I guess with action, you feel obligated to act as if X is true, but you're not understanding why. It's like being blindfolded and told to walk in some direction and "trusting" that it'll all work out.
So an anti-alief (as you described) would be like you intellectually believe that junk food is bad for you, but can't really bring yourself to stop eating it or feel any fear for your healthy when you do. Whereas a celief would be if you don't even intellectually believe that junk food is bad for you, but you try to avoid it anyways because everyone says it's bad for you (esp. people whose opinions you usually respect), and so what are the chances they're all wrong vs the chances you just don't understand it yet?
We have "aliefs" and "beliefs" - let me introduce "celiefs": something that we worry *has a high chance of being true*, but aren't quite convinced of.
Often this is something that society/experts/someone you admire says is true, but you don't see the reasoning behind.
We may look for evidence that might convince us of the celief, or behave as if we already believe the celief; this is not exactly performative, but more like an act of "hedging" -- so that if the celief turns out to be true, we've avoided causing harm. We would do this regardless of whether people see it, but it can still feel "disingenuous" since we haven't quite internalized the... (read 211 more words →)
Hardest to easiest for me:
- gadgets problem (The wrong answer just pops into my head so quick)
- lilypad problem (I think the phrasing of it makes it not intuitively obvious to me on first glance that the rate of growth increases; my first instinct is to read "it doubles every day" as "it increases every day")
- bat-and-ball problem (The answer of $10c just feels viscerally repulsive to me in an uncanny valley kind of way)
I'm with you on this one; I like feeling like an outlier. It makes me feel special :P
There are some examples there that did grind my gears though, like the pillow-throwing example and the 'that didn't hurt' example. They felt more like 'I'm going to insist your inner experience isn't real, to the point where I won't believe you (even if only in a joking way) if you told me'.
Whereas the 'no-one does that' example and the 'we all love Tom Hanks too much' example felt more like a metaphorical 'everyone' and if you actually said 'no, I'm not like that', the response would be 'oh okay not ~everyone's~ like that'.
I'd personally... (read more)
When I comment on things:
But maybe sometimes I come across as crying 'food poisoning'? (I can see myself feeling this way if, for instance, I put out an idea I thought was fully baked but a commenter points out it's not as well-baked as I thought it was, and that might be the case for others as well, but I might also actually come across as accusatory and I'd like to try to avoid doing that :P)
I've personally only seen appeals to inner privacy when how the person feels is indeed the subject matter being disputed (e.g. when they're faced with accusations about their intentions). I'd like to see an example of this being used outside that context, so I better understand how it's used as a general conversation halter ...
Yeah, I think I'm drawn to insight porn because of my intellectual hedonism (which mostly cares about what feels good to read about than what actually improves my ability to have true beliefs and make decisions that result in the attainment of my goals) XD But I'll be careful!
I think I've read one or two AI posts which were surprisingly accessible considering I have no background in AI.
What point do you think the OP is making?
Jargon is useful and natural when it describes distinctions we're already familiar with, but is cumbersome when it describes distinctions that feel meaningless to us.
As a 'subpoint', I felt like the OP was implying that one has no reason to be upset with other people for resisting one's attempt to push jargon onto them, unless one is trying to hijack their mental software to use them as a tool for one's own goals and priorities. I could be wrong about OP having this view ...
how is this relevant?
... but just in case, I wanted to mention a case where one might be upset with other people for resisting one's attempt to push jargon onto them, that has nothing to do with trying to control or manipulate them.
(Was that too small of a point in the OP to be worth addressing? I'm new here XD)
I don't think even the people who feel it's justified to change the way you think are trying to use you as a tool for their goals and priority; I don't think it's that machiavellian. They push the termininology they do because it's natural for them, because they truly believe their terminology most accurately describes reality.
When you reject their terminology, they don't see it as you saying 'my brain isn't currently running an OS where this language shift is easy and makes sense, and I get to have more of a say on what OS my brain runs on than you do'. They see it as you saying 'that concept that you're... (read more)
This is my first comment here; I do webcomics and a bit of category theory!
I gravitate towards certain aspects of rationality because I have an aesthetic preference for certain things like simplicity and consistency, which gives me a fondness for principles like Occam's Razor and identifying ways that peope often fail to be consistent, which rationalists tend to talk about afaik.
But I wouldn't say I'm a truthseeker, just an 'intellectual hedonist'. I have a sense of 'curiosity', but it's more towards 'cool stuff' rather than 'true stuff'. My sense of what's 'cool' is pretty arbitrary.
Anyone else feels similarly? Would this be a good place for me? My goals might not completely align with yours, but compared to most other places on the Internet, this place has a higher concentration of stuff I find pleasing (or at least not-displeasing) to read :P
I think degrees of various kinds of beliefs are always a spectrum, but the spirit of celiefs is you "can't see the gears", like Mateusz mentioned. So if you actually have some idea of why and just don't put 100% certainty on it, I wouldn't say it's meaningfully a celief