I can think of several hot-button issues that are analogous to this parable — or would be, if the parable were modified as follows:
As science progresses, religious figures lose some power and prestige, but manage to hold on to quite a bit of it. Old superstitions and taboos perish at different rates in different communities, and defying them is considered more cool and progressive in some subcultures and cities. Someone will eat fruit X on television and the live audience will applaud, but a grouchy old X-phobe watching the show will grumble about it.
A conference with the stated goal of exploring possible health detriments of X will attract people interested in thinking rationally about public health, as well as genuine X-phobes. The two kinds of people don’t look any different.
The X-phobes pick up science and rationality buzzwords and then start jabbering about the preliminary cherrypicked scientific results impugning X, with their own superstition and illogical arguments mixed in. Twentysomething crypto-X-phobes seeking to revitalize their religion now claim that their religion is really all about protecting people from the harms of X, and feed college students subtle misinterpretations of the scientific evidence. In response to all this, Snopes.com gets to work discrediting any claim of the form “X is bad”. The few rational scientists studying the harmfulness of X are shunned by their peers.
What’s a rationalist to do? Personally, whenever I hear someone say “I think we should seriously consider the possibility that such-and-such may be true, despite it being politically incorrect”, I consider it more likely than not that they are privileging the hypothesis. People have to work hard to convince me of their rationality.
Yes, that would certainly make the parable much closer to some issues that other people have already pointed out! However, you say:
Personally, whenever I hear someone say “I think we should seriously consider the possibility that such-and-such may be true, despite it being politically incorrect”, I consider it more likely than not that they are privileging the hypothesis.
Well, if the intellectual standards in the academic mainstream of the relevant fields are particularly low, and the predominant ideological biases push very strongly in the direction of the established conclusion that the contrarians are attacking, the situation is, at the very least, much less clear. But yes, organized groups of contrarians are often motivated by their own internal biases, which they constantly reinforce within their peculiar venues of echo-chamber discourse. Often they even develop some internal form of strangely inverted political correctness.
Moreover, my parable assumes that there are still non-trivial lingering groups of X-phobe fundamentalists when the first contrarian scientists appear. But what if the situation ends up with complete extirpation of all sorts of anti-X-ism, and virtually nobody is left who supports it any more, long before statisticians in this hypothetical world figure out the procedures necessary to examine the issue correctly? Imagine anti-X-ism as a mere remote historical memory, with no more supporters than, say, monarchism in the U.S. today. The question is—are there any such issues today, where past beliefs have been replaced by inaccurate ones that it doesn’t even occur to anyone any more to question, not because it would be politically incorrect, but simply because alternatives are no longer even conceivable?
I can think of several hot-button issues that are analogous to this parable — or would be, if the parable were modified as follows:
As science progresses, religious figures lose some power and prestige, but manage to hold on to quite a bit of it. Old superstitions and taboos perish at different rates in different communities, and defying them is considered more cool and progressive in some subcultures and cities. Someone will eat fruit X on television and the live audience will applaud, but a grouchy old X-phobe watching the show will grumble about it.
A conference with the stated goal of exploring possible health detriments of X will attract people interested in thinking rationally about public health, as well as genuine X-phobes. The two kinds of people don’t look any different.
The X-phobes pick up science and rationality buzzwords and then start jabbering about the preliminary cherrypicked scientific results impugning X, with their own superstition and illogical arguments mixed in. Twentysomething crypto-X-phobes seeking to revitalize their religion now claim that their religion is really all about protecting people from the harms of X, and feed college students subtle misinterpretations of the scientific evidence. In response to all this, Snopes.com gets to work discrediting any claim of the form “X is bad”. The few rational scientists studying the harmfulness of X are shunned by their peers.
What’s a rationalist to do? Personally, whenever I hear someone say “I think we should seriously consider the possibility that such-and-such may be true, despite it being politically incorrect”, I consider it more likely than not that they are privileging the hypothesis. People have to work hard to convince me of their rationality.
Yes, that would certainly make the parable much closer to some issues that other people have already pointed out! However, you say:
Well, if the intellectual standards in the academic mainstream of the relevant fields are particularly low, and the predominant ideological biases push very strongly in the direction of the established conclusion that the contrarians are attacking, the situation is, at the very least, much less clear. But yes, organized groups of contrarians are often motivated by their own internal biases, which they constantly reinforce within their peculiar venues of echo-chamber discourse. Often they even develop some internal form of strangely inverted political correctness.
Moreover, my parable assumes that there are still non-trivial lingering groups of X-phobe fundamentalists when the first contrarian scientists appear. But what if the situation ends up with complete extirpation of all sorts of anti-X-ism, and virtually nobody is left who supports it any more, long before statisticians in this hypothetical world figure out the procedures necessary to examine the issue correctly? Imagine anti-X-ism as a mere remote historical memory, with no more supporters than, say, monarchism in the U.S. today. The question is—are there any such issues today, where past beliefs have been replaced by inaccurate ones that it doesn’t even occur to anyone any more to question, not because it would be politically incorrect, but simply because alternatives are no longer even conceivable?