Saturday, November 3, 2007

Some hypothetical answers for the Wire Disagreement Dilemma

Here is a sampling of possible answers for the Wire Disagreement Dilemma:

1. Always go with your own "Experience" beliefs (cut the red wire).

2. Always go with the beliefs of whoever's Social Security Number is 987-65-4320 (which, by staggering coincidence, happens to be your own Social Security Number.)

3. Always go with the beliefs of whoever you judge has the most "common sense" in the room (which, by staggering coincidence, happens to be you.)

4. Always go with the majority belief.

5. Always go with the belief of the person who had the highest IQ test scores on his most recent test.

6. Always go with the person with the most education (as measured in years of schooling).

7. Assign a score, based on a preconceived formula that weights one or more of the previous considerations. Then go with whoever has the highest score, unless you really dislike the outcome, it which case go with your "Experience" beliefs.

Ptolemaic vs. Copernican Epistemologies. One of the differences between these solutions is the degree to which they presuppose that you have privileged access to the truth. For lack of a better term, I would call systems Copernican Epistemologies if they posit that have no privileged access to the truth, and Ptolemaic Epistemologies if they posit that you do have privileged access to the truth. This is a spectrum;
"Always go with your own 'Experience' beliefs" is the exemplar of Ptolemaic belief; "I have no privileged 'Experience' beliefs" is the exemplar of Copernican belief; there are plenty of gradients between.

Note that it is not possible for a human to actually implement a 100% pure Ptolemaic belief system, nor a 100% pure Copernican belief system. For example, your beliefs of "what I would have believed, apart from other peoples' opinions" will, in practice, be tainted by your knowledge of what other people believe.

1 comment:

Michael Vassar said...

How long do you have to get info?
I might administer a Cognitive Reflection Test (takes a couple minutes) and go with the majority opinion among people scoring a 3 on it.

If the other people had been coworkers for some time and had practiced giving empirically well calibrated confidence judgments and I had done the same then I would start from indifference and integrate the information content of our confidence judgments.

Note that you have assumed your answer if you say that you have 100% confidence in your proof, as a 100% confident person is by definition not subject to influence by evidence.