The Crackpot Problem is a very interesting challenge and we need to be able to address it.
I suspect that if you talked to the average crackpot, they would be unable to give reasons for why they are more likely to be correct that the average person would ever find plausible and that the average person would become clear of this the more that they dug into this.
On the other hand, if you have good reasons for thinking that your epistemology may be good (ie. read into cognitive biases, taken the time to read other perspectives, studied logic, ect.) than other people will find it at least plausible that you have a better epistemology.
This eliminates a good proportion of the crackpot field, but it doesn’t completely solve the issue as there are probably some extremely verbally fluent and persuasive crackpots out there and most people can’t differentiate them from rationalists.
The Crackpot Problem is a very interesting challenge and we need to be able to address it.
I suspect that if you talked to the average crackpot, they would be unable to give reasons for why they are more likely to be correct that the average person would ever find plausible and that the average person would become clear of this the more that they dug into this.
On the other hand, if you have good reasons for thinking that your epistemology may be good (ie. read into cognitive biases, taken the time to read other perspectives, studied logic, ect.) than other people will find it at least plausible that you have a better epistemology.
This eliminates a good proportion of the crackpot field, but it doesn’t completely solve the issue as there are probably some extremely verbally fluent and persuasive crackpots out there and most people can’t differentiate them from rationalists.