Quoting from the article:
I didn’t see anything wrong with the reasoning in the article that would lead me to disagree with the authors. Should I be persuaded? Should I support the policy they advocate? Should anyone?
I don’t think so. Why? Because they don’t tell me the state of the debate.
Should the state of the debate include arguments against focusing on the topic? For example, what if someone says that focusing on Congressional budget scoring is a mistake and that focusing on promoting Paths Forward (or radical life extension) is better?
Does anyone disagree with them? What does the other side(s) say? Are there any experts with counter-arguments? In order to be confident they’re right, I’d have to search for opposing views. Then I’d have to read them and see if they had reasonable points (the kind of arguments that would seem potentially correct to me if I didn’t know any counter-arguments, not the kind of arguments that seem worse than nothing because they’re incoherent or illogical). If they made some reasonable arguments, I’d have to be undecided until I did more research and organized all the arguments for all sides and reached a conclusion.
This attitude seems rational. I’ve heard other people advocate for similar things by saying, e.g., that one doesn’t really have an intellectual right to an opinion unless one can properly articulate opposing arguments (steelmanning). JS Mill, in On Liberty, wrote:
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that… if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment
Despite seeming rational, I don’t feel as if I see many people live up to this standard. There’s other basic standards of rationality (such as abstaining from strawmanning and insults) that people (even ostensibly serious intellectuals like Sam Harris) don’t live up to. The fact that these basic standards of rationality are known but widely ignored seems like an obstacle to society’s intellectual progress. It shows that even if rational intellectual methods are discovered and disseminated, they mostly won’t be properly adopted and will be widely ignored. But maybe a small cadre of rational intellectuals can make up for that.
Disagreement is common in general, and there are presumably some reasons we aren’t already doing dynamic scoring. They may be bad reasons, but they presumably have some supporters or things would have already changed.
This reminds me of Socratic intellectualism and dealing with inner conflicts. I.e., if one’s doing something, then there’s a reason that one’s doing it. There’s some benefit that one thinks/feels one’s getting.
It might be useful for me to remember to be charitable to (or steelman) both sides of inner conflicts and outer conflicts of ideas.
Regarding the article as a whole, it seems that people should have much higher standards of knowledge. If one isn’t able to address all opposing arguments and isn’t open to debate, then one hasn’t really earned an intellectual right to one’s opinion.
Lesson: Address opposing arguments.
I haven’t studied Popper yet, but I think I’ve heard something about rival ideas which seems as if it might be a tiny bit related.