> I've read many anecdotes of people going off the deep end with political stuff over the last 6 years or so, people who refuse have a reasonable conversation about or seem to be unable to explain their convictions that bad thing was actually good thing even when shown evidence to the contrary.
And I've interacted with hundreds and observed tens/hundreds of thousands of "right thinking" people who suffer from the same inability to substantiate their "correct" beliefs, or the ability to address legitimate criticisms of their claims/logic without resorting to rhetorical wildcards like "that's pedantic".
> Is there a cure? I wouldn't know. Is there a defense against it? I don't know? Does it actually exist or is it a convenient cover story that I can blame all the woes of the world on? Once again, I don't know.
My intuition is that you just demonstrated a substantial portion of the cure: the ability to implement Unknown() - it is an amazingly rare ability these days. If you don't believe me, read internet discussions for one week deliberately looking for instances of people noting uncertainty in their beliefs, and the opposite: instances of people claiming to have knowledge of things that are unknowable (such as the contents of other people's minds, the future state of reality, etc), knowing the "correct" answer to subjective questions, and various other highly irrational behaviors that are typically excused as "you know what I meant" or "that's just people being people".
I would speculate some combination of these (plus some things I'm missing):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/
https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/heuristics
https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2022/02/is-reality...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
> I've read many anecdotes of people going off the deep end with political stuff over the last 6 years or so, people who refuse have a reasonable conversation about or seem to be unable to explain their convictions that bad thing was actually good thing even when shown evidence to the contrary.
And I've interacted with hundreds and observed tens/hundreds of thousands of "right thinking" people who suffer from the same inability to substantiate their "correct" beliefs, or the ability to address legitimate criticisms of their claims/logic without resorting to rhetorical wildcards like "that's pedantic".
> Is there a cure? I wouldn't know. Is there a defense against it? I don't know? Does it actually exist or is it a convenient cover story that I can blame all the woes of the world on? Once again, I don't know.
My intuition is that you just demonstrated a substantial portion of the cure: the ability to implement Unknown() - it is an amazingly rare ability these days. If you don't believe me, read internet discussions for one week deliberately looking for instances of people noting uncertainty in their beliefs, and the opposite: instances of people claiming to have knowledge of things that are unknowable (such as the contents of other people's minds, the future state of reality, etc), knowing the "correct" answer to subjective questions, and various other highly irrational behaviors that are typically excused as "you know what I meant" or "that's just people being people".