Is Agreeing to Disagree Honest or Rational?

[mindstalk]

Robin Hanson says no. If you're a truth-seeking rational thinker who understands disagreement theory, and you meet another such, you should come to agree on all matters of fact. The agreement might be on a probability distribution, i.e. agreeing on uncertainty, but that's not the same as agreeing to disagree. If you believe X is true, and another meta-rational believes Y is true, and you meet, something should change.

He mentions Gulliver's Travels, in that the Houyhnhnms agreed too much to seem human; here's a relevant link to the text.

Comments

I know about that stuff

[(Anonymous)]

That is a literature about if you start with different priors and get the same info, you might not converge in opinion. I'm focused on the situation where you have the same prior and get different info. Robin Hanson

Re: I know about that stuff

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Ah. Obvious if you put it that way. I hadn't translated what wnoise said about sufficiently far apart distributions into "different priors".

Re: I know about that stuff

[wnoise.livejournal.com]

Ah, that wasn't clear, and I hadn't had a chance to read your paper yet.

Damien: I don't know of a terribly in-depth discussion, but Jaynes does briefly go over it around page 127 of _Probability Theory: the Logic of Science_