Adam Elga

I characterize myself as addicted to rationality and started at a young age.

Around my household, they sometimes, when I was a kid, they called me Mr. Rational.

And I've always been fascinated with probability, doing the rational thing, what's justified, optimizing.

And I think that's the thread that runs through my philosophy.

So I've thought about direction of time and, in particular, how actions bear on what happens in the future and the past, what you should think about various temporal asymmetries.

And also I've thought about, with some co-authors, Dutch book arguments and money pumps and game and decision theory.

This is great.

And also, it's super big.

Given what we will talk about later in the day, we can plant a seed that's really going to connect.

So there's a great philosophical

applied philosophy question about how you should respond when someone who you antecedently considered smart, well informed, and so on, came to a different conclusion than you on the basis of similar evidence.

And on the one hand, they're the people who basically think whoever's in fact, right, should pretty much stick to their guns, or that should count for something extra.

So that's

that kind of stick to your guns side of things.

And then on the other side, there are the people who think, well, given that one of us is wrong, I had no antecedent reason to think that I would be the one who was right.

And certainly finding out that we disagree shouldn't be evidence that I was the one who was right.

And so I should stick with that prior assessment, those prior conditional assessments and,

basically often significantly move in the direction of the person who came to the contrary conclusion.

Sad to say, although there's a kind of escape route here.

There are different versions of the view, but the version that I like, and I've been influenced by David Christensen's writing on this, is the version that says you basically should