I know this is intended as a shitpost, but it points to a very deep epistemological problem. By definition, everyone thinks any given opinion of theirs is right (if they didn't, then that wouldn't be their opinion). But of course not everyone can have all the right opinions all the time
I actually had that thought as I was posting this. I was mocking people who are arrogant about their beliefs and refuse to be proven wrong, but I was also thinking about this paradox that every person believes each of their opinions to be correct yet also knows they can't all be correct
Isn't the solution to that problem really simple though? Just value doubt.
That definitely helps but doesn’t remove the problem entirely
Doesn't this problem dissolve if you see yourself as holding a nonbinary personal level of confidence based on your own experiences and information? Of course people with different experiences are going to hold different beliefs, I haven't seen what they've seen and vice versa. If both of us knew the whole truth we would agree, but we don't so we disagree.
The bigger problem in practice, IMO, is that confidence is entangled with social-political weight. Someone who qualifies their statements gets taken less seriously than someone who doesn't. People want others to confidently endorse positions to signal their friendship or alliance. Even microexpressions of doubt and the timing of actually taking things under consideration are seen as reasons to discredit one's position, so we can't even hold private doubts reliably.
So we are constantly being trained to feel and think that we are more confident than we really are, and realizing that can feel like the ground falling away beneath our feet because, social-politically, it is. But that's a cultural issue rather than an epistemological one.
Doesn’t this problem dissolve if you see yourself as holding a nonbinary personal level of confidence based on your own experiences and information?
I don’t think so, and I think you pointed to why it doesn’t work in your comment:
Of course people with different experiences are going to hold different beliefs, I haven’t seen what they’ve seen and vice versa. If both of us knew the whole truth we would agree, but we don’t so we disagree.
Of course having weighted beliefs does help weaken the problem, and can go a long way, but it doesn’t remove it entirely
Could you explain why you think what I said means it doesn't work?
The weights you put on your beliefs are still beliefs. You can have belief (A) I think X is true, and belief (B) I believe that my belief A is 75% likely to be true.
But when you get down to it, B is just a belief, just like A is (the only difference is that A is a belief about another belief; but this doesn’t make it any less of a belief). So the weight you put on your beliefs are just yet more beliefs that you by definition believe be true.
Like all beliefs, these beliefs are not guaranteed to be true, even though we by definition believe them to be true. In fact this class of belief is fairly unreliable. Like you said, these beliefs are very subjective, because they are based on the experiences you’ve just happened to have in your life. But circumstances of chance like this are not a reliable way to form beliefs. So though you by definition belief all these meta-beliefs to all be true, they are almost certainly not all true.
So we are back where we are started: everyone believes all their beliefs to be true, but not everyone can be right all time.
Sorry, I know that explanation was a bit convoluted, but I don’t know how to explain it in depth without being convoluted. Does that make sense?
Why on god's green earth would you believe meta-beliefs to be true "by definition"? Historically there have been so many changes to meta-beliefs, from divine inspiration to bayes' law. I have memories of my meta-beliefs changing as a child, and honestly my meta-beliefs even change depending on my mood. So why the heck would I not expect the same to be possible in the future?
As far as I can tell, subjective belief probabilities are a sort of integration over forward propagation through lines of reasoning, world models, and meta-beliefs that occur in one's brain.
This belief finds practical application in stuff like me making sure I eat if my meta-reasoning is cranky (assigning too little value to new information, expecting hostility to be more productive than empathy, etc.).
Though of course I am not super confident in any precise meta-meta-statements because human brains aren't well understood yet by anyone, let alone me.
I suppose you could reduce all that complexity to a single line of reasoning that you try to trust with utmost confidence, but then I would expect you to get akrasia as the rest of your brain sees all the things you are missing and starts ignoring your "certain meta-beliefs".
Why on god’s green earth would you believe meta-beliefs to be true “by definition”?
A belief is a proposition that you think is true. If you think some proposition, meta or otherwise, is not true then it wouldn’t be a belief of yours
Ah, no wonder you're having a epistemological crisis then. It must be hard only being able to do binary (true/false) logic when thinking about your own reasoning. I'm sorry you're going through that.
I understand that intellectually you may have given the possibility that I'm at least partially right about reasoning zero credence. But, like, come oooon. You must remember times in your own life when you learned new ways of reasoning and changed your confidence in your beliefs as a result. So how surprised would you really be if you learned something new about how to reason? Can you really tell yourself you never expect that to happen again? Doesn't it feel more like when you're reading a book and you can't predict what the next page is going to read?
Weighing your beliefs doesn’t guarantee that you’ll never have false beliefs, and you’ll still on some level believe all your beliefs to be true. That doesn’t mean weighing your beliefs is totally worthless and you are still free to do that if you like
Most of my beliefs are false. I assign 50% probability that Mexico City is west of 30⁰ W when I typed "30⁰ W", and now I've thought about it for a minute I'm 99.99% sure^1^. Now I looked it up on Wikipedia and thought some more and I'm at least 99.99999999999% sure^1^.
I knew at the start something like this would happen and that "There 50% probability that Mexico City is west of 30⁰ W" was never true about the world in the way it is true that there is 50% chance a particular potassium-40 atom in my brain will undergo radioactive decay between now and its half life from now.
I was as close to 100% sure as I can get that Mexico City wouldn't objectively have 50% chance of being on one side of that line than the other. I was extremely confident that I was wrong, and yet there I was saying it because it was my best guess.
I really hope you won't leave this conversation still thinking you believe your beliefs to be true, because that's no way to live.
^1^: normalized to the world being real, which I don't know how to sensibly apply probabilities to. Still I would be very surprised if such a charade broke over this, so I expect to consistently experience Mexico City at 99⁰W for longer than I'll remember that it is there.
Sometimes I hold some opinions out of comfort/self-soothing. One example is that I'd rather just hold the opinion that China is socialist than seriously consider the legitimate left-wing critiques of its rightist and capitalist excesses. I think these hold water but if I had to reckon with a reality that almost none of the world is socialist instead of 1/6th, I would be utterly paralyzed into inaction via despair.
I checked out all of your opinions, then believed the opposite.
I pull my bed covers over my head and huff my own farts until I see stars then the universe lets me know that I'm correct about everything
joseph smith
I investigated myself and found out that I'm right. Lol
Common sense, I guess...
I'm always wrong, so I take my initial opinion I truly believe and then I choose to hold the opposite of that opinion.
Always being wrong though means that my choice to hold the opposite opinion is also wrong therefore it makes my initial opinion correct.
This made me think of that Seinfeld episode where George does the exact opposite of every decision he would normally make, and then someone else posted a gif from it
That's where I got it from lol it's the Costanza rule, but I joke that it's really the Costanza paradox since choosing to do the opposite is still a choice and so it should also be wrong
School of hard knocks yo.
Is that the old, or new school?
I ask the magic conch
i just don't listen to other people. i cover my ears and go LA LA LA whenever my opinion is challenged.
Because i said so, duh
Be like water. Let your opinions take shape.
Statements of fact can be proved or disproved with objective evidence, whereas statements of opinion depend on personal values and preferences.
https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/fact-opinion-differentiation/
i was born this way
I believe that V. I. Lenin communed with Satan and received his unholy word, and so everything he wrote was pure lies.
Lies are actually good, according to my twisted, warped morality.
Whenever I encounter a question about anything, I just consult my unholy texts and blindly accept whatever I read.
If the answer's not in there, I declare the person who asked it to be a treasonous heretic.
I actually love treason and heresy so sometimes we end up making out. But only if it's gay.
I'm genderfluid so whether it's gay or not depends on which gender I am atm, which is an open question. And whenever I encounter a question, I read Lenin about it.
I can't find the answer and now I'm trapped in an endless loop where all I do is read Lenin and question my gender. And that loop's name?
Samsara.
Thank you for coming to my poetry reading.
Many, many years of being right in the first place
I know this doesn't happen for everyone but for me it was when I became a father.
Easy, just be me, you comparative dunce.
Well played! 😅
Natural Stupidity.
Since I started to do everything in hindsight.
its like r/shittyaskreddit except its lemmy