Perhaps you’re thinking of cases where one side of the disagreement is making arguments that are pretty obviously bad or irrelevant, so the other side’s confidence is justified?
Yeah, cases where you actually deeply understand the arguments made on all sides and see the flaws (even if they’re non-obvious flaws).
I agree that this is rare, and almost all of the time when people think they’re in this situation they are not. But at the same time it’s often worth trying to be in this situation rather than giving up and sticking with uncertainty. It’s possible to succeed and it’s possible at the meta-level to be reasonably confident you’ve succeeded. (It’s rare, and one should be very suspicious every time this happens, but not infinitely suspicious).
bunch of equally expert people are just being foolish
I agree that if this should invoke even more suspicion, but the central cases I’m thinking about only involve non-foolish mistakes by experts.
I think we’re fully in agreement, we both think one should be quite suspicious of oneself if you’re more confident than experts on a controversial question. And I agree that this is the main thing to emphasize. I just think it’s important to nitpick that this isn’t a fully general argument, the amount of suspicion is finite and can occasionally be overcome by object-level considerations.
there are a bunch of places where it’s possible to be reasonably confident despite strong disagreement between well-meaning experts.
the central cases I’m thinking about only involve non-foolish mistakes by experts.
we both think one should be quite suspicious of oneself if you’re more confident than experts on a controversial question...[but] the amount of suspicion is finite and can occasionally be overcome by object-level considerations.
That would imply the experts are not in agreement about the object level issue? Or that they aren’t incorporating it into their model of some meta-level issue?
Yeah, cases where you actually deeply understand the arguments made on all sides and see the flaws (even if they’re non-obvious flaws).
I agree that this is rare, and almost all of the time when people think they’re in this situation they are not. But at the same time it’s often worth trying to be in this situation rather than giving up and sticking with uncertainty. It’s possible to succeed and it’s possible at the meta-level to be reasonably confident you’ve succeeded. (It’s rare, and one should be very suspicious every time this happens, but not infinitely suspicious).
I agree that if this should invoke even more suspicion, but the central cases I’m thinking about only involve non-foolish mistakes by experts.
I think we’re fully in agreement, we both think one should be quite suspicious of oneself if you’re more confident than experts on a controversial question. And I agree that this is the main thing to emphasize. I just think it’s important to nitpick that this isn’t a fully general argument, the amount of suspicion is finite and can occasionally be overcome by object-level considerations.
That would imply the experts are not in agreement about the object level issue? Or that they aren’t incorporating it into their model of some meta-level issue?