Shitty Ask Lemmy

I actually had that thought as I was posting this. I was mocking people who are arrogant about their beliefs and refuse to be proven wrong, but I was also thinking about this paradox that every person believes each of their opinions to be correct yet also knows they can't all be correct

Isn't the solution to that problem really simple though? Just value doubt.

Doesn't this problem dissolve if you see yourself as holding a nonbinary personal level of confidence based on your own experiences and information? Of course people with different experiences are going to hold different beliefs, I haven't seen what they've seen and vice versa. If both of us knew the whole truth we would agree, but we don't so we disagree.

The bigger problem in practice, IMO, is that confidence is entangled with social-political weight. Someone who qualifies their statements gets taken less seriously than someone who doesn't. People want others to confidently endorse positions to signal their friendship or alliance. Even microexpressions of doubt and the timing of actually taking things under consideration are seen as reasons to discredit one's position, so we can't even hold private doubts reliably.

So we are constantly being trained to feel and think that we are more confident than we really are, and realizing that can feel like the ground falling away beneath our feet because, social-politically, it is. But that's a cultural issue rather than an epistemological one.

Sometimes I hold some opinions out of comfort/self-soothing. One example is that I'd rather just hold the opinion that China is socialist than seriously consider the legitimate left-wing critiques of its rightist and capitalist excesses. I think these hold water but if I had to reckon with a reality that almost none of the world is socialist instead of 1/6th, I would be utterly paralyzed into inaction via despair.