Book II: How to Actually Change Your Mind

The Proper Use of Humility

Confessing your fallibility but doing nothing about it braggery, not humility. Designing fail-safe machinery is good humility. Dismissing evidence for evolution because we can’t really know for sure that evolution is correct is misplaced humility.

The Third Alternative

Sometimes we justify questionable policy by claiming its absence is undesirable, e.g. believing in Santa makes children behave nicely, and therefore Santa-ism is the best of all possible alternatives.

Gathering evidence IRL may be expensive. When picking a stopping point, ask whether the collected evidence compels the conclusion, not whether it allows the conclusion.

Check your motivations. Are you ignoring fast cheap evidence because you already have a comfortable conclusion? Are you holding out for expensive slow evidence because the conclusion is uncomfortable?

A probabilistic model can take a few hits. But we sometimes assume a true theory can have no failures and a false theory can have no success.