rather than objective analysis.
Rational beliefs should be able to withstand scrutiny and opposing arguments. The inability to do so indicates that the belief is more about personal bias and emotional investment rather than objective analysis.
“Sincere” doesnt seem right or relevant. and “counter argument” is a bit too adversarial for me. You’ll get sucked into bad-faith tennis matches with flat earthers; which is just a waste of time.
So +1 unpopular - but it’s not far off.
If you’d said . . . “you should consider a range of different hypotheses, grant them equal respect and try to gather (and assess) evidence in a way that is not biased for or against any of the hypotheses. You should then see which of the hypotheses seems most likely given the evidence.”
Then i’d agree. And I’m not sure how unpopular it’d be. Science vs not-Science.
But if your hypotheses are: H0: A is true. H1: A is false. Then I don’t see how you can be “sincere” about both if you literally believe A in the first place.
You probably do have to be open to the possibility of being wrong - so maybe the tough part is actually being a little insincere about H0. It’s the evidence that should decide afterall.
The point I’m trying to get at is that if you can’t lay out the counter-argument your opponent would make against your view in a way that they would agree with (steelmanning) then you’re not debating in good-faith. It doesn’t automatically mean you’re wrong - it’s possible to be right by accident or intuition too, but it does cast doubt on the quality of one’s reasoning.
This thread is a good example of that. “I believe the sun will rise tomorrow” and “I need to breathe oxygen” are not good-faith counters to my argument. They’re the opposite of that; strawmans. I’m perfectly willing to admit there are edge cases where this way of reasoning falls short (rocks are hard, fire is hot, water is wet …) but I don’t feel like that in any way refutes what is the essence of what I’m saying.
Personally I don’t like the idea of debate as in words vs words, i prefer empiricism - set out theories and test against observable evidence. It’s hard to do that in this case though.
But I must admit I do find the “sun will rise” argument hilarious as I think it is a very limited description of the relative movements of the sun and earth - and a clear example of personal bias vs considering alternatives impacting peoples ability to make a better description of what is going on. So yeah maybe it really does make your point.