Why do people believe true things?
Dan Williams argues that understanding true beliefs is more challenging than false ones, emphasizing the complexities of knowledge formation amid misinformation, cognitive biases, and social influences, particularly regarding wealth and poverty.
Read original article
In his exploration of why people believe true things, Dan Williams argues that the real challenge lies not in understanding why false beliefs arise, but in grasping the conditions under which true beliefs are formed. He emphasizes that ignorance and misperceptions are common, yet some individuals manage to perceive reality accurately. Williams highlights the importance of recognizing that the truth about complex matters is not self-evident and is often obscured by layers of social interpretation and cognitive biases. He critiques the tendency to view poverty as an anomaly rather than the default state of humanity, suggesting that wealth creation is the true puzzle requiring deeper explanation. Furthermore, he discusses the concept of "explanatory inversions," where common sense misinterprets the nature of social phenomena, such as cooperation and law-abiding behavior. Williams posits that social epistemology should focus on understanding why true beliefs emerge amidst a landscape filled with misinformation and biases, rather than solely investigating the prevalence of false beliefs. This perspective encourages a more nuanced view of knowledge formation, emphasizing the complexities involved in aligning mental models with reality.
- The challenge of understanding true beliefs is more significant than that of false beliefs.
- Wealth creation is a complex phenomenon that requires deeper exploration than the default state of poverty.
- "Explanatory inversions" highlight the misconceptions in common sense regarding social behavior.
- Social epistemology should focus on the emergence of true beliefs in a context filled with misinformation.
- Cognitive biases and social influences heavily mediate the formation of beliefs about complex issues.
Related
Nobody knows what's going on
Misinformation's impact on beliefs, reliance on unreliable sources, and human tendency to trust comforting information are discussed. Difficulty in discerning truth and consequences of widespread misinformation are highlighted.
Are people too flawed, ignorant, and tribal for open societies?
Open societies face challenges in understanding political reality due to complexity, invisibility, incentives, and biased cognition. Citizens struggle with navigating issues, relying on mediated information, and rational ignorance. Biases like self-interest and tribalism affect political engagement, leading to distorted beliefs and decisions.
The Four Theories of Truth as a Method for Critical Thinking
The article outlines four theories of truth: correspondence, coherence, consensus, and pragmatic, emphasizing their roles in critical thinking and the importance of personal experience in evaluating claims.
Fashionable Ideas
Dan Williams discusses "fashionable beliefs," where acceptance of ideas is influenced by trendiness and social signaling rather than rational evaluation, impacting identity, status, and adaptability in society.
Principles I Find Interesting
Johnny Webber discusses principles of human behavior, including mimetic desire, scarcity mindset, Occam’s Razor, and the Golden Rule, emphasizing empathy, simplicity, and the effectiveness of positive reinforcement over punishment.
13 commentsAs it relates to the title: basically the author doesn't understand why altruism was difficult for evolutionary biologists and game theorists to explain, and instead of learning about those fields and the questions they raised then answered, they call for an "explanatory inversion" where their own beliefs are correct by default.
The titular question is maybe only interesting if you've been steeping in post-modernism for too many semesters and are trying to blow some epistemic bubbles to see which way is up. It's worth noticing that a rational mind can believe an unlimited amount of true things without needing to un-believe anything. The same is not true for non-truths. Non-truths conflict with truths and other non-truths.
First, GDP is a total amount, not a per-capita figure. The population has grown dramatically, so even if everyone throughout history was equally wealthy, the graph would still have the same general shape.
Second, even though the scale on the left side is equally divided into $20T increments; going from 0 to $20T is not the same as going from $20T to $40T. Exponential growth is required to achieve the first milestone. A mere doubling gets you to the second one.
Especially once you go beyond the surface-level responses that try to rely on things like particle physics. It is fundamentally a philosophical question, not a science question.
But still, it is interesting to consider that the three phenomena he talks about -- poverty, crime, and ignorance -- are now mostly thought of as aberrations from the norm that needed to be eliminated, when in fact they're the state that the vast, overwhelming majority of humans in history were born, lived and died in.
If you do think of the problems in the reverse way -- how do we _increase wealth_, and _increase cooperation_ and _increase knowledge, they're all become sort of the _same problem_ -- ie: how do we as a society increase the benefits of cooperation with each other? You see the problem of tackling crime not as a problem of devising the correct punishment scheme, but as devising a way such that the benefits of cooperation outweigh the benefits of free riding.
Today schools push doxa and try to their best to avoid gnosis and even speculation about gnosis. They form useful idiots https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef... or Ford-model stereotypical workers, not acculturated citizens.
As a result modern society is practically ignorant as the middle-age societies, only most does not know that because they think knowledge is only doxa.
Related
Nobody knows what's going on
Misinformation's impact on beliefs, reliance on unreliable sources, and human tendency to trust comforting information are discussed. Difficulty in discerning truth and consequences of widespread misinformation are highlighted.
Are people too flawed, ignorant, and tribal for open societies?
Open societies face challenges in understanding political reality due to complexity, invisibility, incentives, and biased cognition. Citizens struggle with navigating issues, relying on mediated information, and rational ignorance. Biases like self-interest and tribalism affect political engagement, leading to distorted beliefs and decisions.
The Four Theories of Truth as a Method for Critical Thinking
The article outlines four theories of truth: correspondence, coherence, consensus, and pragmatic, emphasizing their roles in critical thinking and the importance of personal experience in evaluating claims.
Fashionable Ideas
Dan Williams discusses "fashionable beliefs," where acceptance of ideas is influenced by trendiness and social signaling rather than rational evaluation, impacting identity, status, and adaptability in society.
Principles I Find Interesting
Johnny Webber discusses principles of human behavior, including mimetic desire, scarcity mindset, Occam’s Razor, and the Golden Rule, emphasizing empathy, simplicity, and the effectiveness of positive reinforcement over punishment.