The heuristic isn’t widely applicable, but I disagree about it being poor altogether. As I pointed out above, it’s not just that he defended good vs. evil. It’s that he did it in the context of a presentation on a subtopic of how we conceptualize the world. He may have things to teach me in other areas, obviously.
That’s why I compared it to someone bringing God into a discussion on ethics specifically. (Or, say, evolution.) That person may be brilliant at physics, but on the topic at hand, not so much.
It also occurs to me that this heuristic may be unusually useful to me because of my neurology. It does seem to take much more time and effort for me to deconstruct and find flaws in new ideas presented by others, compared to most people, and because of the extra time, there’s a risk of getting distracted and not completing the process. It’s enough of an issue that even a flawed heuristic to weed out bad memes is (or, feels—I’m not sure how one would actually test that) useful.
Okay, I’ll grant you that. It’s better to have a sufficiently strict filter that loses some useful information than a weaker filter which lets in garbage data. I would presume (or, at least, advise) that you make a particular effort to analyze data which you previously rejected but which remains widely discussed, however—an example from my own experience being Searle’s Chinese Room argument. Such items should be uncommon enough.
The heuristic isn’t widely applicable, but I disagree about it being poor altogether. As I pointed out above, it’s not just that he defended good vs. evil. It’s that he did it in the context of a presentation on a subtopic of how we conceptualize the world. He may have things to teach me in other areas, obviously.
That’s why I compared it to someone bringing God into a discussion on ethics specifically. (Or, say, evolution.) That person may be brilliant at physics, but on the topic at hand, not so much.
It also occurs to me that this heuristic may be unusually useful to me because of my neurology. It does seem to take much more time and effort for me to deconstruct and find flaws in new ideas presented by others, compared to most people, and because of the extra time, there’s a risk of getting distracted and not completing the process. It’s enough of an issue that even a flawed heuristic to weed out bad memes is (or, feels—I’m not sure how one would actually test that) useful.
Okay, I’ll grant you that. It’s better to have a sufficiently strict filter that loses some useful information than a weaker filter which lets in garbage data. I would presume (or, at least, advise) that you make a particular effort to analyze data which you previously rejected but which remains widely discussed, however—an example from my own experience being Searle’s Chinese Room argument. Such items should be uncommon enough.
Agreed.