“Oh that simple..” comes across as condescending (and contains a punctuation error, which is made worse by the juxtaposition).
No one downvoted that comment because they thought it was wrong, precisely. “sometimes the majority is right and sometimes it is wrong” is not really something that can be argued with. That comment got downvoted because it made you sound like a jerk.
Let me explain the situation. I was saying that it’s not good idea to believe something because the majority does, then people are disagreeing with me, AlexMennen said:
Most people believe that it is impossible to travel faster than light, although they don’t understand why that is and it is all very abstract to them. I speculate that this might be connected with the fact that it is impossible to travel faster than light.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense, talking about light speed with the recent news. I guessed there would be some meta morals to it and lots of hidden meaning. It was a surprise that he was really just giving one example of where the majority was right: on the other hand it rejects those cases where the majority is wrong (so it is slanted against what I was claiming).
I wonder if I still sound like a jerk in light of this, in any case how can I post a comment with the same meaning without sounding that way?
Beliefs come in degrees. Isolate each factor leading to your final degree of belief.
We can also ask questions about why people believe what they do and there are always multiple important reasons. Why does Bob believe in global warming? Because it is high status and it makes sense to him that gasses could trap heat. why is it high status? Because experts believe it. Why does it make sense to him? Because he heard it described, simplified, in a way that was internally consistent. Experts’ beliefs and the consistency of the story are both related to how likely the proposition about global warming is to be true.
Counterfactuals are helpful. What is the probability that global climate change is real? You have an answer. Now, imagine that one scientist changes his mind from this opinion to an extreme minority one that weather events have been flukes, or not unusual, or caused directly by an anomaly in the sun that is about t return to normal, or whatever. If you claim that that would have literally on effect on your beliefs, you will suffer from a line-drawing problem as you are asked about hypothetical scenarios in which ever more scientists defect from the scientific consensus. You would have to explain something like why 10% of scientists believing something is meaningless, but 10.0000001% isn’t.
The important thing is to not become misled by the fact that moderately different scenarios would result in your having, wholly appropriately, indistinguishably similar confidence. Very different scenarios leave one with much less confidence.
Likewise, you oughtn’t say there is no important relationship between a layperson’s belief and reality just because the relationship is attenuated by many intermediate steps and weak causal effects at each link in the chain.
“Oh that simple..” comes across as condescending (and contains a punctuation error, which is made worse by the juxtaposition).
No one downvoted that comment because they thought it was wrong, precisely. “sometimes the majority is right and sometimes it is wrong” is not really something that can be argued with. That comment got downvoted because it made you sound like a jerk.
This is useful criticism.
Let me explain the situation. I was saying that it’s not good idea to believe something because the majority does, then people are disagreeing with me, AlexMennen said:
It doesn’t make a lot of sense, talking about light speed with the recent news. I guessed there would be some meta morals to it and lots of hidden meaning. It was a surprise that he was really just giving one example of where the majority was right: on the other hand it rejects those cases where the majority is wrong (so it is slanted against what I was claiming).
I wonder if I still sound like a jerk in light of this, in any case how can I post a comment with the same meaning without sounding that way?
Beliefs come in degrees. Isolate each factor leading to your final degree of belief.
We can also ask questions about why people believe what they do and there are always multiple important reasons. Why does Bob believe in global warming? Because it is high status and it makes sense to him that gasses could trap heat. why is it high status? Because experts believe it. Why does it make sense to him? Because he heard it described, simplified, in a way that was internally consistent. Experts’ beliefs and the consistency of the story are both related to how likely the proposition about global warming is to be true.
Counterfactuals are helpful. What is the probability that global climate change is real? You have an answer. Now, imagine that one scientist changes his mind from this opinion to an extreme minority one that weather events have been flukes, or not unusual, or caused directly by an anomaly in the sun that is about t return to normal, or whatever. If you claim that that would have literally on effect on your beliefs, you will suffer from a line-drawing problem as you are asked about hypothetical scenarios in which ever more scientists defect from the scientific consensus. You would have to explain something like why 10% of scientists believing something is meaningless, but 10.0000001% isn’t.
The important thing is to not become misled by the fact that moderately different scenarios would result in your having, wholly appropriately, indistinguishably similar confidence. Very different scenarios leave one with much less confidence.
Likewise, you oughtn’t say there is no important relationship between a layperson’s belief and reality just because the relationship is attenuated by many intermediate steps and weak causal effects at each link in the chain.