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Notes -
Do you believe false things?
You, high IQ, well educated, traveled and read motte denizen, you personally?
Not ordinary mistaken trivia knowledge, for example when you are unsure whether US has 50 or 51 states, or on what continent is New Guinea, but when facts about the world that serve as bedrock of your beliefs that happen to be totally delusionary, at catastrophical odds to reality. Can it happen to you?
It happens frequently. See the famous poll where about one in 20 of "very liberal people" believe that tens of thousands of unarmed blacks are annually killed by police.
For non-US example, see this poll among Palestinians, where one third of population of Gaza believe that Israel has less than 500k inhabitants.
"No, it cannot happen to me! I was trained in martial arts of rationalism by ancient master Yud the Yumongous! I am unstoppable!"
Well, it can happen not only to "brainwashed libtards" or "dumb Ayrabs".
It happened to credentialed rationalist and one of Yud's disciples.
The short xeet that went viral:
Until I was 38 I thought Men's World Cup team vs Women's World Cup team would be a fair match and couldn't figure out why they didn't just play each other
And the long essay where Eneasz Brodski at request of his readers and haters explains how it happened:
How To Believe False Things - by request, this is an explanation of how I got 38 years old believing a match of World Cup men's team vs World Cup women's would be fair.
TL;DR: EB learned about relative strength of men and women as we all learn all things we know. From his own experience, from media, from experts. EB trusted them all, without considering that his experiences could be extremely unrepresentative, media could be completely fictional and experts could just plain lie to his face.
Given history is rife with entire civilizations believing things we now consider mad, and given still that I don't consider this age as meaningfully wiser than any previous one, it seems almost certain that I take for granted things that are catastrophically erroneous.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that I believe such things since such a stance is contradictory with my metaphysical skepticism. But I certainly act as if some erroneous things are true.
The more interesting question is if it really matters that much outside of academic affairs or outside of a political regime that derives its legitimacy from public opinion.
I've made no secret in this forum of my attachment to truth as a terminal value, but experience has dispelled in me the conviction that this is a preoccupation of most people, or indeed something they ought to preoccupy themselves with in the first place.
People are prompt to delegate this kind of thinking, with no way to convince them to do otherwise, so the corruption of authoritative institutions seems a much more pressing problem than perennial biases.
Health seems like the big one. It makes a personal difference to your quality of life and lifespan whether you believe that lead paint is safe, whether you believe that vaccines are good for you, etc. I expect that the biggest thing our descendants are likely to shake their heads at is some benign part of everyday life in the developed world which will have been exposed as having dire long-term consequences on the human body. The "microscopic lithium contamination is causing obesity" people are probably wrong, but something like that.
Personal health advice matters up to a point.
I understand this is relevant vis à vis cigarettes or leaded gasoline and the like, but these are matters of public health and public policy. It's only in a democracy that every man must have an opinion on such matters, and we've done fine in the past with more primitive types of holy men declaring things they notice have problems to be unclean and pass down general wisdom like this.
In any case, having a truth seeking apparatus that really works is absolutely necessary, but I would couch that as academic affairs, actually.
In fact, the current state of affairs where no institution is trustworthy and everyone has to build their own opinion of basically anything is a catastrophic failure and a waste of everyone's time. Not some utopian epistemological anarchy.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating we all stop thinking and defer to the closest available authority. But we have to live in a world where most people are going to do that, by necessity. So even if it's unwise, it ought to work.
Surely not? In any era, save some totalitarian hell-scape, I can still use my own judgement to determine if I, personally, am going to take up smoking/let a quack saw up my leg/give the wise-woman's herbal remedy a try. Renaissance, medieval, even ancient literature is full of jokes about doctors prescribing unpleasant/harmful treatments which clearly don't work just to look like they know what they're talking about, and characters rightly giving them a hard pass after the application of a bit of common sense.
You can, but you don't have to for most things.
Consider in the periods you bring up the role of the Church vis à vis morality (protestantism and all), because I think it's a lot more relevant to what I'm trying to illustrate than medicine which has indeed always been suspect of quackery.
There are places that still work like this today. I've lived in some. In some nations, the ruler just says whether something is acceptable or not (which usually really come from his advisors) and people fall in, because that's what you do.
People don't turn off their brain altogether so you can't make insane demands out of them, but they will generally be unconcerned with matters that are beyond their command, and really most dissident talk is about character rather than policy specifics.
This also happens in representative democracies mind you, but this tendency to stick to "is this a good man" rather than "are those good policies" is usually panned as populism because it's rightly recognized as subversive to the ideal of a democratic system.
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