hyperpape wrote:What on earth do you mean? Can I reasonably hold the opinion that Yuki Satoshi is the best professional in the world? Or if that doesn't offend your sense of reality enough, that I'm the best go player alive? Or even that I'm better than Magicwand?
Of course you don't believe that. You would judge the latter two opinions as obviously unreasonable, and not ask what my perspective is (and God help you if you don't make those judgments).
So do you just mean that when it comes to top professionals, it becomes too hard to decide, so that any opinion is reasonable? If so, that's a very silly inference. If it's impossible to say who's strongest, then that makes Magicwand just as unreasonable--he would be overstepping his bounds by saying that Japanese players are weak. Everything he says depends on there being true and obvious answers to the question "who is the strongest". He presumes that people who have (certain) different opinions are unreasonable just as much as I do.
I think there's an important distinction to be made between
agreeing with somebody's comment, and understanding that they might have their own reasons for making a comment.
If you say that you are the best go player in the world, I probably don't agree. But it is still possible that you know something that I don't. Maybe you have some hidden talent and are just pretending to be 3k. That's entirely possible.
But I don't have the information that you have.
So with the information that I have
available to me, I can make a decision on what I think is correct. However, the set of information that another person has is a different set of information. And they might draw different conclusions with that information.
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Here's another example:
I have no idea what "Quazary Candy" is. I've never heard of it before. One day, somebody shows me a package of "Quazary Candy". I open it up, and there's a bunch of blue pieces that look like M&Ms. They are all very sweet. I kind of like the candy, so I ask for some more. They give me 2000 packages. I eat them all. All of the bags have sweet blue pieces, which look like M&Ms.
Then Bob comes along and tells me, hey, have you ever had "Quazary Candy"? Quazary Candy is some of the sourest candy that you can imagine. When you open the package, they look like red triangles.
Now, at this point, I've had Quazary Candy before, so I think to myself, "This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. He's talking nonsense. I've eaten Quazary Candy for the past two years, and I've had over 1000 packages, and not once did I have a sour piece of candy. He's just some stupid guy that doesn't know what he's talking about.".
Now suppose that Quazary Candy actually comes in two flavors: sweet and sour. One is red, and one is blue. Let's say that Bob has only had the sour kind, and has never had the sweet kind.
From Bob's perspective, the only Quazary Candy that he has ever experienced was red and sour. Therefore, he infers that, as a rule, Quazary Candy is red and sour. From your perspective, the candy is sweet and blue. The only experience that you've had tells you that it's sweet and blue.
It could be just coincidence that you both have distinct sets of data. But both of you have rationally made conclusions about Quazary Candy, based on the information that you have available to you.
And you both think that the other is being irrational.
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***Nobody is "right" with these types of statements. We only have some data points, which we can use to draw our own conclusions. Depending on the data that you have, different conclusions may be drawn.
Since you can only see your own data, you have no idea if the other person's decision process is rational. In order to accurately determine this, you also need to see the axioms that they use to draw their conclusions. But this is not possible.
The best alternative is to share with one another what you know. If you tell Bob about the sweet candy, and he tells you about the sour candy, you both might learn something.
