what's something you believe strongly but have little knowledge about
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.
people said the same thing about books, radio, television, and movies at one time or another
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.
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 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.
I deliberately make it a point not to, when I can.
No investigation, no right to speak.
I have mixed feelings:
And yet ordinary people should be able to say “I want to stop choking on yellow smoke every time I go outside” without having to learn the difference between hexamethyldecawhatever and tetraethylpentawhatever.
That's a fair point, but that doesn't apply to everything. Believing something strongly is more about the factual basis of things, rather than direct desires for improvements. Like, I wouldn't say I have a strong belief that I want a bagel right now, I just want the bagel, but I can say I have a strong belief that bagels are a type of bread.
never expected Mao Zedong to be cited as someone's inspiration to take an empirical approach to beliefs, lol
I'm a Marxist-Leninist, so I see Mao more favorably than not. He made mistakes, but was also a critical figure in establishing socialism in China, and is beloved in China because of it. That being said, Mao did not invent the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge nor the necessity of unifying theory with practice, that's a core part of Marxism from the beginning. Mao just had a poetic and direct way of writing that is immensely quotable in ways Marx, Lenin, etc. don't often compare.
You’ve been on Lemmy for over a year and you’re surprised?
Everything will be ok.
admittedly I'm not too keen to reevaluate that particular belief, it has value even when false
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.
It's great to want to learn theory! If you want, I actually made an introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list, it should help with structure. It's meant to build up as time goes on, so you aren't thrown in the deep end at the start.
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!
Epstein didn’t kill himself. Epstein island was a Mossad honey trap. Does that one count?
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know how exactly it should be implemented but Germany needs a serious inheritance tax. Tbh. due to not having it in the past a wealth tax might be advised as well.
I want to live in a world where a worker** totally can earn 100x what another worker earns, but not in a world where you earn 100x because of daddy's money. For that we have to get rid of insane inheritance. I also think this rectifies criminal generational wealth like the church or old noble families.
Let's be honest: Life is good in Germany so only few people actually complain about that, but it is a * unfair system and I can understand everyone who doesn't want to play in it.
Hillary Clinton is bisexual, leaning lesbian, and was having an affair with Anthony Weiner’s wife.
It fits a lot of the behavior and side comments of people close to the situation, including the email scandal and his behavior at the time. But I have no real information and never expect to.
I truly believe I am right about this.
is this like an attempt at "this sentence is false" or something, or did you forget to finish your thought?
If the shoe fits.
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.
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.
As @PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml said, Marxist economics are sound and they work. The problem is that the conclusions of Marxist economics point to it being unquestionably correct to move beyond capitalism and into socialism, so the capitalist status-quo spends more time trying to make up any excuses they can to keep the gravy train going for that little bit longer. Liberal economists can't form a consensus because it's all based on rejection of working economic theory.
The problem is that the conclusions of Marxist economics point to it being unquestionably correct to move beyond capitalism and into socialism
It's even earlier, Marx himself noted that conclusion of LTV itself is socialism and indeed all the economists basing on Ricardo's work arrived at this point. Marx was just completely conscious in his tries and used dialectical materialism unlike others to develop a scientific socialism, thus his theory was the best one. He also noted that this necessity was why the pet economists of capitalists needed to take a step back and turned mainstream political economisc into the superficial justifications of capitalism, that happened with J.S. Mill Junior iirc.
I don't agree on this point, because I think communism is predicated on selflessness, and there's a decent amount of evidence that we're only selfless on the small scale (communities ≈ 150 ppl). Without selflessness, communism depends on authoritarianism, forcing people to be selfless and work for the greater good.
Capitalism has enjoyed relative success because it is predicated on selfishness. It's not necessarily better for society, but the fact that there are no large, successful communisms is pretty strong evidence that it exploits humanity's baser nature. I don't see communism working outside of either small, isolated communities, or in idealized, hypothetical thought experiments.
There's no way there's an entire spoon of plastic in my brain. I know that one study came to that conclusion but that study was wrong. Cmon people that's insane.