I find him using political examples not suspicious at all. After all, politics is an area where epistemic mistakes can have large to extremely large negative effects. He could have referred to non-political examples, but those tend to be comparatively inconsequential.
Yes, indeed, and that was my point: they are using a political example with a connotation-loaded language as if it was truth, not one possible perspective. Which made me question the OP’s ability to evaluate their own commitment to truth-seeking.
For any proposition p which you assert it is possible that someone else has another “perspective” and asserts ¬p instead, each acting as if it was the truth. So the existence of possible perspective is not specific to politics or truth seeking. Sure, it is possible to be overconfident relative to the evidence you have, but I don’t recommend universal extensive hedging for any political examples merely because they are political. If you disagree with his examples, you are surely able to insert similar examples where (what you believe to be) epistemic mistakes have a very large negative impact. The thing with contemporary political mistakes is: They are nearly always controversial, so disagreement is expected, but this is not substantial evidence that political mistakes with large negative effects don’t exist. (One could use now uncontroversial historical examples instead, like Lysenkoism, but this could make it sound like such mistakes are a thing from the past, that we are much wiser now.)
I find him using political examples not suspicious at all. After all, politics is an area where epistemic mistakes can have large to extremely large negative effects. He could have referred to non-political examples, but those tend to be comparatively inconsequential.
Yes, indeed, and that was my point: they are using a political example with a connotation-loaded language as if it was truth, not one possible perspective. Which made me question the OP’s ability to evaluate their own commitment to truth-seeking.
For any proposition p which you assert it is possible that someone else has another “perspective” and asserts ¬p instead, each acting as if it was the truth. So the existence of possible perspective is not specific to politics or truth seeking. Sure, it is possible to be overconfident relative to the evidence you have, but I don’t recommend universal extensive hedging for any political examples merely because they are political. If you disagree with his examples, you are surely able to insert similar examples where (what you believe to be) epistemic mistakes have a very large negative impact. The thing with contemporary political mistakes is: They are nearly always controversial, so disagreement is expected, but this is not substantial evidence that political mistakes with large negative effects don’t exist. (One could use now uncontroversial historical examples instead, like Lysenkoism, but this could make it sound like such mistakes are a thing from the past, that we are much wiser now.)