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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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I expect you'd find 99%+ of beliefs are genuine

Counting issues above aside, I'm not sure. And it's a much more interesting question when approached practically - what do many peoples' held beliefs mean, and should they hold the supposedly-nongenuine ones, as opposed to a philosophical "how real are they" approach.

Are beliefs about, say, the attractiveness of clothing genuine? Not that it's entirely fake, but the history of fashion and said trends show it is, at best, highly contingent - does the simulacra, groundless nature of it mean anything? What about men or women who find women with heavy, garish makeup attractive? (one could respond "they're just making trivial claims about their experience", but ... say i'm enlightened, and can redirect the rivers of perception at will - I look at an apple, "perceive it" instead as a pear, and then honestly claim "I see that as a pear". Something's not quite right there! Wouldn't something like that apply to to socially-modified, rather than intentionally-modified, beliefs?)

If someone says (and does really believes, as opposed to it being a straight lie) "I think my wife is the most beautiful person in the world"?

Beliefs of the form "my race is superior", or "my country is superior to other ones"? Even if some races were superior, e.g. whites or jews being smarter, most folk beliefs posit supremacy in areas where it doesn't exist, whether that be historically "british good, german bad", "whites are much more honest and freedom-loving than blacks", or funny-to-us balkan or african rivalries. There are plenty of overtly nationalistic or racist people alive today.

"I want to lose weight, but just can't manage to, I try to eat less but I still don't lose any!" or "I want to lose weight but don't have the willpower to"?

"<my favorite player> is the BEST <sport> PLAYER!" What does that mean?

It's easy to put politics into the 'just one of many things' box, but looking at a broader scope of human activity, a lot of them don't seem to be "fully updating" or "broadly applied". IMO, that's borne of their meaninglessness, and said faux-beliefs should be abandoned by those who hold them.

You make a good point that there are a wide range of possible fake, or at least questionable beliefs in a broad range of areas. But I don't think that invalidates my point that there are an absurdly large number of genuine beliefs about banal things. Any number of anecdotes does little to provide statistical weight when for every suspicious "My wife is the most beautiful person in the world" you cherry pick out there are literally hundreds of trivial beliefs like "My wrinkly grandpa is not the most beautiful person in the world", "my neighbor's dog is not the most beautiful creature in the world", "My wife's red scarf is more beautiful than her brown purse", "My wife's red scarf is more beautiful than mud"... that never get questioned and are rarely even mentioned because they're just so obvious to the person holding them and relatively uninteresting.

I'm not arguing that nongenuine beliefs don't exist, or are super rare in some global sense. Just that they are vastly outnumbered mathematically if you consider the full set of ordinary beliefs that people have continuously throughout the day that let them function as human beings.

Agree with that, and made the same point lol. It gets worse - what about locally-correct beliefs that are held for the same reasons as pseudobeliefs? One might avoid poisonous plants because they're "cursed", and also burn incense to avoid curses. Say you, in the interest of 'health', or just because it's what everyone in your family does, brush your teeth each night, and also use antimicrobial mouthwash each night - believing both to be equally effective means of teeth cleaning - and yet you don't actively pursue 'cleaning stuff off of teeth' while brushing, just 'go through the motions' and don't clean effectively, and also eat lots of donuts.