I think it is just plain old cognitive dissonance: you believe two contradictory things at the same time. I don't think any meta levels are necessary to explain it; they rather make it confusing.
The cognitive dissonance is more like cognitive diffraction patterns: few things are absolutely true or absolutely false; it's where qualitative differences merge that creates these patterns, as with different wavelengths of light.
@MrHen They probably didn't prepare for it 1.) because people often don't do what's good for them for various reasons, e.g. laziness, stupidity, etc., and/or 2.) they weren't fully committed to this belief: they half-believed that it might not happen after all.
@Robusto To burn your finger! You are supposed to touch it.
@MrHen Confusing: I had to think really hard to decide whether this meta-"belief" made sense, whether I had failed to understand something about a process that would otherwise be quite simple: cognitive dissonance.
@Cerberus — I could still push “virtue” into it, but it would require some prerequisite knowledge about social signalling on your part. To keep it simple, it can be theorized that those people were trying to signal higher social status by proposing marginal theories; and they wanted to believe in those theories because it's virtuous to have higher social status and because believing in something makes it more plausible.
@Vitaly It's just this "belief" that your actions are virtuous that I don't like: it is misleading, because it is the desire to act virtuously that counts and nothing else (I think).
(a) beliefs refer to how we react to reality (b) people claim a belief but do not act on them (c) if they are not _actually_ believing, what _are_ they believing in?
@Vitaly Oh, and the fact that this desire causes a second, contrary belief (that the stove is cool by God's hand); but that belief is on the same level as the main belief (that it is in fact hot).
@Robusto Bad Religion... I used to listen to them.
Oh, it is just that they are really believing it's hot but are acting as if they believed the stove were cool, because they want to act that way, for some reason (desire to pretend that God exists, etc.); or they are undecided, believing it is hot at one moment, cool at the next—this is sort of like cognitive dissonance.
I will rephrase MrHen's explanation using the LW phrasing, but I'm too tired to defend it in debate:
(a) beliefs refer to what sensory experiences we anticipate (b) people claim a belief but do not anticipate sensory experiences implied by that belief (c) if they are not _actually_ believing, what _are_ they believing in?
@Vitaly Ad c): They probably either believe the opposite (pretending), or they believe both it and the opposite at the same time (cognitive dissonance: sometimes they believe it, at other times the opposite).
@MrHen Well, if they are conscious of their own disbelief, i.e. pretending, they just don't believe it; but if they are not conscious of that, they hold the opposite belief to some degree (but not completely).
I agree empirical evidence is not an all-encompassing system. But without it we do come head-on into the problem of inductive reasoning, as you say, and in that case a physicist who posits 11 dimensions is not vastly different from a preacher who tells you god created the earth in 6 days.
@Robusto Sorry, I didn't finish that thought. Let me make it more clear
My point was that belief carries (or should carry) an implication of the believer such that something should change in behavior if the belief were to suddenly vanish
@Robusto If someone believes in something but their actions don't align with their professed belief, I think it is better to say that they don't believe in that something at all
"I believe smoking will kill me, but I'm going to put that out of my mind while I feed my nicotine habit." Yes? "I believe a diet high in sugar may lead to diabetes. But pumpkin pie tastes good. Twinkies taste good."
> Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments. Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena. According to this view, bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another.
@Vitaly — Dude, I totally knew you were going to play that card. And by our belief system, the first person to bring up that argument must necessarily lose said argument.
I heard an expression today but I did not know how it is written or what it is. And I could not find it with Google.
It's something like:
it tastes like horspy
Any pointers?
"if a sizable number of people believed in fairies, and based their daily lives on them, and derived a sense of morality from them, you would have to be fairy literate if you wanted to rule over them effectively"
I'm not a native English speaker. I can understand English spoken by native speakers.
However, I cannot understand Indian English spoken by Indian on Youtube. How can I
understand their English? It seems hard to me as a non-native English speaker.
A non-native speaker is asking ...
Which should you use, which or that, in the following statement. Since this is mainly talking about the types of persons (within 'her'), you might use 'that,' but would you also use 'who'?
Sam was praising the industrious worker who/that she was when she was i...
I often get confused when trying to use who vs that.
Some examples that often confuse me:
THAT
The person that went to the store.
The people that went shopping.
The persons that went shopping.
The group that went shopping.
WHO
The person who went to the store.
The ...
Which of the following is correct?
"There were 10 people that went to the store."
"There were 10 people who went to the store."
Edit:
Which of the following is correct?
"There were 10 people that had brown hair."
"There were 10 people who had brown hair"
I heard an expression today but I did not know how it is written or what it is. And I could not find it with Google.
It's something like:
it tastes like horspy
Any pointers?
I'm not a native English speaker. I can understand English spoken by native speakers.
However, I cannot understand Indian English spoken by Indian on Youtube. How can I
understand their English? It seems hard to me as a non-native English speaker.
Which of the following is correct?
"There were 10 people that went to the store."
"There were 10 people who went to the store."
Edit:
Which of the following is correct?
"There were 10 people that had brown hair."
"There were 10 people who had brown hair"
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…