Thereâs âunderstandingâ in the weak sense of having the info tokened in a belief-box somewhere, and then thereâs understanding in the sense of never falling for tempting-but-fallacious inferences like those I discuss in my post.
Have you read the paper I was responding to? I really donât think itâs at all âobviousâ that all âhighly trained moral philosophersâ have internalized the point I make in my blog post (that was the whole point of my writing it!), and I offered textual support. For example, Thorstad wrote: âthe time of perils hypothesis is probably false. I conclude that existential risk pessimism may tell against the overwhelming importance of existential risk mitigation.â This is a strange thing to write if he recognized that merely being âprobably falseâ doesnât suffice to threaten the longtermist argument!
(Edited to add: the obvious reading is that heâs making precisely the sort of âbest model fallacyâ that I critique in my post: assessing which empirical model we should regard as true, and then determining expected value on the basis of that one model. Even very senior philosophers, like Eric Schwitzgebel, have made the same mistake.)
Going back to the OPâs claims about what is or isnât âa good way to argue,â I think itâs important to pay attention to the actual text of what someone wrote. Thatâs what my blog post did, and itâs annoying to be subject to criticism (and now downvoting) from people who arenât willing to extend the same basic courtesy to me.
Fair point, when I re-checked the paper, it doesnât clearly and explicitly display knowledge of the point you are making. I still highly doubt that Thorstad really misunderstands it though. I think he was probably just not being super-careful.
Thereâs âunderstandingâ in the weak sense of having the info tokened in a belief-box somewhere, and then thereâs understanding in the sense of never falling for tempting-but-fallacious inferences like those I discuss in my post.
Have you read the paper I was responding to? I really donât think itâs at all âobviousâ that all âhighly trained moral philosophersâ have internalized the point I make in my blog post (that was the whole point of my writing it!), and I offered textual support. For example, Thorstad wrote: âthe time of perils hypothesis is probably false. I conclude that existential risk pessimism may tell against the overwhelming importance of existential risk mitigation.â This is a strange thing to write if he recognized that merely being âprobably falseâ doesnât suffice to threaten the longtermist argument!
(Edited to add: the obvious reading is that heâs making precisely the sort of âbest model fallacyâ that I critique in my post: assessing which empirical model we should regard as true, and then determining expected value on the basis of that one model. Even very senior philosophers, like Eric Schwitzgebel, have made the same mistake.)
Going back to the OPâs claims about what is or isnât âa good way to argue,â I think itâs important to pay attention to the actual text of what someone wrote. Thatâs what my blog post did, and itâs annoying to be subject to criticism (and now downvoting) from people who arenât willing to extend the same basic courtesy to me.
Fair point, when I re-checked the paper, it doesnât clearly and explicitly display knowledge of the point you are making. I still highly doubt that Thorstad really misunderstands it though. I think he was probably just not being super-careful.