That doesn’t seem to be a good range – markets like Intrade are known to have long-shot biases, and the more restricted the range, the less attractive it is as a market. (It’s harder to find irrational traders to take for 10 or 20% return if there are only a few prices it could trade at! Now something like Obama for President where the prices could range from 0 to 100 at various times, that’s worth trading.)

IMO the fact that so few people seem to be faced with this dilemma has more to do with overconfidence than an unusual weakness for persuasion that you and I share. It may also be due to the fact that few people take the time to expose themselves thoroughly to alternative points of view.

But look at the peculiar ideas presented here, such as Eliezer and Robin’s recent debate about the advent of superintelligence in the relatively near future. I strongly suspect that both of their opinions are outliers among relevant experts, yet many readers here are persuaded by one or another of their views. Is it because their positions are so obviously right? I don’t think so – I think it is just that they are both skilled at marshalling persuasive arguments for their positions, and few readers have learned, as you and I have, of just how dangerous it is to allow oneself to be persuaded by skillful argumentation. In this case, at least, each of them seemed to be skeptical of the other’s scenario, so we did get exposed to both sides; but still it seemed to come down to a choice between one future or the other.

As for the concern that the strategy of listening to experts would have committed us to wrong or even morally unjust views in the past, this is unfortunate but after all no strategy is perfect. People today may imagine that they would have had the independence, intelligence and intellectual courage to adopt more enlightened (or at least modern) views even if they had lived centuries in the past, but surely this is self delusion in almost all cases.

I’ve found that although I’m good at catching basic logical fallacies, in areas where I’m not an expert I can easily be suckered by a really good writer cherry-picking facts and quotes. For example, upon reading some of Graham Hancock’s books arguing for Atlantis, I was utterly convinced until I could find specific refutations of his points. Most pro- and anti- global warming writing also seems entirely convincing until I reverse the effect by reading something from the opposite side. Even the more intellectual old-earth creationists have occasionally made me think twice: I can’t personally conceive of a believable series of individually adaptive steps by which an eye could evolve, and in the dark days before the Internet I couldn’t just go onto talk.origins and find one already written up either. And in some fields, the cycle of evidence -> refutation -> counter-refutation goes on forever without either side being terminally convincing: along with the aforementioned global warming stuff, some economic issues also make me feel that way. After reading the debate on reason.com between Taubes and one of his critics, I already know it’s going to happen here too.

My solution thus far has been to assume that any consensus of experts much better informed than I which doesn’t have a really obvious reason to be biased is probably right, and that any evidence to the contrary no matter how convincing is probably just clever arguing. But it bothers me that this position would probably have made a Catholic out of me back in the Dark Ages, or a racist back in the days when everyone was racist.

Does anyone else here have this problem, and if so, what do you do about it?

don’t you people get stressed thinking,writing all that? do you get it naturally or use any specific habits/tools to destress?