Gonna keep pumping this because a) I think it came out really good, and b) it's related to some Toulmin-esque ideas I've been developing on how to teach critical thinking beyond SIFT. - ThreadSky

mikecaulfield.bsky.social • 409 days ago

Gonna keep pumping this because a) I think it came out really good, and b) it's related to some Toulmin-esque ideas I've been developing on how to teach critical thinking beyond SIFT.

Reposted from Charlie Warzel

A while back @mikecaulfield.bsky.social spoke to me about a v smart theory he had. It helps explain how we get shit like 'DEI Made Airplanes Unsafe' and why discourse is so exhausting/poisoned. His theory is that we live in The Age of Evidence Maximalism, where Everything is Evidence. (gift link!)

Comments

mrxdentith.com•409 days ago

A serious question: isn’t the evidence for your “evidence maximalism” account reliant on some form of evidence maximalism itself?

mikecaulfield.bsky.social•409 days ago

Good question, but I think not. I don't go into credentials or research background but I study and quantify this behavior for my day job, and could show quantitatively, for example, it was the dominant trend driving the big lie, or many other such events.

mrxdentith.com•409 days ago

It just seems that you can apply your three conditions/criteria of “evidence maximalism” in such a way to ensure you get the evidence for evidence maximalism…

mikecaulfield.bsky.social•409 days ago

Ahh.. yes. The underlying model in the original piece Charlie talks about from a year ago uses Toulmin's model of evidence-warrant-claim to ground these judgments.

mrxdentith.com•409 days ago

Are the conditions jointly necessary and sufficient, or are they weighted? I’m very much aware of how “warrant” is used in the epistemic literature (given my work on the philosophy of conspiracy theory”) and how it is sometimes a fairly vague concept…

mikecaulfield.bsky.social•409 days ago

We might have to do this outside Bluesky -- it will take some time but I plan to write a longer piece. Or if you wanted to write a short critique I'd love to read it.

mikecaulfield.bsky.social•409 days ago

That framework (from The Uses of Argument, 1958) is context sensitive and negotiated, but provides a model that can structure normative judgments. But it's a bit much for an Atlantic article.

mrxdentith.com•409 days ago

I guess that explains my worry; it seems that on the description in the Atlantic article an awful lot hinges, if the criteria are negotiated, on author interpretation of evidence, which seems like it is going to produce *in some cases at least* evidence maximalist evidence of evidence maximalism

mikecaulfield.bsky.social•409 days ago

The minimalist position would be that these incidents are local or rare and not requiring being seen as connected by any larger pattern, but that's not supportable on the data, at least in the political realm. But a great question.