I wrote the following on my blog last night. I thought that I'd run it past an intelligent audience. Note that what I have referred to as an idea is what we here at lesswrong would call a 'belief'. I changed the name to remove any strange foggy baggage that might appear in the heads of potential readers who are not familier with belief vs belief-in-belief and other concepts like that.

What are your thoughts?

I recently got into a discussion on Facebook that started with an assertion that free-thought/atheism/humanism/etc was no different than the certainties of fundamentalism. But that discussion moved into many topics, one of which is why it should not be controversial to assert that one idea can be more 'right' than another.

I asserted that the view that the universe was created 13.72 billion years ago was more 'right' than the view that the universe was sneezed out of a giant space cow. My interlocutor felt that the giant space cow could be 'right' for one person, even if it is not 'right' for others.

It is at this point that we ran into a problem, as it became apparent that her view of the meaning of 'right' and my own were different. As best I can tell, she felt that 'right' meant that it feels right or brings comfort. I, of course, use the word 'right' to mean that an idea contains explanatory and predictive power. The idea that the universe started in a big bang explains a lot about what we see in the cosmos and predicts what we will see as we keep looking - with a high degree of accuracy. That makes is 'right'. And it's more 'right' now than it was two decades ago because we have found places where it is 'wrong' (the increase in the rate of expansion of the universe) and revised the idea to explain it (dark energy), making it more 'right'.

So we had two versions of 'right'. It wasn't a given that she would accept my version, so I had to come up with a good reason why my version of 'right' was, well, 'right'.

What I came up with was to point out an ethical imperative to be as 'right' as possible - using my definition. Consider this: If there are two ideas, one of which is 'right' enough to predict certain unintended consequences of an action that the other idea fails to predict. If you consciously choose the less 'right' of the two ideas (perhaps because it is 'more right for you'), you have consciously chosen to risk harming

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