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Peter Gerdes's avatar

But why would one presume the majoritarian position as your prior? That's generally not how we understand priors. In particular, any position that requires that doesn't create a compelling argument because the person being addressed has no obligation to agree with those priors.

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Rideout's avatar

Another way to consider the argument: one should presume the majoritarian position as their prior for a given belief, but should update that prior based on evidence or arguments. How heavily should one weight that update? The best-case contrarian has some sort of epistemic skill, maybe they are more numerate, or intentionally study rational argument, or have some sort intuitive rationality and a history of prior contrary successes. If you use the average common-sense muddled thinking you shouldn't weight any given piece of evidence all that much in your update.

All that probably boils down to: you wouldn't be a contrarian in the first place if you didn't believe yourself to have some particular justification in your heterodoxy, which is a rather obvious observation.

Which probably means you should only trust your own reasons for contrary beliefs if the methods used have have prior validated successes, which all things considered, is a rarer feat that it should be.

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