Believing without evidence is always morally wrong | Hacker News Reader

Believing without evidence is always morally wrong

aeon.co

20 pointsibhosszu9 comments

Adhering to this, would make experimentation difficult in many fields. I am not a fan. Taking action, even if there's no evidence, in the service of the preservation of life is moral. It may not be effective (or net positive effect), but the place of sacrifice is a different moral question.

I disagree with this. Intuition is powerful evolved trait in humans, and often times has valuable information. Many believes furthermore, can only be evidenced by intuition. Logic in western countries has really dominated the culture for a long time now, and their are disastrous effects I think on the west because of it. You need logic and intuition to be whole, and you need beliefs based in facts and in feeling, not just one.

I also have to say, that their are some things that believing in without evidence makes your life significantly better. Believing in a meaning of life even though there is no evidence at all to support it is one example, and I don't know how anyone would function without that belief.

Plenty of people function very well without believing in a notion of objective meaningfulness.

No they don't. I have met a large amount of people. Even the nihilists believe in some sort of meaning. Furthermore, it is literally impossible to function without a believe in something meaningful, which can not be backed up by evidence given we have no facts to evidence that any action, animal, thing, matters at all or has any meaning.

Just waking up the morning and brushing your teeth is the acknowledgment that your teeth are meaningful and that your health is meaningful. Even if you are purely hedonistic you acknowledge that your pain and pleasure is meaningful.

If you are a functioning human you believe that there is meaning, and that is a belief that can not be backed up by any sort of conclusive evidence.

Sure they do. The examples you gave are all for subjective meaningfulness - my teeth, my health, my pain and pleasure are all very meaningful to me, but at the same time I know they are meaningless in the grand scheme of things and I'm fine with that.

I think the author missed an opportunity at the end, when threading the role of AI/decision-making with respect to our lives...

Our behavior in society is fluid and dynamic. And so the extent to which data gets used to influence our future can, and should also reflect our changing values and beliefs.

The caveat is: what's the lag behind to which automated systems accurately reflect our beliefs of what's right and wrong?

Things like the semantics of words change regularly, at least in English.

And so is it safe to assume and believe that systems using "big data" accurately project and reflect society within a given moment of time?

...the irony of a director at GS lecturing about right/wrong.

>Add the wrong ingredients into the Big Data recipe, and what you’ll get is a potentially toxic output.

Shouldn't the Big Data algorithms apply the same principles?

If only more "journalists" thought about this before reporting things.

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