sad truth: This is Alex Jones’s world. We just live in it.
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I cannot think of one example wherein true belief is a choice. Childhood indoctrination, for example. Children are made to believe in whatever religion, for instance (there is likely other nonsense involved but unrelated to religion), that their parents believe. Another example is, say, climate change. People review the evidence and the scientific consensus and that compels them to believe that the climate is changing, and that, specifically, it is largely man-made. They’re not choosing to believe.
I don’t think belief is a choice. You either are convinced something is true or you are not convinced. If you choose to believe something you know is not true, you’re lying to yourself and you don’t really believe it.
For example, I want you to choose to believe that rainbow colored universe creating unicorns exist and they live in Des Moines, Iowa. You can choose to pursue belief, but you can not truthfully choose to believe it to be true, you’d have to fool yourself into believing it to be true by first convincing yourself it’s true, otherwise, you’re just lying to yourself.
I’m open to changing my mind on this as it’s something I’ve only recently concluded philosophically. I feel my reasoning and conclusion are convincing. I can’t choose to believe differently, you’ll have to convince me to believe differently, BUT I can choose to not pursue knowledge that would change my belief, which is different. Thus, I cannot choose what I believe, but I can choose to not want to actively investigate something that might change my mind so I’m choosing to remain in my belief.
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But believing it to be true without evidence is the fallacy. Convincing yourself that weather manipulation is real because you want to believe it to be real and you “just feel it’s true because I can see the government doing that sort of thing” is the failure of critical thinking.
If you believe in something with bad evidence, your logic is faulty.
That’s the problem with practically every single conspiracy theory out there. People are convincing themselves of things with bad logic. Heck, that’s why religion is so popular.
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I can’t think of one example where it isn’t.
No, there are plenty of children who adamantly refuse to believe what their parents believe. Sometimes for good, sometimes for ill.
The one thing I will say though is that knowing the difference between a wrong choice and a better choice is a skill. Like all mental skills, there is a tendency to become more skillful with age and experience. Children tend to be bad, sometimes very bad, at choosing what to believe, but especially at very young ages it isn’t their fault. This, however, doesn’t make them good, and it doesn’t make it not a choice. What it does mean is that one needs to play with a system in order to develop proficiency with that system, and that failure in the pursuit of knowledge is the path to success.
No one is compelled absolutely to believe in climate change. Sometimes people are compelled to express belief; for example, perhaps Bob is going out with Sarah, and if he disagrees with Sarah’s views he isn’t going to get laid. At other points in history the penalty for heresy has been a brutal execution. But the thing about epistemological ethics, unlike most other kinds, is that no one really knows what you’ve chosen to believe, except yourself. Being an atheist doesn’t force you to tell others that you’re an atheist; you could, if you wanted, go to church and sing hymns with the rest of them. But the point is that you can always fake it when it comes to behavior. The one person who you should never fake it with is yourself — but you can, if you want to. It’s a choice you can make.
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If you come home to find that your next door neighbor is on top of your wife or husband, you are not deciding to believe that your wife or husband is cheating on you. The evidence, in this case witnessing your wife or hubsand cheating on you, compelled you to believe.
Back to my example of childhood indoctrination. You’re wrong that children that disbelieve in the religion of their parents, and the religion that was shoved down their throats during their upbringing, choose disbelief. It is not a choice. That person, through simple logic and with a complete lack of evidence for that religion, have stopped believing, but, they did not choose to. This person could not believe in that religion, for the reasons given above.
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We aren’t talking about the notion that data aggregate websites are in on a ridiculous conspiracy because there’s nothing more to talk about.
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This is a false dichotomy. The true dichotomy is: we have hypotheses we have disproven, and we have hypotheses that we have not (yet) disproven. The scientific method does not and cannot prove things. We fundamentally do not know what is true. Instead we know what is not true.
This nature of knowledge is at conflict with our biological nature. In order to survive, we must act, and in order to act we must believe that certain things are true. This is something that is impossible to know perfectly. It is all guesses.
Belief is the structure bridging this conflict between the nature of knowledge and the necessity for action.
But even this description is an oversimplification. We are not beings of unlimited attention, not of unlimited memory. Both are resources limited by our biological natures. We choose what we pay attention to. We choose how we remember things. For example, why do childhood memories have such a potential to scar a person? Well, two reasons: first, children are bad at writing realistic stories, often filling in the gaps with magical explanations in their ignorance, and second, what you call “reality” is something that doesn’t exist in your mind, and what you’re interacting with mentally is instead just the shadow cast by your memories.
People are hesitant to discard their memories, which can be a mistake. Your memory is no more infallible than you are, and it’s not difficult to remember things that never happened, especially if it was a much less epistemologically skilled version of yourself that you’re putting your faith in. It’s not comfortable to face this truth, because memory is the only anchor to reality we have, and it can work. But just because it can work, does not mean that it always succeeds.
(Got to get back to work, sorry if I’m not responding to everything at this time.)
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Then stay out of this thread, last warning.
You want to discuss a dead horse?
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I dont have to justify what i want to discuss to no one and you guys are not to decide what is here discussed. If you dont like the topic just leave and stop harrassing me and trolling this topic. Simple as it is.
I didn’t ask you to justify anything. I was asking you if you wanted to talk about a topic (the one you brought up), even though it has been refuted by common sense? You want to talk about a dead horse? And if you don’t realize your topic is a dead horse, I suggest you read the replies to your topic.
There’s nothing more to talk about.
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Waaaah waaaah the conversation is not going the way I wanted it to go, I’m calling the internet police
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I don’t think we actually choose how to remember things though. I didn’t actively choose to remember a certain event in my childhood. That is to say, I don’t consider subconscious thinking as a choice. If someone has a bad childhood and their mind blocks something out as a defense mechanism, this isn’t done as a choice by the person, but rather it is something done by the subconscious. Thus, I cannot “choose” to remember where I was at 4:13pm on April 5th, 1989. I don’t have that choice. While it may be somewhere in my brain, I cannot choose to recall it.
And again, with my unicorn example, can you honestly say you could actually choose to believe it to be true and honestly believe it to be true? Do you have the choice to do that?
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There is no rule that I am aware of that says we must abide by an original posters topic. You cannot force someone to talk only about what you want to talk about. If you feel you are being harassed, you need only ignore the users you think that are causing said harassment. You cannot force someone to leave this topic.
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You guys turn this topic into a toxic one and that is violating the CoC. You are trolling nothing more nothing less… so please go and play somewhere else with each other.
We are not trolling. We’re having a great philosophical discussion about epistemology which is directly tied into your original topic about why you believe what you believe.
“Why do people trust HSReplay so much” when “It would be easy to display fake numbers in order to push or lower the playrates of certain decks or to coverup for the rigged matchmaking” directly results in a discussion about how we think and why we think the way we do.
You started it. This is where the conversation was bound to go.
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We will hopefully find out soon.
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Seems like they do not.
Miracle Rogue was t3 and below 50% winrate overall, but forum was QQing non stop that it’s the most broken thing ever, because vicious syndicate said so and there is a video on yt with some high rolls.
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