>One heuristic for spotting when you might be wrong is that you hold a very uncommon belief.
this is only the case in a 'wisdom of the crowd' world where people hold uncorrelated, authentic, self-formed opinions. If you're in a world of mass opinion and mania where ideas spread virally it ceases to be an indicator. In that environment its not truth that determined popularity of a belief, but how transmittable they are. In a world where gigantic companies produce sociality being anti-social in the most literal sense is a very real survival and truth-finding strategy.
And of course it's more important to be right than happy. Happiness decoupled from truth is nihilism. If that's the goal start doing heroin at ten in the morning and retreat into the VR world of your choice.
As Cormac McCarthy said in his last book: “You would give up your dreams in order to escape your nightmares and I would not. I think it's a bad bargain.”
> If you're in a world of mass opinion and mania where ideas spread virally it ceases to be an indicator.
Not really. It continues to be an indicator, just a less reliable one. As I said, it's one heuristic. It increases your probability of being right more than it decreases it, but it isn't an absolute rule.
Fundamentally, science itself relies on this heuristic to some extent. The idea that an experiment be reproducible is essentially the idea that the majority of testers should agree on observed reality. You just have to be careful not to conflate opinion with observed fact, or to treat it as more than a heuristic evaluator.
> Happiness decoupled from truth is nihilism.
Not at all.
You do not need to be correct to be happy, and there is no correlation at all between your ability to correctly understand the world and your capacity (or worthiness) to experience joy or to help others experience it. You are allowed to be wrong and happy, or apathetic and happy, or ignorant and happy, or even nihilistic and happy.
> If that's the goal start doing heroin at ten in the morning and retreat into the VR world of your choice.
There's more than one type of happiness. The kind you describe is hedonic. The other type is referred to as Eudamonic, and it comes from connection, service, and a sense of purpose.
You'll never get to experience the second type if other people don't want to be around you because you've decided that your own narrow perspective is the One True Perspective (TM).
Don't get me wrong, I reject post-modernity and the horrifying idea that there is no objective truth. I just also reject the idea that any of us are valid arbiters of that truth, or that we must know the truth before being allowed to experience happiness.
Nobody said you can't. They said the happiness is "decoupled from truth", which isn't ideal if we care about objective health of a society.
Your position seems to imply support for society-level submission to religious dogma. There's no point ignoring actual examples of all these ideas.
Hold an "uncommon belief"? According to you, it's a sign you're wrong. "the world isn't crazy, it's you who's missing something"... and you even say "let people continue being wrong for the sake of being social."
I don't think you meant to express support for strict religious rule and population submission, but that's how I'm reading it.
Your argument supports those who seek submission from the population. You don't require objective truth to play a role in happiness. You have found value in submission that serves to neutralise dissent. Dissent when coming from the few, isn't worth your time. Peg those few dissenters as "probably wrong" and call it a day.
A lot of folks seem to be interpreting my heuristic is if it were a hard and fast rule here. Thats not what a heuristic is.
A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows for quick decisions based on "most likely" outcomes. Its a statistical tool.
In my case I said it should be enough of an indicator for you to double check your work, not that you were automatically wrong. I stand by that.
That said, you're getting into epistemology now, and its important to differentiate between the observed facts and the biased interpetation of them.
I mentioned before that reproducibility in this way is important to science, and the reason it works with science is that we decouple the observation from the interpetation.
When most people observe that 2+2=4 and you get 5 it is likely that you're wrong. You should invest the time to double check your work.
If 50% of the world then tortures that observation through convoluted and error filled reasoning until they can interpret it to mean magic sky daddy wants you to let the priest touch your special no-no place you should ignore them.
Observed reality being in agreement is a much more reliable heuristic than agreement of interpretation, which is often filled with bias.
> They said the happiness is "decoupled from truth", which isn't ideal if we care about objective health of a society...
Happiness is an emotion. Imagine if I'd claimed society should only be allowed to feel lust on Tuesdays. This is no different. You are allowed to feel however you'd like to feel whenever you'd like to feel it.
Making up arbitrary rules about when you're "allowed " or "deserve" to feel good will make you miserable, and you don't have the right to tell the rest of us we have to abide by your misery making emotion rules.
You might consider asking yourself where this idea that you must meet specific prerequisites before being allowed to feel specific feelings came from, and then seriously considering whether it has merit, or if it even actually works.
Are you also restricting when you're "allowed" to feel negative emotions? How does that work? Are you really able to just... not be sad if you dont deserve it? Do you always feel happy when you DO deserve it?
I think the Protestant ethos is soo deeply embedded in you that you might not even know its there.
this is only the case in a 'wisdom of the crowd' world where people hold uncorrelated, authentic, self-formed opinions. If you're in a world of mass opinion and mania where ideas spread virally it ceases to be an indicator. In that environment its not truth that determined popularity of a belief, but how transmittable they are. In a world where gigantic companies produce sociality being anti-social in the most literal sense is a very real survival and truth-finding strategy.
And of course it's more important to be right than happy. Happiness decoupled from truth is nihilism. If that's the goal start doing heroin at ten in the morning and retreat into the VR world of your choice.
As Cormac McCarthy said in his last book: “You would give up your dreams in order to escape your nightmares and I would not. I think it's a bad bargain.”