Comment by trabant00 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trabant00 | Hacker News Reader

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A good analyses, but it does miss mentioning 2 things I can think of:

Philosophical beliefs in the realms of politics, social, religious, are long thought not to be a discovery of the truth but a creation of a system in which the believers want to live in. It is not true that "thou shalt not kill" in the sense that is is not a law of the universe, but it sure makes living together a lot more desirable.

The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem - discovering a cronyism might generate a knee jerk reaction to eliminate it without understanding the full consequences of doing that. The data involved in a problem is practically infinite. Better the devil you know might be exemplified like this: sure, Bob is kind of lazy and he costs you 5k$ to employ him at you textile factory, but outsourcing your production to Asia, even though 1/5th of the cost for same productivity, might introduce problems you are not aware of at the time like: child labor, local workers not affording to buy your products any more, the outsourcing company controlling or taking over your business, etc.

So just discovering a belief isn't an universal truth or that it generates some problems does not necessarily justify destroying it.

Additionally every change costs energy and (as you well mentioned) colours itself with a perception of potential/real/invented risk. This risk is the straw we all grab to excuse ourselves why we are not acting the way we know we should.

If you look at the real world these risks get even invented on the fly (e.g. if we were to accept that immidiately $badthing would happen), so using the terms of the author: We can invent new crony believes with the purpose of protecting other (bigger) crony believes.

If you think about conspiracy nuts, their drama lies exactly in the flexibility. Their core crony believe isn't e.g. that the earth is flat or that reptilians control politics, but a deeper underlying believe that something is wrong. Which is why they often switch out their myths like other people change their clothes.

It's worth noting that proponents of moral naturalism, which is at least a position taken seriously in philosophy, do not find any problem with the is/ought problem. Furthermore, moral realism in general doesn't have a problem with it. The fact that they are "long thought" not to be a discovery of truth (by whom?) does not settle the question, but personally (as a moral anti-realist) I agree with you.

See this section for responses to the objection: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/#Nat...

There’s also “beliefs” that aren’t true in a strict sense, but make the world easier to talk or think about and that make it easier to persuade people of a position. “Human rights” fall into that category. They aren’t true in any straightforward sense, but like you say they encode a system that people would like to live in and provide an easy to conceptualise cognitive and rhetorical shortcut for persuading other people to cooperate in bringing that world about.

Some beliefs are facts. Some beliefs are a lens to focus on certain facts.

There are facts, and then there are endless possible interpretations. A fact is an occurrence of something in space and time and can be verified through our 5 senses in an empirical manner, which is also the basis of modern science.

For example, it is a fact that I'm currently sitting on my chair, writing this comment. However, answering the question "why am I writing this comment?" is deeply subjective even for me to answer. And yet, many people would consider it a "fact" that I want to sound smart, for example.

The language that we use also affects our understanding and models our environment. The previous example can be a fact for all of us only because we have a shared view of "what a chair is" through culture and language.

We hold these truths to be self evident...

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