I once lent my copy to a friend of a friend prone to conspiratorial thinking, who professed to be open-minded and interested in my viewpoint. A few years later, after many reminders, he returned it to me. I asked him what he thought of it. He said he never read it, but it made for a great paper weight. This was the first of many realizations for me that magical thinking cannot be altered with logic.
I like how everybody thinks this applies to others and they should change.
When in fact this entire genre should be read and addressed exclusively for oneself.
It reminds me how I was passionately discussing sth like this with a (former) friend and it seemed we agreed on the principles. When suddenly through some offhand remakr or turn of phrase it turned out he was thinking of others while I was thinking of myself
Meaning, he thought how easily others were misled (naturally, he himself was perfectly immune, his worldview correct) while I was talking about how I needed to protect myself from being seduced by agreeable nonsense.
Again, this genre applies to the reader, it is not a lecture material for you.
We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have enough trouble keeping our own sane.
What we can do is short or bet against them if we are so convinced that we are right. Place your bets and stick to yourself. If you are as right as you are convinced, you should do well over time. Physical and economic reality >> fantasy and cope.
> We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have enough trouble keeping our own sane.
Assessing other peoples’ beliefs and ideas is, in my experience, one of the best ways to stay sane and learn. Ideas are ultimately independent of the people that hold them. I feel like it is people with unfounded ideas (religions, historically) that try mightily to stop other people from critically assessing them.
> Ideas are ultimately independent of the people that hold them
That's a nice thing to believe. I disagree.
The difference between good people and bad people literally is the things they believe. Nazis aren't born evil, they are made evil by naziism. Its not only OK, it's necessary to your survival to judge them by that metric.
> We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have enough trouble keeping our own sane.
A kinder way to say "judging" is perhaps discrimination. As humans we must discriminate between the good and bad opinions of others, and even good and bad people, or we are doomed.
If you were to learn only from your own mistakes, or try to pretend that there is no such thing as a bad person, you would live a short and brutal life of victomhood.
> We have no business judging others`s beliefs when we have enough trouble keeping our own sane.
I agree with you except for this part here, because what other people believe can, and does, materially impact you when they vote. There's an incentive to try and influence others' beliefs when they're harmful to you or your communities.
Sure but then it also pays to be clear what you are doing: It it not about "truth" or epistemology but about influence/propaganda/persuasion/pick your own euphemism.
And the literature on this is completely difft and, more to the point, vastly more effective than the one on philosophy of science or striving for truth.
Not saying one is better than the other. My point is only those are difft and Sagan is not a good guide to make masses of people vote or act how you want.
> What we can do is short or bet against them if we are so convinced that we are right. Place your bets and stick to yourself. If you are as right as you are convinced, you should do well over time. Physical and economic reality >> fantasy and cope.
In a world with bad faith & ill-informed missionaries (meme-ssionaries?) this is an inadequate political/societal perspective. We should all have the humility to be wrong but the conviction of our current beliefs and tomes that represent them
It's more you can't get someone to change their thinking by giving them a book if they don't want to change or read the book. My mum gives me books on the Baha'i faith but that doesn't work well either because I'm not interested. It's more about whether the person is motivated to change than about logic I think.
Logic itself is a kind of magical thinking. There's no way to get from logic to epistemology, and yet people think they will get to epistemological high ground if they keep to a logic asceticism strictly enough.
It's not a nice thought - how much of human thinking is just down to wiring. Pre-set connections somewhere in the big switchboard of human mind.
How much of whether you're right or wrong on a given issue is not down to knowledge, intelligence or rigor - but to pre-set biases that happen to be set the right way or the wrong way. How the same knowledge and intelligence that can guide you to truths can instead lead you to be more entrenched in wrongs, and just how hard it is to know the difference.
You can try to be better than that, but even if you do, you aren't going to escape your own nature. And most people don't even seem to try.
People here are taking an overly cynical binary stance. It's not that logic cannot reach such people, but that there are barriers to them thinking and accepting your logic. Once you remove most of the barriers, most of these people are happily logical.
The important realization I had is that this is true even for fairly rational people. If you've ever encountered someone who tends to listen more to one source than others, they are exhibiting the exact same behavior this thread is complaining about. And in my experience, this happens to everyone, even the most rational people I've met.
"Once you remove 97% of human nature, what remains is quite logical and reasonable."
That's what I'm talking about. That one person who seems way more rational than most might be 95% irrational - just outperforming the "97% irrational" baseline. And those 2% that make up the difference? How much of this is teachable skills, things you and me could learn and apply, and how much of it is just some weird brain wiring?
That appearance of reason may be deceiving too. You'd expect an atheist to outperform the average by a lot - but is this true? How many atheists are atheists because they carefully examined the case for God's existence and found it lacking - and how many are instead atheists because of something like an innate contrarian streak, or just because of conformism paired with non-religious upbringing?
I happen to remember the reason why I ended up an atheist quite well. I just didn't like the idea of God existing, at all. I didn't get there by being reasonable - I got there by being lucky.
Those barriers often exist as survival mechanisms. It could be quite rational to not even give a hint that one will even consider the logical viewpoint if some of the consequences involve losing one’s status in the community, losing one’s job etc. The overly “rational” loners have something broken with this survival instinct.
The worst is we don't know what we don't know. That sounds trite, but in fact the scientific method is about generating a consensus among "rational, educated, intelligent people."
That doesn't mean it's correct. It doesn't even mean it's objective. The best you can get is a consensus among a subset of humans that certain things happen because of certain other things, and certain models can predict some of these things with limited accuracy.
This turns out to be useful for human experiences, as far as it goes. But we literally can't imagine what connections we're not aware of, what formalisms and models we can't create because our brains are too limited by their evolutionary wiring, and what experiences we're not having because same.
You could argue that these invisible imperceptible things can't affect us, by definition. But we don't know that's true. There could an entire universe of influences and abstractions we're not aware of.
And there probably is. Realistically, what are the odds that our not very large or clever brains really do have the potential to understand the entire universe?
What we think of science is more like the gap between the smartest 1% and the rest of the population. Science is a good way to make those 1% insights sticky and useful to everyone else.
But it's highly presumptuous to assume that human cognition has no limits, and the universe fits comfortably inside our brains.
> Realistically, what are the odds that our not very large or clever brains really do have the potential to understand the entire universe
My belief on this is not entirely rational, of course, but it seems to me that there's probably a sort of Turing-completeness for intelligence/understanding, where as soon as a mind starts being able to understand abstraction, given enough time and resources, it can probably understand the entire universe.
It would also be presumptuous to say that brainfuck is equally powerful to every other programming language that exists, and yet we know it to be true. The fundamental reason we can prove that Turing-complete languages are equivalent to each other is that we can build the same abstractions in both, so intuitively it feels like a similar principle holds for human intelligence.
