Even though I disagree with Caplan on x-risks, animal rights, mental illness, free will, and a few other things, I ultimately don’t think it’s necessarily suspicious for him to hold the most convenient view on a broad range of topics. One can imagine two different ways of forming an ideology:
The first way is to come up with an ideology a priori, and then interpret facts about the world in light of the ideology you’ve chosen. People who do this are prone to ideological biases since they’re evaluating facts based partly on whether they’re consistent with the ideology they’ve chosen, rather than purely based on whether the facts are true.
The second way is to interpret various facts about the world, and after some time, notice that there’s a general theory that explains a bunch of independent facts. For example, you might notice that, in various domains, most people are biased towards voting for things that appear superficially socially desirable rather than what they know is actually good for people. Then, based on this general theory, an ideology falls right out.
I predict that, regardless of his own personal history, Bryan Caplan will probably appeal to the second type of reasoning in explaining why his views all seem “convenient”. He might say: it’s not that the facts are ideologically convenient, but that the ideology is convenient since it fits all the facts. (Although I also expect him to be a bit modest and admit that he might be wrong about the facts.)
It is suspicious to just happen to have a whole bunch of views that support one’s pre-existing politics, but it is only a little less suspicious to have a whole bunch of not that related views that all conveniently support one coherent political view
I’m taken to understand that Caplan has been a libertarian since he was a kid, and an ancap almost as long. Insofar as he considers most of or many of the listed positions to come from careful academic reflection, most of the arguments he makes about them are probably ones he didn’t have when he first became sympathetic to his current politics
Part of my second question is that I think in order to beat these two challenges, the best he can do is say that there is one fairly simple principle that is behind anarcho-capitalism, and that it generalizes so robustly, both when thrown into the real world, and when thrown into philosophical controversies, that it causes all of them to conveniently point in a similar direction. It would have to be one he believed in from a young age and saw vindicated more and more over time in practice, and it needs to be remarkably unpopular to, despite having unusually powerful application in so many controversies, escape the sympathies of so many other experts. I suspect he will suggest something like this, but I am suspicious a principle that actually meets these criteria doesn’t exist, and that much of his worldview is best explained by bias. This is why I think a question on this level is one of the best challenges to pose him.
Even though I disagree with Caplan on x-risks, animal rights, mental illness, free will, and a few other things, I ultimately don’t think it’s necessarily suspicious for him to hold the most convenient view on a broad range of topics. One can imagine two different ways of forming an ideology:
The first way is to come up with an ideology a priori, and then interpret facts about the world in light of the ideology you’ve chosen. People who do this are prone to ideological biases since they’re evaluating facts based partly on whether they’re consistent with the ideology they’ve chosen, rather than purely based on whether the facts are true.
The second way is to interpret various facts about the world, and after some time, notice that there’s a general theory that explains a bunch of independent facts. For example, you might notice that, in various domains, most people are biased towards voting for things that appear superficially socially desirable rather than what they know is actually good for people. Then, based on this general theory, an ideology falls right out.
I predict that, regardless of his own personal history, Bryan Caplan will probably appeal to the second type of reasoning in explaining why his views all seem “convenient”. He might say: it’s not that the facts are ideologically convenient, but that the ideology is convenient since it fits all the facts. (Although I also expect him to be a bit modest and admit that he might be wrong about the facts.)
Two reasons I disagree:
It is suspicious to just happen to have a whole bunch of views that support one’s pre-existing politics, but it is only a little less suspicious to have a whole bunch of not that related views that all conveniently support one coherent political view
I’m taken to understand that Caplan has been a libertarian since he was a kid, and an ancap almost as long. Insofar as he considers most of or many of the listed positions to come from careful academic reflection, most of the arguments he makes about them are probably ones he didn’t have when he first became sympathetic to his current politics
Part of my second question is that I think in order to beat these two challenges, the best he can do is say that there is one fairly simple principle that is behind anarcho-capitalism, and that it generalizes so robustly, both when thrown into the real world, and when thrown into philosophical controversies, that it causes all of them to conveniently point in a similar direction. It would have to be one he believed in from a young age and saw vindicated more and more over time in practice, and it needs to be remarkably unpopular to, despite having unusually powerful application in so many controversies, escape the sympathies of so many other experts. I suspect he will suggest something like this, but I am suspicious a principle that actually meets these criteria doesn’t exist, and that much of his worldview is best explained by bias. This is why I think a question on this level is one of the best challenges to pose him.