A Rational Argument

So are you suggesting that it impossible for someone else to construct an unbiased argument for you?

After all, it's only a small step to observe that it's impossible to ever know whether someone else has the motives of the campaign manager in this case.

You can never construct an unbiased argument for anything, except by an improbable coincidence that any wise person will refuse to believe in.

After all, it's only a small step to observe that it's impossible to ever know whether someone else has the motives of the campaign manager in this case.

Valid evidence is valid, whatever the motives of the one who cites it; the world's stupidest person may say the sun is shining, but that doesn't make it dark out. But you'd be wise to take responsibility for adding up the evidence yourself, and try to check one or more sides to see if any arguments were omitted. (Just don't expect the evidence to balance. It shouldn't.)

I like the spirit of what you're saying, but I'm not convinced that you've made a rational argument for it. Also, I'm concerned that you might have started with the conclusion that a rational argument must flow forward and constructed an account to justify it. If so, in your terms, though not in mine, that would make your conclusion irrational.

I think it can be perfectly rational to think backwards from any conclusion you want to any explanation that fits. Rationality is among other things about being bound by the requirement of consistency in reasoning. It's about creating an account from the evidence. But it's also about evaluating evidence, and that part is where it gets problematic.

In an open and complex world like the one we live in every day, weighing evidence is largely a non-rational (para-rational? quasi-rational?) process. We are operating only with bounded rationality and collections of murky impressions. So, your idea of making a checklist and somehow discovering who the best candidate is is already doomed. There is no truly evidence-driven way of doing that, because evidence does not drive reasoning-- it's our BELIEFS about evidence that drive reasoning. Our beliefs are mostly not a product of a rational process.

A logical explanation is one that follows from premises to conclusions without violating any rule of logic. Additionally, all logical explanations of real world situations involves a claim that the logical model we put forward corresponds usefully to the state of the real world. What we called a "cat" in our reasoning corresponded to that furry thing we understand as a cat, etc. If I can think backwards from a conclusion without finding an absurd premise, then I have a logical explanation. (It may be wrong, of course.)

To attack my self-consistent, logical account of a situation that suggests that X is TRUE, based solely on the fact that I was looking for evidence that X is true, is equivalent to an ad hominem fallacy. I think you can certainly suspect that my argument is weak, and it probably is, but you can't credibly attack my sound argument simply because you don't like me, or you don't like my method of arriving at my sound argument. A lot of science would have to be thrown out if a scientist wasn't allowed to search for evidence to support something he hoped would be true. Also, as you know, many theorems have been proven using backward reasoning.

If you want to attack the argument, you can attack it rationally by offering counter-evidence, or an alternative reasoning that is more consistent with more reliable facts. Furthermore, our entire legal system is built on the idea that two opposing sides in a dispute, marshaling the best stories they can marshal, will provide judges and juries with a good basis on which to decide the dispute.

Instead of calling it irrational, I would say that it's a generally self-deceptive practice to start from a conclusion and work backward. I don't trust that process, but I couldn't disqualify an argument solely on those grounds.

Instead of prescribing forward reasoning only, I would prescribe self-critical thinking and de-biasing strategies.

(BTW, one of the reasons I don't vote is that I am confident that I cannot, under any circumstances, EVER, have sufficient and reliable information about the candidates to allow me to make a good decision. So, I believe all voting decisions people actually make are irrational.)

James, in regard to your last paragraph: I very much doubt whether your decision not to vote is itself a good one, by the standards you've just espoused. After all, if you don't have enough information to decide between voting for X and voting for Y, how can you have enough information to decide between voting for X and voting for no one? Seems to me that you have to make a decision (which might end up being the decision to cast no vote, of course) and the fact that you don't have enough evidence to be strongly convinced that your decision is best doesn't relieve you of the responsibility for making it.

"(BTW, one of the reasons I don't vote is that I am confident that I cannot, under any circumstances, EVER, have sufficient and reliable information about the candidates to allow me to make a good decision. So, I believe all voting decisions people actually make are irrational.)"

See http://lesswrong.com/lw/h8/tsuyoku_naritai_i_want_to_become_stronger/.

Hmmm. If I understand you correctly, then two people could produce an identical argument but one would be incorrect because he did it backwards? Do you suppose that there is an implied arrow of time in every syllogism?

Many of you seem to think there is an axiom of reasoning that says the persuasiveness of an argument must be independent of what you know about the process that produced that argument. There is no such axiom, nor should there be.

Voting is irrational because the probability that your vote will have any effect on the outcome is about zero. I discuss that more and have a back-and-forth in the comment section here.

Many of you seem to think there is an axiom of reasoning that says the persuasiveness of an argument must be independent of what you know about the process that produced that argument. There is no such axiom, nor should there be.

In particular, depending on the process that produces an argument, you may have to infer the existence of evidence not seen.

Hmmm. If I understand you correctly, then two people could produce an identical argument but one would be incorrect because he did it backwards? Do you suppose that there is an implied arrow of time in every syllogism?

More like... Hamlet might be just as good if it had been written by monkeys on typewriters instead of Shakespeare, but there's a reason why it wasn't.

Even if things come out equally by luck in one world, it would have different entanglements in possible worlds. The entanglements wouldn't follow. It's like the lottery ticket that happens to win in your Everett branch or Tegmark duplicate - buying it still wasn't a rational act. Only a forward-flowing algorithm will make the entanglements match up.

"Only a forward-flowing algorithm will make the entanglements match up."

To try and rephrase this in simpler language: You do not know the truth. You want to discover the truth. The only thing you get scored on is how close you are to the truth. If you decide "XYZ is a great guy" because XYZ is writing your paycheck, writing down lots of elaborate arguments will not improve your score, because the only thing you get scored on was already written, before you started writing the arguments. If you start writing arguments and then conclude that XYZ is a great guy, you may improve on your score, because you get a chance to change your mind. Changing your mind becomes mandatory as the truth becomes more complex; if you decide on the truth for personal convenience out of 2^100 or 2^200 possible options, you're never going to hit it if you don't work to improve your accuracy.

This has approximately zero relationship to the way political campaigns (or anything else) happens in the real world, where campaign managers are part of an ideologically biased social network. In fact, their job is essentially to strengthen the connections between voters and a candidate, by whatever means necessary, mostly through propaganda (aka advertising) that combines emotional appeal with the occasional smidgen of rational argument.

Maybe it would be a better world if people didn't work this way, but they do, and I don't see any prospect of changing this. I'm not even sure how rationality can be applied to most electoral issues. Take the issue of abortion. Either you believe abortion is immoral, or not. You can apply rationality to figure out which candidate supports your moral point of view, but it's not much help in setting your root moral values. So how can you make an unbiased choice?

Elections are all about trying to get people who share your biases into power. I know the self-proclaimed rationalists here think the whole process is icky, but part of being rational is dealing with the real world, not the world as you would like it.

That being said, there's room in the electoral process for a bias in favor of rationality, science, humanism, and enlightenment. I think it's pretty clear which of the two major political parties in the US favor those values.

Actually this would work nicely if the body that makes this survey doesn't work for any of the candidates, but either has independent votes or is funded by the voters. It would then be in their best interest to show the voters all the evidence, rather than "all the true evidence that serves my candidate".

In other words, if you want to intervene in politics as a rational agent, you shouldn't work for any party: you should work for the public at large! Which brings us to the following question: what is the necessity, nay, the justification for parties existing in this day and age? Aren't there better alternatives in making governments be the faithful servants of popular will, rather than, say, of their own existence or of the interests of a particular group of people?

This is why I think an adversarial court system is fundamentally defective.

Granted, inquisitorial court systems have flaws as well... but in principle it seems like an inquisition is actually what we want. We want to know what happened, not find out who is better at arguing.