Thursday, June 24, 2021

Epistemology of Avoiding Scams (vs. Avoiding Bias)

One practical epistemology is avoiding being scammed.

A scammer is an intelligent being who wants to take something away from you. People may worry about their biases fooling them, and guard against bias. But biases and scammers are different, in that biases are relatively simple, can't be expected to be devious.

We could say that epistemology (one angle to it) is knowing how to guard against the things that get us to believe falsehoods. An epistemology of avoiding bias will not pick up on the same threats as an epistemology of avoiding being scammed.

A bias epistemologist might be concerned that scam epistemology could be paranoid, vulnerable to "paranoia bias". The scam epistemologist should be concerned about the threat of scam epistemology itself, because a scammer can use all kinds of different ideas as part of a scam, including scam epistemology -- and bias epistemology.

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