I guess it depends on how you define bullet-biting. Let me be more specific: voted up for accepting an ugly truth instead of rationalizing or making excuses.
As an answer to the first question it is a normative claim. All else being equal I prefer a universe in which bullets are bit than where they are not bit. The evidence for this is that I say I do, have no particular motive to lie and consistently demonstrate sufficiently aversive reactions to non-bullet-biting for me to have reliably inferred whether or not I consider it an intrinsic good. Depending on your moral philosophy you may consider it appropriate to declare my answer false but this would not be because of evidence.
In response to the second question, biting bullets also increases the relationship between one’s consequentialist values and one’s belief about optimal actions to take. Unless other assumptions and reasoning are sufficiently poor there will be a correlation to other good things.
Bullet biting is a terminal value for you? That is one of the weirdest things I’ve read in a while. More power to you, I guess, it doesn’t threaten my terminal values so long as you aren’t sacrificing truth for it.
Bullet biting means excepting a disturbing conclusion instead of using the conclusion to reject one of the premises in a modus tollens or reducio argument. Some arguments that bite the bullet are probably true. If you want to consider them extra good because they also take this form, fine but most people tend to value things like happiness, freedom, knowledge etc. Biting the bullet looks kind of weird next to that list but terminal values aren’t things you can be argued out of. Problem is, some arguments that bite the bullet are false. Were you to value biting the bullet over truthfulness you’d basically be declaring your willingness to argue dishonestly in cases where you can make arguments that bite the bullet.
Or maybe we’re talking about totally different things.
Bullet biting means excepting a disturbing conclusion instead of using the conclusion to reject one of the premises in a modus tollens or reducio argument.
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 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.
Is bullet-biting an inherently good thing? Is it even reliably correlated with good things?
I guess it depends on how you define bullet-biting. Let me be more specific: voted up for accepting an ugly truth instead of rationalizing or making excuses.
Yes. (But having good preferences to ‘bite bullets’ towards is rather important too.)
Which question are you answering “yes” to?
Also, evidence?
The first.
As an answer to the first question it is a normative claim. All else being equal I prefer a universe in which bullets are bit than where they are not bit. The evidence for this is that I say I do, have no particular motive to lie and consistently demonstrate sufficiently aversive reactions to non-bullet-biting for me to have reliably inferred whether or not I consider it an intrinsic good. Depending on your moral philosophy you may consider it appropriate to declare my answer false but this would not be because of evidence.
In response to the second question, biting bullets also increases the relationship between one’s consequentialist values and one’s belief about optimal actions to take. Unless other assumptions and reasoning are sufficiently poor there will be a correlation to other good things.
Bullet biting is a terminal value for you? That is one of the weirdest things I’ve read in a while. More power to you, I guess, it doesn’t threaten my terminal values so long as you aren’t sacrificing truth for it.
Weird? Sacrificing truth? Are we even talking about the same concept here?
Bullet biting means excepting a disturbing conclusion instead of using the conclusion to reject one of the premises in a modus tollens or reducio argument. Some arguments that bite the bullet are probably true. If you want to consider them extra good because they also take this form, fine but most people tend to value things like happiness, freedom, knowledge etc. Biting the bullet looks kind of weird next to that list but terminal values aren’t things you can be argued out of. Problem is, some arguments that bite the bullet are false. Were you to value biting the bullet over truthfulness you’d basically be declaring your willingness to argue dishonestly in cases where you can make arguments that bite the bullet.
Or maybe we’re talking about totally different things.
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.