Shitty Ask Lemmy

1624 readers

49 users here now

its like r/shittyaskreddit except its lemmy

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

PeterPoopshit@lemmy.ml

How did you come to have the correct opinion about everything? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 week ago by FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca to c/shittyasklemmy@lemmy.ml

37 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] a_gee_dizzle@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Weighing your beliefs doesn’t guarantee that you’ll never have false beliefs, and you’ll still on some level believe all your beliefs to be true. That doesn’t mean weighing your beliefs is totally worthless and you are still free to do that if you like

[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 week ago

Most of my beliefs are false. I assign 50% probability that Mexico City is west of 30⁰ W when I typed "30⁰ W", and now I've thought about it for a minute I'm 99.99% sure^1^. Now I looked it up on Wikipedia and thought some more and I'm at least 99.99999999999% sure^1^.

I knew at the start something like this would happen and that "There 50% probability that Mexico City is west of 30⁰ W" was never true about the world in the way it is true that there is 50% chance a particular potassium-40 atom in my brain will undergo radioactive decay between now and its half life from now.

I was as close to 100% sure as I can get that Mexico City wouldn't objectively have 50% chance of being on one side of that line than the other. I was extremely confident that I was wrong, and yet there I was saying it because it was my best guess.

I really hope you won't leave this conversation still thinking you believe your beliefs to be true, because that's no way to live.

^1^: normalized to the world being real, which I don't know how to sensibly apply probabilities to. Still I would be very surprised if such a charade broke over this, so I expect to consistently experience Mexico City at 99⁰W for longer than I'll remember that it is there.