I tend to associate not-bullet-biting less with rejecting one of the premises and more with “just kind of ignoring the whole thing because actually believing what your premises would lead you to conclude is silly even though the premises are the Right thing to believe”.
I agree about what is bullet-biting. Yes, a common alternative to bullet-biting is forgetting the argument through cognitive dissonance. But there are other alternatives, such as worrying that the argument is wrong, or that subtle errors in the hypotheses make a difference. Especially in something like politics (the original context), simple hypotheses are unlikely to be true enough to push deduction very far.
But let’s go back to Alicorn’s original question: is bullet-biting good? It sure looks better than cognitive dissonance. Acknowledging a problem is good, but biting a particular bullet means choosing a conclusion to support or a hypothesis to discard and that choice is high-risk. Some weird and unpleasant things are true and you have to bite those bullets to get the right answer, but it’s pretty easy to bite the wrong bullets and do worse than the people who follow the incoherent crowd. For example, the young TGGP followed mainline Christianity to the conclusion of Cthulhu. This is what typical bullet-biting looks like.
I agree about what is bullet-biting. Yes, a common alternative to bullet-biting is forgetting the argument through cognitive dissonance. But there are other alternatives, such as worrying that the argument is wrong, or that subtle errors in the hypotheses make a difference. Especially in something like politics (the original context), simple hypotheses are unlikely to be true enough to push deduction very far.
But let’s go back to Alicorn’s original question: is bullet-biting good? It sure looks better than cognitive dissonance. Acknowledging a problem is good, but biting a particular bullet means choosing a conclusion to support or a hypothesis to discard and that choice is high-risk. Some weird and unpleasant things are true and you have to bite those bullets to get the right answer, but it’s pretty easy to bite the wrong bullets and do worse than the people who follow the incoherent crowd. For example, the young TGGP followed mainline Christianity to the conclusion of Cthulhu. This is what typical bullet-biting looks like.