Thursday, December 31, 2020

Being Relieved and Reassured When I am Wrong

Considering the realm of points of view where thoughtful minds can disagree, we simply cannot have very much confidence that all of our views are correct and justifiable. In fact unfortunately it is likely that we are right only half of the time, an epistemic coin flip. Therefore, it should be reassuring when we discover areas within this realm where we are incorrect because then we can have more confidence in our other points of view being true. 

Similarly I take comfort when I find error or at least disagreement with the intellectuals I follow and admire. This lets me know I am thinking critically, which holds even if they are right and I am wrong. 

To make sure I am not just stubborn and cherry-picking my points of agreement, I always seek to change my mind (2020 edition coming soon). And by the same token, we must be careful not to use this as a cognitive bias giving confirmation and validation to views we should now doubt. 

If there are correlations and other entanglements between points of view, doubt cast upon one of these casts doubt upon all of them. Being wrong about one part of a system probably means one must be less confident in one's views about the other parts of the same system and perhaps wrong about the system itself. The Bayesian updating is a sticky wicket. 


P.S. One recent example for me was listening to an episode of The Libertarian Angle podcast.  The host Jacob Hornberger is someone for who I very much align in my view of the world. He ran in 2020 to be the Libertarian Party's presidential candidate. If he would have won, I would have gladly voted for him. In fact I would have ideologically preferred him as the actual candidate over Jo Jorgensen (Jorgensen was probably the better candidate for general electoral appeal). Yet he has strong beliefs with high confidence that the JFK assassination was a regime change conspiracy done through the CIA and the rest of the national security state. The case he makes causes me to adjust my views slightly but only slightly. I can believe there was unacted-upon desire to thwart Kennedy's foreign policy changes (Kennedy was making concrete movement away from war and hostility). I just don't believe this materially came together in a conspiracy of action. 

Listening to Hornberger gave me a bit of a challenge to my priors about the Kennedy assassination as he is very much more informed about it than am I. At the same time I didn't change my mind and adopt his view. If we do finally someday get a release of the classified records from the assassination (Trump surprisingly agreed to extend the classified status in 2018 until 2021), I might discover I was completely wrong. Either way I'm relieved and reassured because it shows I am not simply outsourcing all of my views to my intellectual heros, and if I am wrong about this, I can have more confidence in the areas where Hornberger and I are in agreement. 

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