[HN Gopher] Why do people believe true things?
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Why do people believe true things?
Author : Michelangelo11
Score : 19 points
Date : 2024-08-17 19:13 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.conspicuouscognition.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.conspicuouscognition.com)
| djaouen wrote:
| Uhhh, what? Do experience and rationality not count here?
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Do experience and rationality not count here?_
|
| Bear in mind that the title question actually has (as the
| article makes clear) a crucial qualifier: the question is why
| people believe true things "beyond their immediate material and
| social environment". In other words, in the domain where
| experience and rationality obviously _work_ --the immediate
| material and social environment--it is _not_ surprising that
| people believe true things, because believing true things in
| that domain has obvious and immediate survival value. It 's
| when you go _beyond_ that domain, to things which _don 't_ have
| any clear, immediate connection to one's daily life and
| survival, that believing true things is surprising--because, as
| the article points out, the default state of almost all humans
| who have ever lived is the opposite.
| ajkjk wrote:
| This is being dense for no reason. 'Why is there poverty? ' means
| 'Why is there poverty [when there could not be]?', obviously.
| Same with every other question they pretend to be surprised by an
| inverse formulation of.
| Sakos wrote:
| This is unreasonably dismissive of a very interesting article
| about where our beliefs and our "knowledge" of the world comes
| from. HN is supposed to be a place where we try to learn more
| about the world and our understanding of that world. But if an
| article becomes a tiny bit philosophical, people go all "nuh-
| uh, don't want to think about this at all".
|
| What is this epistemological laziness?
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