Here's A Good Way To Arouse Your Suspicions

Here's a tip I find useful in life. While of course it's necessary to examine the content of people's claims to check for faulty reasoning and factual errors, it is also quite informative to examine their accompanying attitude too. In other words, if a certain claim is being made, it's always good to ask: what would be a reasonable concomitant attitude be alongside that claim? If the claim and the attitude seem commensurate, there is often, but not always, a good chance that the claim being made is a reasonable one. However, if the claim and the attitude seem not to be commensurate, there is often, but again not always, a good chance that the claim being made is an unreasonable one.

A couple of examples spring to mind. Suppose you meet someone who likes to go around preaching hellfire, believing the majority of the world's population is damned to an eternity of torment. What would be a reasonable concomitant attitude alongside that claim? An obvious one would be deep sadness, another would be mournful regret - after all, if you believe much of the world is currently going straight to hell, surely that's about the worst thing imaginable, so why would you be anything other than terribly upset and heartbroken about such a proposition?

 

Yet you'll notice most hellfire preachers are not like that - they appear to exhibit a smug satisfaction hardly consistent with the terrible news they are sharing, which makes me think their view isn't reasonable. This extends more broadly to any kind of Christian faith built around humility. How strange to find so many people paying almost no regard to the biggest crisis in the world, people who don't have enough food, drink and shelter to survive, yet obsessing all the time about the so-called 'disgrace' of two people of the same sex loving each other in a stable relationship.

Another example I find is green people who treat fossil fuels as though they are comparable to some kind of ghastly bodily secretion. Yes it's good when technological advances wean us off the current dependency of fossil fuels for so much of our industry, but to be so averse to these raw materials in the way that exhibits not even the faintest appreciation for how important they've been in our achievements is a dead giveaway that the person is probably not a reasonable one on this matter.

The reality is, we are not actually running out of resources - the greens are making a mistake in their analysis (as I explain here in this blog post). But even getting into the head of a green person and pretending they are right about the imminent shortage of fossil fuels, a proper attitude to this should not be what you usually find, it ought to be sorrow that such a vital resource is in the last stage of its utility, gladness that humans have been able to use this resource as such a vital vehicle for the progression-explosion we've seen over the past 150 years; and appreciation for how the free market of trade and competition is continually engendering more and more efficiency in a way that resembles nature's law of least effort (most parsimonious energy expenditure).

But generally greens evince none of these attitudes - they instead have a disproportionately doleful attitude to fossil fuels, focusing only on the comparably exiguous amounts of bad that have come from our increased progress, standard of living, and well-being.

So while I'm highly unlikely to make unbalanced blanket claims about what is a peculiarly large number of people, it is at least reasonable to consider that if the vast majority of these hellfire preachers and greens have such different attitudes to the expected ones, we ought to be suspicious not just of their motives, but of their conclusions too. Credible attitude indicates credible conclusion is not an unimpeachable heuristic - but it's one to which we are wise to give proper consideration when simple logical and evidential correction won't quite do the trick.