have been wondering recently what my blind spots are, what are beliefs I have that are unexamined or based on too little evidence for how much I believe them …
maybe there are common patterns, that people commonly believe false things and I might be challenged in my own beliefs this way
I believe what scientists say about vaccines, climate change, etc. is right even though I don’t know all the exact research myself. Does that count?
I think so! At least those are things you can actually dig into and get the know the bodies of evidence, but it does seem like accepting them on authority is the default. I also don’t have much knowledge about many areas of science I still accept as true, but at least with both vaccines and climate I am familiar with the basic evidence, e.g. I know how the COVID mRNA vaccine generates the protein cap that your body then attacks and trains to help recognize COVID, or with climate the way carbon emissions heat the Earth through the greenhouse effect.
I tend to trust experts in their field because, well, imagine the alternatives.
🧐🍗Short-form video is destroying attention spans and critical thinking skills. The level of brainrot I see in people who are hooked on Tiktok or other platforms is staggering. “I saw 500 10-second videos about this topic and now believe it with every ounce of my being, because the algorithm specifically pushes this particular point of view.” seems to be a common occurrence these days.
The internet itself pushes an agenda. Do a google search and the results aren’t happenstance, unless you dictate what you want but even then results will still have an agenda.
I also think the same way. If it was short form content of the same subject, ok maaaaybe the brain won’t be so clusterfucked. but as it is, it’s so random it’s just frying our brains.
I believe my wife loves me, even though she’s unable or unwilling to articulate why. There’s a song she likes where the chorus goes “I don’t know why I love you, I just do”, a sentiment she finds romantic and I find vaguely terrifying.
I would submit that our culture is severely deluded in thinking that conscious reasoning is behind most of our actions and reactions to things. If you like a thing, and have reasons why, those are generally rationalizations to explain why, after the fact, not actually how you got there.
Your’s, too?
Actually, I have some data points. My wife grew up in a family of women: two sisters, a mother, and a bum dad who disappeared when she was a kid. Once, early in our relationship, my wife asked for help moving a heavy box. I walked over, picked it up, and moved it for her. She just sort of stood there with her mouth open and then said, “how did you do that??” I said, “man 🤷♂️”. She said, “that’s so hot.”
But, yeah. I often feel like I got the better part of the deal.
Everything will be ok.
admittedly I’m not too keen to reevaluate that particular belief, it has value even when false
Epstein didn’t kill himself. Epstein island was a Mossad honey trap. Does that one count?
I strongly believe that I can get trans girls pregnant despite the fact I have no evidence in the affirmative but I am still conducting research with great fervour
Keep trying. For science.
There is no power on this earth that could stop me
😳
My door is always open to new study participants!
I believe in my own ignorance.
don’t you have great knowledge of your ignorance? It’s a simple thing to know, in a sense, since it is derivative from not knowing. I don’t know most things, ignorance is established as the baseline state.
No. The older I get, the more things I realise that I know nothing about. You might learn one thing, but that knowledge leads you to three more things that you didn’t even knew existed. Ignorance is exponential that way.
I do miss those childhood years when you thought your parents had all the answers and all you had to do was to ask.
And I miss the teenage years when I knew everything and all the answers were absolute black and white.
Politically, I’m pretty firm in my anti-capitalist stance and I think I’ve learned enough to be justifiably confident about that. But I’m relatively a lot less educated about the specifics of future socialist alternatives. There’s a bunch of reading out there, but it’s hard to keep my attention focused long enough to do that kind of reading without more structure behind it like I had when I was in school.
Inflationary cosmology.
this is a good one, tbh a lot of science I just accept uncritically, e.g. The Big Bang as an explanation- though it seems unlikely to be false, maybe I should educate myself more on this topi, thanks!
This is a cheating one, may be 10% of the physicist have a rough idea on the amount of evidence making it a fact hard to challenge, and max be 100 persons have a deep knowledge of it.
Aliens. There’s got to be more than just us in this insanely huge universe. It’s statistically impossible that in such a huge place there’s only one life form out there that’s capable of making credit scores and movies. Plus, with all the UFO stuff in the news these past few years I really think that something is hiding in the shadows and one day something will blow the lid off. Maybe tomorrow or 50 years from now but I think something will happen that will answer the question “Are we alone?”
It’s crazy, but I want to believe that 4chan post from supposedly a government insider. I can’t remember everything, but the aliens are supposedly not coming from space, but are already here and have an established base underwater. That’s why the credible military sightings are over the ocean and the UAPs appear to dive into the water. There’s also another theory that the aliens are in fact humans from the far future, trying to warn humanity about what it’s doing to doom the planet. But I don’t understand why they can’t just make the message clear and have to resort to vague UAP sightings.
I agree that there must be other stuff living out there, but I don’t think they’re here. My belief that I can’t prove is that the Fermi paradox has a simple but quite depressing solution: that space and time are just too big and there’s no special undiscovered way of getting around it. I’m sure there are some staggeringly unlikely situations out there somewhere where two species have evolved independently at the same time to a similar level of intelligence at a distance close enough to reach each other, but for the vast majority of intelligent life the odds are so vanishingly small that they might as well be alone.
If we’re a typical example of an intelligent species, for example, we’ve been capable of space flight for less that a century and we just about got as far as the moon, and with all the inventions that came along with becoming capable of space flight we’ve almost destroyed ourselves countless times. It’s kind of a wonder we’re still here at all, and with climate change who knows how much longer we’ll last? TBH I think the best we can hope for is to maybe get a radio signal from some ancient place that’s probably long gone, and send one back knowing we’ll probably be long gone by the time it gets there.
Evolution, carbon dating, some physics topics
the dynamics of aviation safety, especially for this year falldown where we witness several airplane crashes that resulting more fatalities.
let say before 2024, the track record was good enough. like I didn’t read or notified much about air crashes at that time. there are several air crashes, but only few I can consider fatal or serious incident.
but now, this year alone: we have American Eagle, Air India, the Bangladeshi military jet, and today the small Russian flight. not to mention several serious incidents and also small fatal plane crashes. not to counting several major air accidents/incidents in 2024 too.
I believe there’s something going wrong here in aviation industry, resulting the overall safety deficiency. but again, my beliefs here is still kinda unproven. I read online discussions about this, but what I read, peoples on that industry can only says “we try our best”.
Aviation functions entirely on our belief in aviation. We believe planes can fly and land safely so they do.
As more planes crash, the belief in its ability wanes, the worse it gets, repeat.
Please don’t lose faith.
I heard this is an expert interview so I know it’s true.
You seem to be slightly confused, that’s how Orkish aviation works. Western FreedomPlanes™ generate lift by harnessing the power of the line that must always go up. For example, the U.S. Dollar’s line has started to go down, which has caused many U.S. airplanes to crash.
My house flew away because so many people had faith in the housing bubble
Economics. I think they’re inexplicable, and yet clearly something is working.
I believe that the fact that there’s a saying, “get four economist in a room and you’ll get five opinions” is evidence that no one truly understands economics, but many only (wrongly) think they do. I personally believe it’s a glitch in the matrix, a hot patch thrown in by developers when the simulation unexpectedly evolved beyond the capacity for barter/trade to handle the scale of the systems. It wasn’t well or thoroughly designed, and frequently crashes (like the big one in the 30’s, and periodic smaller ones since).
And yet… there’s clearly something there.
Mainstream economists don’t understand economics since they dumped out the LTV in XIX century. Current science of economics is basically a cult writting plausible sounding justifications for capitalism.
Basically everyone has little knowledge about the vast majority of things. People who have strong beliefs generally think they have good evidence for them (even if what they think is clearly untrue and their evidence is nonsensical).
I’ve heard of “appeal to authority” and such, but at the end of the day I think that it’s generally sensible to just believe the mainstream expert consensus on something until you’re given good evidence otherwise, especially if you’re dealing with hard science.
Of course it’s ideal to know more about a topic than basic things you were told and took as fact and this should be paired with some level of media literacy and critical thinking, though.
