Comment by illivah

Poor guy. He reminds me of Leshrac from Dota 2. Lots of deep philosophy, leads to nihilism.

Here's one of the multiple big problems. Learning that arguments are often not valid is an amazing insight! However, it says nothing about what what you SHOULD believe, relative to the information you have.

The wise choice is NOT to believe based on your ore-conceptions (ie ignoring the stronger arguments). Better arguments are better than worse arguments. mediocre evidence is better than better arguments. And better evidence is better than worse evidence. And since better evidence is not a guarantee, we measure it by the efforts to disprove them.

So, lets take an example: the conspiracies for the world trade center attack. First we have the official story which we more or less know. Well, some people know at least. Then we have the video Short Change, which goes through a couple hours describing all the points where the official story doesn't make sense. It talks about physics, and background deals, and molten this and that. A lot of interesting stuff. It raised a lot of questions. It didn't provide detailed or reliable evidence, so more research was needed. So i watched the rebuttle video, which was twice as long. They provided evidence, with citations, from experts in their respective fields.

The part that was convincing wasn't "oh, this argument is right, this one is wrong". The part that is convincing is that I can now say "well, according to so and so, this is explained, and so is this, and so is this, and so is this, and so is this" down the line. Now, in this case there was basically nothing left at the end of the argument, but even if there was then I consider the sources. One source says xyz is still unexplained, but that source is now known for making things up and/or not knowing what they're talking about. The other source cites dozens of experts with detailed explanations, photo evidence, clear walkthroughs.

It's not "oh, this argument is better" anymore. Now it's "well, this one literally has no reason to believe it, but this one has a great deal of support."