The analogy is that in both fields people are by default very prone to being overconfident. In cryptography this can be seen by the phenomenon of people (especially newcomers who haven’t learned the lesson) confidently proposing new cryptographic algorithms, which end up being way easier to break than they expect. In philosophy this is a bit trickier to demonstrate, but I think can be seen via a combination of:
people confidently holding positions that are incompatible with other people’s confident positions
tendency to “bite bullets” or accepting implications that are highly counterintuitive to others or even to themselves, instead of adopting more uncertainty
the total idea/argument space being exponentially vast and underexplored due to human limitations, therefore high confidence being unjustified in light of this
At risk of committing a Bulverism, I’ve noticed a tendency for people to see ethical bullet-biting as epistemically virtuous, like a demonstration of how rational/unswayed by emotion you are (biasing them to overconfidently bullet-bite). However, this makes less sense in ethics where intuitions like repugnance are a large proportion of what everything is based on in the first place.
the total idea/argument space being exponentially vast and underexplored due to human limitations, therefore high confidence being unjustified in light of this
There’s also the thing that the idea/argument space contains dæmons/attractors exploiting shortcomings of human cognition, thus making humans hold them with higher confidence than they would if they didn’t have those limitations.
tendency to “bite bullets” or accepting implications that are highly counterintuitive to others or even to themselves, instead of adopting more uncertainty
I find this contrast between “biting bullets” and “adopting more uncertainty” strange. The two seem orthogonal to me, as in, I’ve ~just as frequently (if not more often) observed people overconfidently endorse their pretheoretic philosophical intuitions, in opposition to bullet-biting.
The analogy is that in both fields people are by default very prone to being overconfident. In cryptography this can be seen by the phenomenon of people (especially newcomers who haven’t learned the lesson) confidently proposing new cryptographic algorithms, which end up being way easier to break than they expect. In philosophy this is a bit trickier to demonstrate, but I think can be seen via a combination of:
people confidently holding positions that are incompatible with other people’s confident positions
tendency to “bite bullets” or accepting implications that are highly counterintuitive to others or even to themselves, instead of adopting more uncertainty
the total idea/argument space being exponentially vast and underexplored due to human limitations, therefore high confidence being unjustified in light of this
At risk of committing a Bulverism, I’ve noticed a tendency for people to see ethical bullet-biting as epistemically virtuous, like a demonstration of how rational/unswayed by emotion you are (biasing them to overconfidently bullet-bite). However, this makes less sense in ethics where intuitions like repugnance are a large proportion of what everything is based on in the first place.
There’s also the thing that the idea/argument space contains dæmons/attractors exploiting shortcomings of human cognition, thus making humans hold them with higher confidence than they would if they didn’t have those limitations.
I find this contrast between “biting bullets” and “adopting more uncertainty” strange. The two seem orthogonal to me, as in, I’ve ~just as frequently (if not more often) observed people overconfidently endorse their pretheoretic philosophical intuitions, in opposition to bullet-biting.