From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Mon Oct 07 2002 - 10:34:28 MDT
lcorbin@tsoft.com (Lee Corbin) writes:
>Robin replied
>
>> If you realize your position on recounts may be biased because you favor Gore,
>> you can correct for that by moving your position on recounts in the other
>> direction, even if you don't change your position on Gore at all.
>
>Okay, Peter, so far I don't know exactly how you are thinking
>that Robin and I disagree. I could entertain hypotheses, but
>if it's anything in the above so far, please help me focus on
>what it is.
I guess it's going to be harder than I expected to pin down whether or
not you disagree with Robin. Possibly some agents within your mind disagree
and others agree.
Your apparent claim that value differences are the explanation for left-right
debates implied to me that you were rejecting Robin's explanation, but now
you have rephrased it to avoid implying that.
This statement:
>So if I'm already in possession of some explanation as to why
>certain people hold certain opinions (e.g., they were red-diaper
>babies and believe that Chomsky is infallible, or that they
>have a deep commitment to a personal relationship with their
>alleged Creator), then I consider Robin's trick inapplicable,
>even if it's pretty good to keep it in mind for other times.
looks to me like a partial rejection of Robin's theory. Certainty that
someone else is wrong appears to indicate that the allegedly wrong person
is actually wrong less frequently than it indicates that the person who
claims to be certain is overestimating his abilities, so I ought to
assume that I normally can't justify the conclusion that someone else
is certainly wrong. And I don't understand why Robin's trick would be
inapplicable if I can't justify the conclusion that the other person is
certainly wrong.
Your apparently inability to come up with an explanation for the persistent
exhortations that people should "just get along" is another small piece of
evidence that you are biased against nonaltruistic/unflattering explanations
of people's behavior. (My guess is that the biggest single cause of such
exhortations is a desire to show membership in a group that holds allegedly
altruistic beliefs such as "seeking agreement causes valuable cooperation".
I also suspect you underestimate the effectiveness of such exhortations at
producing conformity. Presumably some people benefit from conformity.)
>> It predicts disagreements such as the one between you and Robin.
>
>Would you spell this out please? In some sentence like, "Lee
>and Robin disagreed because they were being loyal to their
>past beliefs".
Yes. Robin's belief in the importance of idea futures and of economists
causes him to be more biased than most people towards the theory that people
act more selfishly than they realize. The effort you have put into debates
biases you into overestimating the degree to which people listen to each
other's logic. There are probably other biases of this nature which also
contribute to the disagreement.
>> It also explains results such as more than 50% of people
>> believing they are above average. Whereas it isn't clear
>> to me that your hypothesis makes any prediction about
>> whether people will be objective.
>
>Sorry, I don't understand the context or referents of
>those remarks at all.
Robin seems to have a clear argument that value differences fail to
explain the lack of objectivity (i.e. unbiased weighing of the evidence
pertaining to factual questions) in ideological debates. I thought you
started this (or a related thread) in an attempt to explain that lack,
and it looked like you were implying that value differences explain the
question you asked about objectivity.
Upon rereading your earlier messages, I see that you are emphasizing
different things when referring to objectivity than Robin would, which
might indicate that I misunderstood what you are referring to. But if
that's the case, I suspect I will want to argue that you are confused
about something.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter McCluskey | Free Jon Johansen! http://www.rahul.net/pcm |
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