Note that if we strengthen “argument” to “valid formal proof”, and “authority” to “proof generator”, then the statement of this post is wrong. For a good decision theory, seeing a valid formal proof that some action leads to higher utility than others should not be reason enough to choose that action, because such a decision theory would be exploitable by Lobian proof generators.
I’m not sure if this counterargument transfers continuously to everyday reasoning, or it’s just a fluke of how we think about decision theory. Maybe there could be a different formalization of logical counterfactuals in which “argument screens off authority” stays true. But that doesn’t seem likely to me...
I think what applies to everyday reasoning is that an argument is usually an informal suggestion pointing at a single component out of, often, a very huge sum, or, in other cases, a proposition reliant on a very large number of implicit assumptions and/or very prone to being destroyed “from the outside” by expert knowledge.
If the term from the sum was picked at random, it would have to be regressed towards the mean when you estimate expected value of the sum; when the term is not picked at random, and you don’t know to which extent it’s choice is correlated with it’s value, you can’t really use it in any way to meaningfully improve an estimate of the sum (even though the authority and non-authority alike will demand that you add in their argument somehow, and will not suggest you treat it as an estimation of the totality of the arguments).
Note that if we strengthen “argument” to “valid formal proof”, and “authority” to “proof generator”, then the statement of this post is wrong. For a good decision theory, seeing a valid formal proof that some action leads to higher utility than others should not be reason enough to choose that action, because such a decision theory would be exploitable by Lobian proof generators.
I’m not sure if this counterargument transfers continuously to everyday reasoning, or it’s just a fluke of how we think about decision theory. Maybe there could be a different formalization of logical counterfactuals in which “argument screens off authority” stays true. But that doesn’t seem likely to me...
I think what applies to everyday reasoning is that an argument is usually an informal suggestion pointing at a single component out of, often, a very huge sum, or, in other cases, a proposition reliant on a very large number of implicit assumptions and/or very prone to being destroyed “from the outside” by expert knowledge.
If the term from the sum was picked at random, it would have to be regressed towards the mean when you estimate expected value of the sum; when the term is not picked at random, and you don’t know to which extent it’s choice is correlated with it’s value, you can’t really use it in any way to meaningfully improve an estimate of the sum (even though the authority and non-authority alike will demand that you add in their argument somehow, and will not suggest you treat it as an estimation of the totality of the arguments).