Comment by Kenji

>This is the correct Bayesian action, by the way. If I know that a false argument sounds just as convincing as a true argument, argument convincingness provides no evidence either way, and I should ignore it and stick with my prior.

Wrong. The correct scientific methodology would be to store the new conflicting theories in your head while being unsure whether or not they are true (withholding judgement); later on, if new evidence sheds light on the issue, you can discard or keep it. The silliest thing to do is what this guy advises: Persistence on arbitrary facts because they were first. That's how religion works. Despicable.

I don't like how this guy treats "high school dropout" as an example for someone particularly stupid and naive. It sounds elitist and smug and detracts from the main point of the text. It reminds me of lesswrong.com

> I've heard a few good arguments in this direction before, things like how engineering trains you to have a very black-and-white right-or-wrong view of the world based on a few simple formulae

Oh no, nothing is further from the truth. In engineering, you have to do a lot of subtle design decisions that aren't black-and-white at all. Difficult tradeoffs like cache invalidation, where there's no right answer in general.

All in all, a subpar article that goes on way too long and could be shortened to a couple of lines.