Comment by pjscott | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjscott | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Belief should not be absolute, but a matter of degree. If I flip a coin ten times, I believe that it'll land heads at least once. How strongly do I believe it? As a matter of fact, I'm a little more than 99.9% sure. The probability of getting at least one head is 1023/1024.

On more complex things, it's harder (and sometimes uncomputable) to come up with such precise probability estimates, but that doesn't change the principle. I believe with greater than 99% certainty that evolution happened. I believe with less certainty that Moore's law will continue for another two or three process nodes. I have very little belief that "psychics" can talk with the dead; equivalently, I have a very high degree of belief that they can not talk with the dead.

The degrees of belief we have about things should be revised upward or downward based on evidence, and should be based on the evidence we have available to us. Your belief that mars is real is supported by a lot of evidence, and therefore should have a high degree of confidence. But if I told you that there's a planet, unknown until now, called Uldune, and that this planet has space pirates using it as a supply base, then believing me with non-negligible certainty would be an act of blind faith. (Disbelieving me, with high certainty, would not be. My story about the planet Uldune contradicts a lot of evidence about the current state of the art in space travel, and the laws of physics, and so on.)

Evolution is a good example. Why do you believe it happened? Because someone told you. You read someone else's words. It sort of makes sense. You saw what you assume are dinosaur bones in a museum. All of that is faith, and perhaps blind faith.

I'm assuming you're not a geneticist, so you probably didn't verify that the bones that were stacked nicely into a skeleton actually came from the same being. You likely weren't part of the dig team that found them. You don't know where they came from, or even if they are actual bone. And I'm not even talking about people purposely misleading us, but rather the fact that we have to take at face value what we are told. That's blind faith. We both _assume_ we could dig and verify the facts (with enough time, money and education), but we don't -- we just believe.

My argument is the 'evidence' we think we have, is nothing more than blind faith in 99% of the time, simply because we don't have the time and resources to follow up on everything. We simply believe because everyone else does.

If your definition of "blind faith" is broad enough that accepting things on "blind faith" is actually a good, fairly reliable predictor of possible future observations, then I think you should get a narrower definition.

For example, I accept on "blind faith" the fact that Australia exists. But if I got on a plane to Australia, I have every reason to expect that it will go to a real place called Australia, rather than secretly taking me to Botswana or something. By your definition, a belief in Australia and a belief in unicorns are both lumped under the category of blind faith, which I think is a really silly classification.

All our observations of the world -- even sight, sound, smell, and so on -- are indirect. Your eyes don't see all wavelengths, and they can be tricked into confusing combinations of red, green, and blue as "the same color" as a pure wavelength of light. And don't get me started on the preprocessing that happens before the signals even reach your brain! Will you categorize everything you see as being taken on blind faith as well? Where do you draw the line?

"a belief in Australia and a belief in unicorns are both lumped under the category of blind faith, which I think is a really silly classification."

I'm not lumping them together. Lots of people that I trust tell me they've been to Australia. I don't have any reason to doubt them. I trust them, so accept that Australia is there. Lots of others also publish pictures, movies, etc so I trust them too. But that's a belief, not a knowledge -- I _personally_ have no evidence at this point.

Nobody I know professes to have seen a unicorn. I also have no personal evidence, so I don't believe that.

And like I said above, I'm not trying to go to the point of whether we can trust our senses, or know whether or not we actually exist or any of that. I'm just trying to show that individually, each of us live our lives with 99% belief (ie no personal experience/evidence), and 1% knowledge (things we've personally experienced).

Let's take the atom. How do YOU KNOW that atoms exist? What personal experience/evidence do YOU have that they exist? We both believe they exist, but neither of us have split one and know for a fact that there is a nucleus in there. We both choose to believe, based on the coherent story we hear from many other sources.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com