Something You Believe Is Wrong

No one is omniscient. No one knows everything. That means everyone believes something that is wrong (at least everyone who's not in a state of radical doubt). That includes me and you.

There is something I believe that is wrong. There is something you believe that is wrong. The problem is false beliefs feel just the same as true beliefs. Even something you know is true, might still be false.

And the only way to improve the situation, is to be willing to change your mind. Keep that in mind when you interact with someone who disagrees with you. They're probably not evil. They might not be stupid. They may not even be wrong. They have reasons for believing what they believe, just like you do. They might not be good reasons, but you can't determine that until you know what they are.

Note that I'm not saying you should blindly accept what someone who disagrees with you says. But nor should you blindly reject them either. You should be willing to listen to their arguments, and honestly evaluate them. Even for things you're absolutely sure are true, because those are the things you're least likely to question on your own.

So, always be willing to keep an open mind. Someone who disagrees with you might know something you don't.

Socially Subjective Facts

Philosophical realism is the idea that there is an objective reality that exists independently of our beliefs. I think philosophical realism is obviously true, and it always surprises me to find out there are people who don't (which includes nearly 20% of professional philosophers).

However, there is a sense in which non-realism actually makes sense.

For example, money. There is almost nothing useful you can do with a dollar bill. What few things you can do with it (like burning it for heat) can be better achieved with other, more readily available materials (like wood). The only reason money is valuable, is because people believe it's valuable. We're willing to trade useful items for money, because we know everyone else is also willing to trade useful items for money, not because the money itself is useful.

Many things in society are like that. The leader of a organization is the person whose orders are followed, and people follow the orders of the person they believe is the leader of the organization. Laws are what police and judges enforce, and police and judges enforce what they believe the laws are. Art is whatever people believe art is.

I'd go so far as to say that most people's experiences are shaped more by these socially subjective facts, than by physically objective facts. Maybe that has something to do with some people's rejection of even physical realism.

Religious Exemptions

Today, the Supreme Court ruled that Hobby Lobby doesn't have to provide its employees with insurance that covers contraception, because that would violate Hobby Lobby's religious freedom. Legally speaking, the Supreme Court probably made the right decision. The Affordable Care Act has a religious exemption written into it.

That's the problem. Laws shouldn't have religious exemptions. I'm not just talking about this law, I'm talking about any law. Or rather, no law should have a specifically religious exemption. Laws can have exemptions that include religious reasons, but they shouldn't be exclusive to religious reasons.

There are two reasons for this. One is that religious belief shouldn't be treated any differently than any other belief. If a religious conviction is enough to exempt you from a law, then a secular conviction should be as well. Otherwise you would be elevating religious beliefs above secular beliefs.

The second reason is that it violates the separation of church and state. You might not think so, since usually religious exemptions are intended to prevent laws from hindering the free exercise of religion. But that's the problem. It forces the government to decide what is or is not a valid religious belief to qualify for an exemption.

Not only does that violate separation of church and state, it does so in a way that is biased against minority religions. Members of major religions generally won't have any problems convincing a judge that their belief is sincere. Only members of small religions will have to worry about not being allowed to practice their religion freely, which seems like exactly the kind of thing that freedom of religion is supposed to prevent.

But what about free exercise of religion then? Well, generally laws are passed for reasons. If those reasons are good, they probably apply to everyone, religious and non. You can't murder people, even if you really truly believe that the god Huitzilopochtli needs them to make the sun rise.

If a religious exemption is really necessary, it can probably be rephrased to be secular, and still apply to the religious. For example, non-profit organizations are tax-exempt, whether they're churches or not. (Though current law more or less automatically gives religious organizations non-profit status, which is the kind of thing I'm arguing against here.)

And if that's not possible, maybe the law shouldn't be a law in the first place. If "I really truly believe in " is a good enough reason to be exempt from a law, then "I really truly believe in " should be as well, based on religious beliefs not being treated differently than secular beliefs. And if that's good enough, then pretty much anyone who doesn't want to follow the law doesn't have to, which completely defeats the purpose of it being a law in the first place.

Ken Ham and Evidence

A couple weeks ago Bill Nye and Ken Ham had a debate about creationism. Of course, nearly every point Ham made was factually inaccurate. But beyond having the simple facts wrong, Ham also had a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of evidence.

This was highlighted most clearly in Ham's answer to the question "What could change your mind?". His answer was, summarized, "Nothing". Now, this answer in and of itself is a serious strike against Ham's rationality. The point of changing your mind is to make your beliefs more accurate. If you don't even admit the possibility of changing your mind, you're saying that your beliefs cannot possibly be wrong, which is, well, arrogant to say the least.

But it's worse than just that. Ham also said that the Bible makes testable predictions. Alone, that's not a bad thing, quite the opposite. But when combined with his statement that nothing could change his mind, it shows that he doesn't understand the point of predictions. The point of predictions is to provide evidence, but the thing is, that evidence can go either way.

If you make a prediction and perform a test, and the results of the test match the prediction, then that is evidence that supports your beliefs. On the other hand, if you make a prediction, and perform a test, and the results don't match the prediction, then that is evidence that opposes your beliefs. If there is no such outcome that would go against your prediction, then it's not a prediction at all.

For example, suppose I held a rock, and based on my beliefs about the material it's made of, and the laws of physics, I predicted that when I let it go, it would fall down. Then, if I dropped it, and it fell down, that would be evidence in support of my beliefs. But, if I dropped it, and it didn't fall down, either falling up, or hovering in place, or anything else, that would be evidence opposing my beliefs. If I had predicted that when I let it go, either it would fall down, or it wouldn't, then I haven't actually made a prediction. I haven't, in any way, specified what the result of a test would be, which means no outcome can oppose my beliefs, but no outcome can support them either.

If Ham thinks the Bible really does make predictions, then those predictions failing to come true should change his mind. If nothing could change his mind, then his predictions can't actually provide evidence.

Halloween

In some ways, Halloween is a lot like Christmas and Easter. They were all Pagan holidays relating to the changing seasons that were later co-opted by Christianity, and now don't have much to do with either. We still tend to practice the Pagan rituals, but without thinking about where they came from or what they have to do with nominally Christian holidays.

But one important way that Halloween is that no one takes the mythology of Halloween seriously at all.

During other holidays, children are taught to believe in things that don't exist, whether it's Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny, or Jesus. But on Halloween, children are taught that all those ghosts and goblins wandering the streets are actually just other kids dressed up.

That's why Halloween is the skeptics' holiday. The lesson of other holidays is to have faith in things unseen. The lesson of Halloween is to investigate what looks mysterious and find the truth behind it.

Cargo Cults Get a Bad Rap

Cargo cults are religions that formed in pacific island cultures when they came into contact with Europeans. They sought to replicate the Europeans' material wealth and technology by imitating it. They didn't know how those things were made, so they thought they were gifts from the gods. They built imitation airstrips and control towers thinking those were rituals to summon planes.

The term cargo cult has also been applied in other contexts, such as cargo cult science or cargo cult programming, to mean imitating techniques and procedures without what they're for or why they're used. I don't object to that usage, because it seems pretty accurate, but it does give a poor representation of cargo cults.

As far as I can see, cargo cults are the most rational religion in existence. They're still wrong and irrational of course. But compared to more mainstream religions like Christianity and Islam, they're downright sane. Cargo cults have real evident miracles.

Airplanes and radios and all sorts of magical things. You don't need to have faith in those things. Their explanation for those things was wrong, but that's not necessarily irrational. The irrational part of cargo cults is refusing to give up that explanation when it fails to work. Compare that to Christianity which is entirely based on irrationality and faith.

Can You Choose What You Believe?

It's a simple yes or no question, right? Either you can choose what you believe in the same way you can choose what to have for breakfast, or you can't in the same way you can't choose to obey the law of gravity.

Well, no. Whether or not something is a choice is not a simple binary yes or no. It is, as nearly everything else is, a continuum. We don't normally notice it, because we usually only encounter examples at extreme ends of the continuum, like breakfast or gravity.

But there are examples of in-betweens. Consider a person with OCD. Does such a person choose to wash their hands over and over? To a degree, they do, but to a degree they don't.

It's the same with choosing what to believe. You form beliefs based on what you see and hear, and you can't really change that. But you can choose what to look at and who to listen to. And even when beliefs are deliberately chosen, it still takes a long time to really convince yourself of it.

Reality is Objective

Reality is objective. What's true is true for everyone, regardless of what people believe.

You'd think this would be obvious. And yet, it comes up. Particularly in debates about the supernatural. People will say things like "Well, maybe ghosts don't exist for you, but they do exist for me." I've never seen anyone apply this sort of reasoning when doing something mundane, like say, crossing the street. No one ever says "That bus might exist for you, but it doesn't exist for me." People know there either is a bus there, or there isn't, regardless of what they believe, and if they want to not get hit by it, they ought to have beliefs which match objective reality.

I think the idea that reality is different to different people might come from the thought that our senses are infallible. If I see something, that means it's there. If I see something, and someone else sees something different, well our realities must be different. But our senses aren't infallible, and we frequently see or hear things that aren't there, or fail to see or hear things that are.

It seems to me much easier to explain occasional discrepancies in our perceptions in an objective reality than to explain the ubiquitous consistency of our perceptions. How often do people disagree about whether it's day or night, whether they're inside or outside, whether they're sitting or standing, whether there's a bus in the road or not? If reality were subjective, why would such consistency be so common?

Justified True Belief?

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy interested in the study of knowledge. One of the foundational questions of epistemology is "What does it mean to know something?". A common answer is that knowledge is justified true belief. In order to know something, you have to believe it, have a good reason for believing it and it has to actually be true.

That sounds pretty good, but there are problems with it. It's possible to construct scenarios in which all three conditions are apparently met, but it doesn't seem like anything was "known".

There's also the question of what counts as justification. But I think there's another, more fundamental, problem with this definition. One I don't think I've ever seen anyone else point out.

No definition of knowledge should include the condition of being true.

To do so is to make the term inapplicable in any situation remotely resembling real life. The reason for that is because of the answer to another fundamental question of epistemology: "Is it possible to be absolutely certain of something?". The answer to that is no. (Of course, others disagree, and I should probably write another post explaining why I think that.) All we can do is get more and more evidence for something, getting closer and closer to 100% certainty, but never actually reaching it.

In toy examples, whether a given fact is true or not is simply assumed/given. So if a hypothetical character has a justified belief, we can say whether that character knows it or not, because of our god-like omniscience. But in real life, no one has that omniscience.

Consider the same question - Is a belief knowledge or not - applied to yourself. Do I know the sun will rise tomorrow, or do I just believe it? Well, I certainly think it's true that the sun will come up. I wouldn't believe it if it I didn't think that, tautologically. But if that's the standard, then I ought to consider every belief I have to be knowledge. If I didn't believe they were true, I wouldn't believe them.

And if we apply that standard to other people, then our evaluations of whether someone else knows something or merely believes it, simply becomes a question of whether they agree with you or not.

I propose a simpler definition: Knowledge is belief that is held with a high degree of confidence.

This definition fits very well into a Bayesian framework. Degree of confidence is simply probability. If you believe something is true with a probability greater than, say, 99.9%, you can be said to know it. This also handily deals with the question of what counts as justification - that's just Bayesian evidence.

Extraordinary Evidence

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" -Carl Sagan

 Some people don't like this quote. They say it's too subjective. There's no objective standard of what's extraordinary. And other rather silly objections.

I would generalize the saying to be something more like this: "All claims require the appropriate amount or degree of evidence.".

The ordinariness/extraordinariness of a claim is not a binary feature, but rather a sliding scale. If I said I had eggs for breakfast this morning, that's a perfectly ordinary claim. You'd probably need no more evidence than my word to believe it. If I said I saw a zebra in my backyard, that's a little bit extraordinary, since they don't live anywhere near here. You'd probably need a photograph, or a news story about a zebra that escaped from a zoo to believe it. If I said I saw a unicorn, that's even more extraordinary. You'd probably need to see the real live thing to believe that. If I said neutrinos can go faster than light, that's even more extraordinary and will require lots more evidence. And then of course, there's always God, which is about the most extraordinary claim imaginable.

Another important thing to note is that belief too is not a binary value. Rather, it's degree of certainty. Probability. Which is nice, because that means this saying can be formalized by using Bayes' Theorem.

Bayes' Theorem is a mathematical formula that lets you calculate how probable you should consider a hypothesis after seeing some evidence, given your prior probability of that hypothesis, how likely you are to see that evidence if the hypothesis were true, and how likely you are to see that evidence if the hypothesis were false.

How extraordinary a claim is, is simply how low your prior for it was. This doesn't totally eliminate claims of subjectiveness, but it's no less subjective than any other belief, and if you're doing Bayes right, it's really a lot less subjective.

And how extraordinary evidence is, is simply how much more likely that evidence is to occur if the claim were true than if the claim were not true.

Going back to my examples, the prior probability for me eating eggs for breakfast is relatively high. You already know from past experience that eggs exist and that people commonly eat them for breakfast. So the evidence doesn't need to be very strong. I'm more likely to say something if it's true than if it's false, but lying isn't unheard of.

The prior probability of me seeing a zebra in my backyard is lower. You still know that zebras exist, but you also know they don't live in the wild here. So, on just my word, it might seem more likely that I'm lying than that I actually saw a zebra. The prior probability for the unicorn is even lower, because you already know they don't exist. A photograph isn't sufficient here because it's more likely that I faked it than that unicorns actually exist.

The Problem with Unitarian Universalism

Unitarian Universalism is about the least objectionable religion imaginable. They don't go door to door trying to convert people. They don't try to prevent gays from marrying. They don't try to get creationism taught in schools. They don't say that if you don't believe as they do then you'll burn in hell.

But there's one major problem with UU that I find objectionable. They're too open and accepting.

The thing is, the existence of god and other religious questions are objective facts. Either god exists, or god doesn't exist. God can't exist for you, and not exist for me. If one person believes in god, and another doesn't then one of them is wrong and ought to change their mind, because truth is important.

Now, I don't think that someone with wrong beliefs should be censored or converted at swordpoint or anything like that. The only way to separate the true beliefs from the false is to constantly examine and challenge all beliefs.

But if a congregation is truly interested in getting at the truth, they shouldn't be content with "Well, some of us believe in god X and some of us believe in god Y and some of us don't believe in god at all.". They should instead examine the evidence and try to determine which, if any, beliefs are true and believe in those. Eventually, as they share information and arguments, they should start to agree on major points.

UUists tend to like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. They use it as an example of how different people can experience the same reality differently. But the parable shouldn't end with one man feeling a rope, and one man feeling a wall and one man feeling a pillar. Rather the blind men should examine the elephant further, switch places and find parts they hadn't before, and hopefully find a unified elephant.