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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2197 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 1, 2026

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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So, what are you reading?

I'm reattempting Duncan's Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons, an open access book.

This is a book about paradoxes and mingled yarns—about the bright sides of dark events, the silver linings of sable clouds. The book portrays law-abiding citizens who harbor a "strange liking" for criminal deeds, and criminals who find an "extraordinary beauty" in their prison yards. Thus, the book describes a nonutopian world in which criminals and noncriminals—while injuring each other in ways plain for all to see—nonetheless live together in a symbiotic as well as an adversarial relationship, needing each other, serving each other, living for as well as off each other, enriching each other's lives in profound and surprising ways.

A collection of essays, including The Will to Believe, by William James. That essay and Is life worth living? have so far been my favorites. I’ve been exploring Pragmatism recently, and I find the school a very useful way to determine how to determine knowledge given humanity’s limited ability to obtain certainty. A few key points that stick out to me:

  1. If an option is momentous, forced, and live, it is advantageous to make a choice in believing even in absence of sufficient evidence. Basically, if you only get one shot, multiple hypotheses are plausible to you, and neutrality is the same as making a positive choice, it behooves you to pick something. He applies this to religion, but it can be applied elsewhere as well such as in business ventures.
  2. The goals of “know as much truth as you can” and “avoid error as much as you can” often conflict so you have to choose between them sometimes. Knowing more truths often means believing more falsehoods.
  3. Much, likely most, of what we “know” is not organized in the form of “justified true belief” but is instead justified, if it is not outright axioms, in a far less orderly and sound way. As a result, one practically must accept a degree of limited justification and “messiness” in your epistemology if you want to maximize the total amount of truth you know.

James reminds me of a reverse Hume. Hume looked at principles like induction and said “we can’t justify this logically”. He tore down “rules” of knowledge and produced skepticism. James seems to do this in reverse; given that so much of what we “know” isn’t logically obligatory, we should attempt to see what sorts of “under justified” beliefs we really can and should hold on to.

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