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You are attempting to give what is effectively jon’s intimate conviction an aura of legitimacy – he conducts a study of sorts, but consisting entirely of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence (?). The point of both analogies however, is that he loses on studies.
I’m not a fan of the distinction. If your belief is Russell’s teapot, you’ve already lost. “At least it’s not Sagan’s dragon”. How would we know, with current tech they look exactly the same. You are multiplying entities beyond necessity.
Not to mention that in this case, due to her moral convictions, her teapot is a dragon .
I think you are slanting /u/iprayiam3's point pretty hard here.
Sure, current, widely-accepted studies. As you said, he has also done a study of sorts, so clearly he doesn't lose all studies, and there's no guarantee he will continue to lose them as studies grow more powerful.
If your belief is [Russell's teapot but with some evidence] then you haven't lost, which was iprayiam3's whole point. If you and plenty of others you've talked to have seen that teapot, but studies say the teapot is not statistically significant, then that doesn't mean you just lose by default.
The difference is that believers in the teapot will not continue to make excuses forever, whereas believers in the dragon will. So it's pretty easy to tell the difference between them, and one clearly is a much more defensible belief.
Beliefs always look like dragons until they don't. I believe in gravity. If I see someone float up into the air, I'm likely to make excuses--maybe they're tricking me or I'm hallucinating. Even if I see a million people start floating around, I will probably decide that someone built an anti-gravity machine, rather than that gravity itself turns off. This looks like a dragon but really it's just normal, correct human reasoning to continue with the most likely hypothesis until another explanation becomes more likely. Moral convictions are even more this way, since they are generally not deliberately-acquired beliefs. People don't know why they believe whether something is moral or not--they generally just believe it until a certain amount of evidence sways them the other way.
Since she has changed her beliefs over time, I think that's pretty strong evidence that her beliefs can indeed still be changed over time based on the evidence she sees in her life, so her convictions are not a dragon.
Thi proves too much. Likely, literally everyone has changed their beliefs over time - I'm skeptical that there's anyone who never had a fantastical belief as a child and purely reasoned things rationally and correctly in a way that didn't mislead them from the moment they had a conscious thought, which they never outgrew due to serving them poorly. By this standard, no one could ever be said to have a "dragon" conviction. For the concept of a "dragon" conviction to be meaningful, a premise has to be that some beliefs are amenable to change through data and some beliefs might not be in a given individual.
To be honest I think very few people, if any, can truly be said to have "dragon" convictions. Many people may have a weaker version of the dragon going on, where their beliefs seem unreasonably stubborn, but I don't think the concept of "does not ever change mind, despite evidence" is even a possible state of the human mind. At best you can say people are too mentally ill to truly understand the issue, or stubborn enough to not be convinced by any reasonable amount of evidence.
That's a perfectly cromulent view, but then the argument about Murphy's view becomes very different. Notably,
is misleading; the reasoning that "since she has changed beliefs over time" is misleadingly over-specific, and rather the reasoning would be "since it is impossible for anyone to have dragon beliefs, her convictions are not a dragon." It's a categorical denial based on the human condition rather than a denial based on Murphy's specific circumstances.
Furthermore, even under this framework, we could just re-label a "dragon" belief as "a teapot belief that reaches a certain level of threshold of being close a true dragon belief," and the arguments would remain the same. Perhaps Murphy's belief isn't a "dragon" but rather a "teapot," and there could theoretically be some evidence that changes her mind, but she has openly stated that she doesn't believe that to be the case, and she behaves in a way consistent with that belief. As a result, for all intents and purposes, her "teapot" belief is sufficiently close to a "dragon" belief to treat it as the latter.
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I think my example was too detailed, and the analogy gets lost. The TLDR is that Russell's teapot and Sagan's dragon are ontologically different concepts. And you can have anecdotal data of the former which can be used to diagnose lack of formal observation, but you cannot have it in the latter.
I am not trying to equivocate qualitative and quantitative research. But qualitative research can observe phenomena that that existing quantitative research may be unable to effectively construct, generalize, or have enough power to measure.
Your default to no, he loses, circumvents my entire point.
You're missing my distinction. The classic form of Russell's teapot is that it is completely unobserved, but not materially unobservable, while Sagan's dragon is both. They only both look the same when they are both speculative. Russel's teapot can be qualitatively or anecdotally observed while Sagan's dragon cannot. If Megan's argument is that she's never actually seen the damage of prostitution, but is convicted it exists based on her ethical assumptions, then yes, it matters not whether it's a teapot or a dragon.
But if her conviction is based on cases, then it's more like, yes I have seen dishware in outer space, even can't give you the coordinates, so I'm not going to take your inability to find it with current satellite tech as proof it isn't there. except the analogy fully breaks down here so this last paragraph is more confusing than enlightening, so why am I even still typing, I'm not even using periods anymore, just commas,
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