5. Conclusion

Two central lessons of Ameliorative Psychology are that when it comes to

social judgment, (a) proper unit weight models outperform humans in

terms of reliability and (b) improper unit weight models (of which the

Goldberg Rule and the F minus F rule are examples) often perform nearly

as well as proper models and therefore better than humans. So why the

resistance to these findings? We suspect that part of the reason people

resist this ‘‘practical conclusion’’ is that the SPR results are noxious to our

conception of ourselves as good reasoners. Further, they undermine our

hope—so evident in the a priorism of so much contemporary epistemology—

that we can be experts at recognizing good reasoning without massive

empirical aid. (The SPR results do not, of course, suggest that we are naturally

atrocious at recognizing good reasoning. It just suggests that we

aren’t experts; we aren’t so good that we couldn’t learn a lot from Ameliorative

Psychology.) Once our dreams of native epistemological expertise

are dashed, we can no longer take seriously the idea that we should attempt

to build a theory of good reasoning without attending to empirical matters.

The fact that people are slaves to the temptation of broken legs

suggests a deep problem with the methods of Standard Analytic Epistemology.

SAE makes our considered epistemic judgments the final arbiters

of matters epistemic. But it is precisely these epistemic judgments that so

often fall to the temptation of broken legs. We have seen this countless

times in discussions with philosophers. When confronted with 50-years

worth of evidence suggesting that short, unstructured interviews are worse

than useless, we are now accustomed to philosophers dismissing these findings

ultimately because, well, they just don’t fit in with their considered

judgments. Now the defender of SAE might reply that there is no principled

reason why SAE is committed to excessive defection—for the evidence

here presented can now help to guide our judgment. Our reply is

that, after 50 years, it hasn’t. Avoiding defection isn’t a matter of simply

knowing the threat; it is a matter of avoiding it in the first place. And we

can’t avoid it if we have a philosophy that presses our faces into temptation’s

fleshy cargo.

Two central lessons of Ameliorative Psychology are that when it comes to

social judgment, (a) proper unit weight models outperform humans in

terms of reliability and (b) improper unit weight models (of which the

Goldberg Rule and the F minus F rule are examples) often perform nearly

as well as proper models and therefore better than humans. So why the

resistance to these findings? We suspect that part of the reason people

resist this ‘‘practical conclusion’’ is that the SPR results are noxious to our

conception of ourselves as good reasoners. Further, they undermine our

hope—so evident in the a priorism of so much contemporary epistemology—

that we can be experts at recognizing good reasoning without massive

empirical aid. (The SPR results do not, of course, suggest that we are naturally

atrocious at recognizing good reasoning. It just suggests that we

aren’t experts; we aren’t so good that we couldn’t learn a lot from Ameliorative

Psychology.) Once our dreams of native epistemological expertise

are dashed, we can no longer take seriously the idea that we should attempt

to build a theory of good reasoning without attending to empirical matters.

The fact that people are slaves to the temptation of broken legs

suggests a deep problem with the methods of Standard Analytic Epistemology.

SAE makes our considered epistemic judgments the final arbiters

of matters epistemic. But it is precisely these epistemic judgments that so

often fall to the temptation of broken legs. We have seen this countless

times in discussions with philosophers. When confronted with 50-years

worth of evidence suggesting that short, unstructured interviews are worse

than useless, we are now accustomed to philosophers dismissing these findings

ultimately because, well, they just don’t fit in with their considered

judgments. Now the defender of SAE might reply that there is no principled

reason why SAE is committed to excessive defection—for the evidence

here presented can now help to guide our judgment. Our reply is

that, after 50 years, it hasn’t. Avoiding defection isn’t a matter of simply

knowing the threat; it is a matter of avoiding it in the first place. And we

can’t avoid it if we have a philosophy that presses our faces into temptation’s

fleshy cargo.