I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about why arguments are so hard to resolve and I suspect that very often the greatest challenge comes from how people’s conclusions often depend on these widescale generalisations. When talking about specific facts, disagreements are often tractable, but when talking about widescale generalisation, it is often impossible to make any significant progress as doing so would require you to litigate hundreds of separate facts. For example, “Are markets generally good?”, I suspect that we can all think of dozens of examples of corporations behaving badly, as well as many places where competive markets are good. It really isn’t easy to try to balance all of these considerations against each other, so when we get to the question of weighing it all, it becomes highly subjective.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about why arguments are so hard to resolve and I suspect that very often the greatest challenge comes from how people’s conclusions often depend on these widescale generalisations. When talking about specific facts, disagreements are often tractable, but when talking about widescale generalisation, it is often impossible to make any significant progress as doing so would require you to litigate hundreds of separate facts. For example, “Are markets generally good?”, I suspect that we can all think of dozens of examples of corporations behaving badly, as well as many places where competive markets are good. It really isn’t easy to try to balance all of these considerations against each other, so when we get to the question of weighing it all, it becomes highly subjective.