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[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal]

A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid argument for something, then you should accept the conclusion. Even if the conclusion is unpopular, or inconvenient, or you don\u2019t like it. He envisioned an art of rationality that would make people believe something\xa0after it had been proven to them.

And I nodded my head, because it sounded reasonable enough, and it wasn\u2019t until a few hours later that I thought about it again and went \u201cWait, no, that would be a terrible idea.\u201d

I don\u2019t think I\u2019m overselling myself too much to expect that I could argue circles around the average uneducated person. Like I mean that on most topics, I could demolish their position and make them look like an idiot. Reduce them to some form of \u201cLook, everything you say fits together and I can\u2019t explain why you\u2019re wrong, I just know you are!\u201d Or, more plausibly, \u201cShut up I don\u2019t want to talk about this!\u201d

And there are people who can argue circles around me. Maybe not on\xa0every\xa0topic, but on topics where they are experts and have spent their whole lives honing their arguments. When I was young I used to read pseudohistory books; Immanuel Velikovsky\u2019s\xa0Ages in Chaos\xa0is a good example of the best this genre has to offer. I read it and it seemed so obviously correct, so perfect, that I could barely bring myself to bother to search out rebuttals.

And then I read the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct, so devastating, that I couldn\u2019t believe I had ever been so dumb as to believe Velikovsky.

And then I read the rebuttals to the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct that I felt silly for ever doubting.