Quelklef

milk consumer

girly but not a girl

name-color: #C09


this question has been haunting me for some time. being a member of a social system i feel a duty for the opinions i hold to be developed in some responsible manner, for some suitable definition of responsible


in some cases doing this is relatively straightforward. if i know that i want to have an opinion on something, then i can go out and engage with a bunch of different viewpoints and let a conclusion precipitate. (nb. i dont think one is required at all to agree with engaged viewpoints, only to acknowledge and ideally understand them)

but most beliefs are formed unintentionally! if i, just for fun, read a book on the history of recycling, it's gonna make a big difference whether that book is corporation-funded or written by an environmental activist, and in both cases i am likely to come away having formed a belief in greater alignment with the author's[1]. this is not a fault of my own: if i am reading to learn, then presumably i dont know much about the topic, and if i dont know much about the topic, then it's far harder to identify e.g. lying-by-omission or bending the truth

i am constantly taking in new information and having my beliefs change. its just infeasible for all beliefs to be formed intentionally. it's also infeasible to bar oneself from having beliefs altogether, or to successfully track where all of one's beliefs come from and accordingly qualify them (to do so sounds, frankly, exhausting and horrible). the conclusion seems to be that i will have shortsighted opinions, that i will hold beliefs for a long time that are just false, and that this is unavoidable. this conclusion is uncomfortable

[1]: not always true; i can think of a single time i read a book and stopped halfway through because i was like "yeah i think this author's viewpoint is fundamentally mistaken and i disagree in an essential way with everything presented in this book". but that was just the one time


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in reply to @Quelklef's post:

i used to (still do) get so discouraged by people saying dumb shit because some part of me assumed that if they were confident enough in their opinion to publish it in some way then clearly they had put an amount of thought and intention into it that i perceived as insurmountably greater than what i was capable of, and thus it was an authoritative statement that trumped my own opinion even if i thought it was dumb

i've tried to lower my personal standards a bit as it's become clear to me that many (most?) people will just say dumb shit because they wanted to and that i also have this human right

put another way, as someone told me recently, "only textbooks need resemble textbooks"