Showing Correctness is A Thorny Issue

[unspeakablehorror]

In my experience, regardless of the level of reasoning a person is capable of, that reasoning is never equally applied to all things.  There's nothing really strange about this, though, because reasoning takes time and energy.  And there's generally no way someone can apply their highest level of reasoning, or even a moderate level, to every question. 

Instead, many questions, important ones even, are answered by very simple methods, like 'this is what I've seen in my experience so I will generalize it to be universally applicable', 'what does this make me feel', 'what do my friends believe', 'what beliefs best validate my current behavior', 'what does an authority figure believe', or other methods that do not robustly show correctness but allow for a quick answer.  Because otherwise we'd never be able to make a decision to do or say anything.

This is one thing I think is good to keep in mind when seeing that someone hasn't given a good argument for something.  I think it's best to realize that good arguments are always going to be much rarer than bad ones, and that if that doesn't seem to be the case, it's much more likely that the criteria of the argument being good or bad is itself being made by some simple method.  Also, the same factors can cause a person to judge a good argument to be bad.

This is also one thing that gives me pause whenever I think about asserting something.  I hate being wrong, or even being right but not having a good argument for it.  But it's inevitable that will happen frequently, because there are many, many questions that cannot be answered well quickly.

Comments

[unspeakablehorror]

I don't think this means that everyone has the same frequency of good arguments to bad, just that that frequency is likely to always be low. But the people who are best at arguing things will do a little better than the people who aren't very good at that.