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Comment by saiya-jin | Hacker News Reader

> And this is right and good.

I disagree (without down-voting). This is basically 1-man echo chamber, you take what you like (it doesn't matter how many eloquent words you use to describe this, result is same), reject what would challenge your beliefs and would make them weaker. That's the opposite of critical thinking so needed in real world, and prime source why the current world, particularly west, is so torn to pieces about shit like russia, trump, guns, migrants and so on.

Stuff in life is complex, always, almost at fractal level. You keep learning, if you actually want, about new viewpoints that will challenge your current ones, every effin' day. Maybe at the end conclusion is don't trust anybody, people are generally a-holes etc. That's still fine as long as it represents truth.

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It seems like you misread what I was saying. I am not advocating a "1-man echo chamber" - that would be a person who never changes their beliefs. When I say "weaker" and "stronger" I am referring to the whole of the belief network, not individual beliefs. This means, generally, that every change reduces inconsistency and increases cohesion of the entire network. The ignorant people in the world pay no attention to consistency, only to feeling, which makes their network intrinsically weak, and they become emotional and ultimately resort to violence rather than resolve to improve their beliefs. (The internet makes this kind of interaction more common, even encouraged, since it drives "engagement" - one of the great tragedies of our time.)

Stuff in life is complex, people are assholes, but even assholes have good ideas sometimes. I recommend listening to everyone who speaks for themselves in good faith. Anyone can cook!

I think you're making assumptions about people and their capability to judge consistency over large chunks of information, when that information is at least internally consistent and common in their experience.

If I believe the Clinton's are pedophiles and murderers and are part of a ring of like minded people, and I'm inundated with information from people and organizations which support this (or at least carefully don't refute it), then when I'm presented with information about a pizza parlor that is supposedly holding children in the basement, is that consistent with my beliefs?

I think what you're presenting is just what everyone already does. Instead of assessing thi gs based on how well they fit our beliefs, we should assess them based on a consistent objective standard, and then alter our beliefs if it meets that standard but conflicts with our beliefs.

This may in fact be what you belief, because you belive in facts and the importance of the truth. The problem is that you get wildly different results when someone that values different things applies the same system.

>This means, generally, that every change reduces inconsistency and increases cohesion of the entire network

This is analog to growing the tree, the page talks about cutting it down.

One could give many examples but the good ones are unlikely to resonate with others.

To give a poor one. There was a time when I understood human decision making as a hierarchy of people in increasingly greater positions of power with access to better information and to people with greater skill. Then one day it struck me how they too are just going though the motions with their freedom for creativity limited to a single potentially career ending move. The machine happily grinds on without anyone behind the wheel.

> reject what would challenge your beliefs and would make them weaker.

Most unresolved disagreements I know of are because the groups disagree on some unprovable underlying assumption. Switching positions on it doesn't make the beliefs stronger or weaker

Being able to believe something and stick to it, regardless of challenges from competing interests or forms of coercion: that's more valuable in practice than being more reconciliatory

> Most unresolved disagreements I know of are because the groups disagree on some unprovable underlying assumption. Switching positions on it doesn't make the beliefs stronger or weaker, just different

In my experience, that assumption isn't in principle "unprovable" - the parties to the disagreement usually don't realize they're making such assumption in the first place! Switching positions can make the existence of that assumption apparent to all, and if people involved are intellectually honest and discussing in good faith, it's pretty much impossible for their disagreement to remain as strong as it was before.

> Personally, I prefer having convictions and sticking to them.

Good point about competing interests and "reducing to something manageable". I prefer "strong opinions weakly held", but in practice, I embrace the natural inertia of beliefs. I.e. I don't consider me already believing something to be strong evidence the belief is true (i.e. "having convictions") - but the stronger a belief is, or more high-impact changing it would be (e.g. suddenly feeling a moral compulsion to upend my entire life), the more evidence and time I need to change my mind.

This may be also a dumber and less admirable strategy, but it's effectively a low-pass filter on evidence: it saves me from changing my mind every other day, and suffering the costs (including cognitive dissonance if I plain override my beliefs for sake of quality of life).

Binary people are funny. Everything is always 1 or 0, nothing is ever undefined and the idea to have different levels of certainty never occurs to them.

It is a rather offensive way to portray the world. All the questions, all the puzzles, all the mystery, everything has been answered and further investigation frowned upon. They would have to again defend their chosen "truth", they would have to question everything!

> Binary people are funny. Everything is always 1 or 0, nothing is ever undefined and the idea to have different levels of certainty never occurs to them.

Not what I was conveying. There's a place for nuance, but from my experience in practice, being able to be decisive is more useful than contemplating and questioning. Not to say I avoid the latter (what are we doing right now?) or that it isn't useful, but the times at which it's really needed are few and far between

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