One of my probability books was about the usage of the term probability—what it meant. (Ian Hacking?) Once upon a time, probable meant being attested to by some authority. That was the measure of truth—what Authority had to say.
“The Truth” is judged differently by different people. For some, The Truth is what an Authority says, where Authority is identified by signaling. In the absence of data, how else are you to judge truth claims? So competing Authorities compete through signaling louder, more congruently, more forcefully, which often amplifies the nuttiness, with increasing claims of certainty and disrespect for other theories.
For a lot of problems like this, I take the mind as a bunch of competing pattern matching algorithms, and note that it doesn’t appear that your algorithms are weighted the same way mine are. Most people have their Authority algorithms weighted much higher than I do, and much higher than most people here do as well.
One of my probability books was about the usage of the term probability—what it meant. (Ian Hacking?) Once upon a time, probable meant being attested to by some authority. That was the measure of truth—what Authority had to say.
“The Truth” is judged differently by different people. For some, The Truth is what an Authority says, where Authority is identified by signaling. In the absence of data, how else are you to judge truth claims? So competing Authorities compete through signaling louder, more congruently, more forcefully, which often amplifies the nuttiness, with increasing claims of certainty and disrespect for other theories.
For a lot of problems like this, I take the mind as a bunch of competing pattern matching algorithms, and note that it doesn’t appear that your algorithms are weighted the same way mine are. Most people have their Authority algorithms weighted much higher than I do, and much higher than most people here do as well.