Shitty Ask Lemmy

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.