Sorry for the delay; wrote a reply on an airplane thinking it would save when I landed 
Take two:
Starting here because from your response, I’m concerned that I came across as claiming that you were mistaken, and that was not my intent. Rather, I intended to say that, since we disagree, and our beliefs are incompatible, we know that (at least) one of us is mistaken, even if we don’t agree about who it is. And that would be true even if neither of us were making a knowledge claim about our beliefs: I believe X, you believe Y, if we know it can’t be both X and Y, then we know one of us is mistaken.
My initial reaction was to say that I had never claimed to know that you are mistaken, but it does seem to follow from my claim to know X (rather than just believe X): If I know X, then I know you mistaken if you believe ~X. It’s interesting how different those claims feel.
This still feels like special pleading. Sure, if I were moderating a debate about this topic, I would absolutely name it something like “Ghosts: real or not?” But elsewhere, lots of thread titles are a short version of the thesis expressed in the OP. As I said above, it’s a bit clickbaity – on a quick review, it looks like it’s more common in political threads, and from my own history it looks like I do it more often on spicier topics (though not exclusively).
I dunno, maybe it is good general practice to avoid statements as titles. Related to how ‘I know X’ and ‘You are mistaken in your believe that ~X’ feel different, assertive titles probably work as clickbait because they feel enough like the latter to offend.
I don’t think we need to be as rigorous in choosing our questions, or in determining what hinges on the answers, as we should be in finding the answer. It seems OK to pick up a question because it tickles your fancy and then use the most rigorous possible means to answer it.
And I don’t think it’s possible to demand as much rigor from our heuristics as we demand from our higher-order beliefs. Out beliefs have to be bootstrapped, so at bottom they’re always going to be founded on instinct and raw experience that are often inconsistent, and so must be unreliable. Further, it’s why we need more deliberate rigor for our higher-order beliefs: because they’re based on layers and layers of shaky foundation.
In this thread, Ecmandu most directly:
I won’t claim Ecmandu is representative of people who believe in ghosts, but these sentiments are familiar.
I don’t think there’s any escaping the psychological implications of the disagreement: either there are no ghosts, in which case anyone who believes they’ve experienced a ghost is wrong about the nature of their own experience; or there are ghosts, and people who haven’t experienced ghosts is something like spiritually colorblind.
There’s no version of the process that avoids that. And yet, someone is mistaken.
Humility cuts both ways.
Maybe a better example would be cold reading, where one person (the ‘Reader’) uses a handful of techniques to convince another (the ‘Subject’) that the Reader can read the Subjects mind. It relies on common cognitive failure-modes that you can point to, but no measure. And while you can recreate the trick on a different person as a demonstration, you can’t really recreate it on the same Subject a second time.
It doesn’t seem like ‘mind-reading’ to explain cold reading to the Subject after the fact, and it doesn’t seem wrong or insulting (even if it makes the Subject feel bad).
As a human, learning about human psychology can be unflattering.
Liberalism has the individual as the ultimate arbiter of truth, and that leaves room for divergence etc. But that’s undergirded by the free exchange of ideas, such that while everyone gets to decide for themselves, everyone else can try to change their mind. The ‘marketplace of ideas’ is presumed to generate and maintain a shared reality on relevant questions of objective fact (which questions are ‘relevant’ is similarly left to the marketplace of ideas).
I mean, where they did try, they actually ended up learning a lot, and there’s good evidence that parts of the enlightenment project came out of those interactions – including ideas about a federation of states and deliberative democracy.
Europeans should have done less of the other bad stuff and adopted the good stuff more fully, but where those discussions took place they seem to have been really really good.
I don’t think that’s true, but in any case they definitely regular-declare that there are no ghosts. For almost all scientists, the existence of ghosts has been disproven for all practical purposes. The fact that they don’t generally take a professional position on it is evidence that it’s no longer an open question so far as professional scientists are concerned.
You act like disproving ‘Y description of light emitting X’ is tantamount to disproving nothing at all, but if Y description is one a lot of people accept for X, it’s quite significant to have disproved that. 118k people visit r/ghosts in a given week. Many of them are going to be very surprised to learn that the capable-of-being-filmed-or-photographed description of ghosts has been disproven.
You overestimate my skill as a lawyer.
I never suggested that people shouldn’t believe in ghosts because it’s harmful. People shouldn’t believe in ghosts because ghosts don’t exist.
Moralistically, if ghosts exist people should believe in them even if it is harmful – I value truth more than I value harm.