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

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".