These are great points. I think the strategy is particularly useful against one sided arguments. In the case of my example it was someone suggesting that high IQ is the sole measure of value and I can thus use the strategy with confidence to point to the existence of other parameters.
But you are making another point that I am very interested in and have touched upon in the past:
For those of us who are heliocentrists and atheists, does this mean that there’s something wrong with rationality, since it would have led to wrong answers in those cases? No, it means that there was something wrong with the information available in those historical situations.
Since rationality is dependant on available information it can be said there was something wrong with that ‘rational assesment’ though not with rationality itself. But we should then attend to the fact that our information is still incomplete (to say the least). I touched on a related point in my post Too Much Effort | Too Little Evidence.
I have been attempting to compose a more formal exploration of this issue for some time, but it is quite difficult to formulate properly (and also a bit intimidating to present it, from all places, to the rationalist community, haha).
These are great points. I think the strategy is particularly useful against one sided arguments. In the case of my example it was someone suggesting that high IQ is the sole measure of value and I can thus use the strategy with confidence to point to the existence of other parameters.
But you are making another point that I am very interested in and have touched upon in the past:
Since rationality is dependant on available information it can be said there was something wrong with that ‘rational assesment’ though not with rationality itself. But we should then attend to the fact that our information is still incomplete (to say the least). I touched on a related point in my post Too Much Effort | Too Little Evidence.
I have been attempting to compose a more formal exploration of this issue for some time, but it is quite difficult to formulate properly (and also a bit intimidating to present it, from all places, to the rationalist community, haha).