Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
What are your 'load-bearing beliefs?' The ones that, if they were disproven (to your epistemic satisfaction) would actually 'collapse' your worldview and force a reckoning with your understanding of reality.
I'm definitively talking about the "is" side of the is/ought distinction. Not your moral beliefs or 'hopes' for how things will turn out.
And not focused on such dry, mostly undisputed facts like "the earth's gravity pulls things towards it center" or "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell."
Ideally beliefs that you consistently use to make predictions about actual events, despite not having sincere certainty about their accuracy.
One that I've been leaning on a lot lately: "Intelligence tends to be positively (if imperfectly) correlated with wisdom."
This is probably the one thing preserving my general optimism for humanity's future.
There are definitely high-IQ sociopaths running about, but I strongly believe that the world would be in a much worse place if the smartest apes amongst us were not also generally aware of their own limitations and were trying to make good decisions that considered more than just short term interests.
My load bearing beliefs are
Come at me bro
If you look at buildings from 200 years ago, the door frames are much lower, because people were much shorter back then. All of those short people passed on their genes to descendants who were much taller than they were. The genes themselves didn't change, but because their descendants grew up in a caloric- and nutrient-rich environment, they were better equipped to fulfil their maximum height potential as encoded in their genes than their ancestors were.
Conceivably the Flynn effect could be partly explicable by a similar dynamic, as modern people have a much better understanding of the importance of early childhood nutrition and so on than our ancestors did. But other than that, I'm sceptical of the idea that intelligence is increasing over time. In point of fact our society seems profoundly dysgenic in numerous ways. Fertility rates are in freefall across much of the West, and the only solution suggested by elites is to import millions of people from cultures in which intergenerational cousin marriage is the rule rather than the exception.
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