20 Things I Believe That Many Do Not
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medium.com
1. Life is about the continuous cycle of our human species development and where we fit in that as individuals.
2. A religion as a system of beliefs is not so much to be true as to fulfill a purpose. The purpose (and the religion) can and should be revised from time to time. (Religions can be replaced.)
3. Agreed.
4. Justice is grounded on power. It should be on reason.
5. We need adequate regulation. If what we have is adequate or not is a subjective and a political mater.
6. University education should not be a replacement for auto-didactic learning.
7. Agreed. Overspecialization is a weakness in itself.
8. Partially agreed. The package of ability and personality is both genetically inherited and later shaped.
9. If in doubt, improve your ability to make an educated guess by learning more about the mater. This is what humans (should) do, as a species.
10. Luck is both given (by arbitrary events) AND created (by how we react to arbitrary events).
11. "Risk-avoidance is the riskiest strategy." does not fully respect the logic.
12. Through "well-intended conservation" the good is at most just preserved (by definition), therefore the comparison is flawed. Also, it's worth noting that there is an effect called "absence blindness" that kicks in in such comparisons. http://joshkaufman.net/absence-blindness/
13. Technological progress spawns a lot of things, including extinctions for many things that we come later to disregard.
14. Progress is not a mathematical function and any attempt to force it to look otherwise is an error-prone exercise.
15. The average is a more simplistic reduction than the power-laws, so agreed. A less simplistic representation than power-laws is also possible.
16. Agreed. (We would probably need a religion drive to achieve that.)
17. Agreed.
18. Aging is a natural biological process. Humans will step over their biological limits, but that will threaten our cohesion on a species level. One of my personal wishes is to leave behind the humanity in one piece...
19. Consciousness is a feedback loop. (The most simplistic reduction.)
20. Free will is an optimum seeking mechanism (made of deterministic components indeed).
In the end looks like for the most of the beliefs I'm too in those that the OP refers to as "many".
I agree with your nuances on 8, 10, 15.
If you create what feels authenticate to you, it will fit in with humanity as a whole.
> 2. Religion as purpose.
I'd say purpose is drawn from philosophy in general, and religion is an instance of philosophy.
> 4. Justice.
There is a political dichotomy of merit-based systems vs. egalitarian systems. I lean towards merit, and equal opportunity.
> 5. Adequate regulation.
There is an overregulation bias. If in doubt, a new law is passed. This is especially harmful to innovation: see AirBnB, Uber/Lyft, Synthetic Biology.
> 6. "University education should not be a replacement for auto-didactic learning."
But the emergence of MOOCs makes autodidactic learning a possible replacement for university education. In an unbundled form, of course, as you still need to develop your network (w/o the campus) and build your reputation (w/o the degree).
> 9. Authenticity vs. social convention.
Again, given the dichotomy of authenticity vs. social convention, favor authenticity. ("if in doubt" is more of a stylistic element)
> "11. "Risk-avoidance is the riskiest strategy." does not fully respect the logic."
It would not, if we could control all of the risks. However, we cannot fully predict and avoid the occurrence of extreme events. Hence, it is better to embrace them via antifragile systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile. Moreover, not taking any seemingly high risks, usually leads to not making any progress at all - and stagnation is the ultimate risk.
> 12. Creative destruction vs. conservation
The comparison is to be understood on the level of "where should I, as an individual, focus my limited attention and energy on?" Environmentalism or Technology? Answer: Technology.
> 13. Technology-driven extinction
Many people primarily see the dangers of technology, whereas - imho - the benefits outweigh the costs. In fact, the opportunity costs of not advancing technology because of naysayers would be higher than the damage that is done by technology itself. (extinction is meant on the level of humankind)
> 18. "Humans will step over their biological limits, but that will threaten our cohesion on a species level."
Threat and opportunity usually go hand-in-hand.
The problem here is that what is valued as meritful is easily manipulated. If killing in war is proclaimed as meritful, then killers rule in such a meritocracy. Churchill said it best, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/364.html
Of course a healthy meritocracy relies on a meaningful and objective measure of performance. Technology should make it easier to implement such a system today though, compared to the times of the old Greeks.