Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

I have come to believe that there is no such thing as 'true rationality' in the universe. There are true events and true facts, but rationality is a shared framework for communication. Rationality exists between people.

People always have a framing story or perspective or viewpoint or system prompt for how they understand facts and events.

If you want to influence beliefs you have to understand the framing story that a person is using - even when that framing story is invalid or untrue.

Also, if you want to influence beliefs, you have to provide some emotional validation. You can't remove a load bearing core belief from someone's story, you can only replace it.

---

Another partial explanation is trauma - you can think about 'conspiracy theories' in a number of ways, but these low information, high satisfaction theories often arise after traumatic experiences. You can't properly address the facts of the situation while a person is hurting.

We should expect to see more conspiracy theories after natural and unnatural disasters. Think wildfires caused space lasers, floods caused by cloud seeding, storms caused by radar installations, melting of steel beams by various means. The people who believe these things are generally not having a good time in life.

---

BONUS Link: Tim Minchin - Confirmation Bias

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1juPBoxBdc

Agreed, I'd phrase it slightly differently in that symbolized reality exists inside our heads, but we often operate as if[1] it exists outside our heads and some, possibly a majority of people, believe that there is not difference - that they are in fact the same thing, that the symbolic universe is real universe.

Every frame is the act of assuming a symbolic correspondence. The only problem is that we've incredibly bad at disproving the veracity of frames.

1. To great success even

Yes. There are true facts, but the concept of "rationality" presupposes that there is one correct way to interpret these facts and translate them into behavior.

Two people observe someone beating another person. One person moves forward to intervene and stop the violence. The other moves away to protect themselves. Which person has acted rationally? They may have both acted in complete alignment with their personal philosophies, and they may each view the other as irrational.

"Rationality" is completely subjective to your own values and belief systems. Human behavior is infinitely more complex than formal logic allows.

There are true facts, but a human observer can never be sure of them

There is such a thing as valid logic, but truthful results depend on the priors being correct.

Yes, I am using the word 'rationality' somewhat informally.

> There are true facts, but a human observer can never be sure of them

See:

> Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge. Also called "the theory of knowledge", it explores different types of knowledge, such as propositional knowledge about facts, practical knowledge in the form of skills, and knowledge by acquaintance as a familiarity through experience. Epistemologists study the concepts of belief, truth, and justification to understand the nature of knowledge. To discover how knowledge arises, they investigate sources of justification, such as perception, introspection, memory, reason, and testimony.

> The school of skepticism questions the human ability to attain knowledge, while fallibilism says that knowledge is never certain. Empiricists hold that all knowledge comes from sense experience, whereas rationalists believe that some knowledge does not depend on it. Coherentists argue that a belief is justified if it coheres with other beliefs. Foundationalists, by contrast, maintain that the justification of basic beliefs does not depend on other beliefs. Internalism and externalism debate whether justification is determined solely by mental states or also by external circumstances.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

A philosophy joke:

> When I talk to Philosophers on zoom my screen background is an exact replica of my actual background just so I can trick them into having a justified true belief that is not actually knowledge.

* Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed, https://old.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyMemes/comments/gggqkv/get...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem

Reply on news.ycombinator.com