Legato wrote:
ike wrote:
Legato wrote:
I like it when people preach to me. I am interested in what people believe, why they believe it and, most importantly, why I should believe it too.
Problem comes in when:
A: People fail to tell me why they believe it in the first place.
B: People fail to meet any rational standards of evidence for their claims.
Personally I prefer to choose beliefs on the basis of their potential to improve the quality of my life. Most religions don't offer much in that direction, but then neither does atheism.
Ahh, see I actually care whether or not my beliefs are true. In fact, that's the only thing I care about in regards to belief. Ergo, I try to base my beliefs on what's most likely to be true.
My problem with that is two fold.
1) In most cases, you're probably wrong anyway. There's an 80% failure rate in R&D, and that's amongst people who are degreed professionals who are being paid to make these things work in order for their company to be successful (and pay their salary). They have every incentive to get it right, and they don't but 1-in-5 times... and companies that are smart about R&D actually get concerned if the department's failure rate drops below 80% because that's the only way to get the good ideas. If most of your stuff works, then you're not really doing anything interesting (or more importantly innovative). And science is constantly overturned... and not just little stuff, big stuff... Check out Learned Optimism (the history of cognitive therapy and how it overturned traditional behaviorism), or Bell's Theorem (non-locality). Yes, you can be right... just not as often as you think. If you think you're right most of the time, you're dead wrong. But you're basically built to be that way -- built-in human biases, overconfidence in particular lead to a "base rate fallacy" in which you insist that, "although most people are wrong most of the time, I'm right most of the time". It's not true. It's a base rate fallacy. That's just the way we're wired to think. Also check out the Wason Selection Task.
2) Often having an accurate belief is actually detrimental, whereas having an inaccurate yet optimistic belief is actually beneficial. There's a huge amount of research in cognitive science that supports this. Check out Martin Seligman's book Learned Optimism and Richard Wiseman's the Luck Factor for some very down-to-earth science on this.
So, since I'm not very likely to be tremendously accurate in the first place, I'd rather focus on being happy and successful in life than worry only about being accurate and ultimately likely fail at all 3 (accuracy, happiness and success). Happiness and success are far more achievable than accuracy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effecthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_taskThis does not mean that I don't strive for accuracy. I just don't obsess about it. It's not "the only thing" that's important to me, because I know it's ultimately not really that achievable anyway. So I give everything my best shot and when it turns out that I'm wrong or I've misinterpreted something, then since I haven't invested all my self-worth in being correct, I can allow myself to be wrong and it's all okay. I can change my mind more easily because I don't have to deal with as much endowment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endowment_effect Of course, I still get endowed, but it's easier to get past it when I've accepted that being wrong much of the time is just part of life. I don't have to save face because I accepted up-front that I might have been wrong.
Ike. We don't have to be right all of the time. In fact we don't have to be right most of the time. We just have to be right often enough to avoid danger and survive. The proof of this approach is the fact of their survival (is that empirical enough for you?). Those who are clever enough to do this will live to the age of reproduction and some of those who do reproduce will pass their cleverness onto their offspring more often than not.
The big mistake is perfectionism. Evolution has not produced perfection. Evolution favors those who can muddle through.
11 Jan 2009, 10:12 pm
