The Line Between Science and Pseudoscience

Gisteron wrote:

Rickie wrote: People believe a lot of things. Some may turn out to be true and some nonsense but that is what makes the world go round. Believe what you wish. Enjoy life. If you like discussing them Ad nauseam, you enjoy it and get benefit from it then good for you. Be happy.

Hmm, this sounds nice but I'm afraid that's the most I can say about it. Our beliefs inform our actions. The further our internal model of the world is from the external reality of it, the worse and more dangerous our decisions can be and often are. Our choices influence ourselves and people around us. So if we have any empathy for our fellow travellers, we should inidividually seek to believe things that are as close to what is colloquially understood as truth as possible and to avoid believing things that in all likelihood are nowhere near true. We should, in our very direct own interests, also care that others do likewise, for everybody else also has choices to make and no man is an island. Personal satisfaction, much as it pains some of us to admit, should neither be the only criterion, nor is it a good one.

All of this is true Gist, but I have found that it is usually pointless to argue with these kinds of people and persuade them to what we believe to be the correct and rational way of thinking. To try to do so with everyone who believes a foolish thing would be emotionally exhausting and take up way too much time, especially on the internet. When it gets to a point where these people start making decisions that affect many other people (like say if they were running for a major office) then the need for correction becomes greater. Short of that, however, your life will probably be happier if you let them go on believing whatever they like, regardless of it's inaccuracies.

Just my opinion.

The further our internal model of the world is from the external reality of it, the worse and more dangerous our decisions can be and often are

Short of anti social or extreme behavior I for one can not say someone's beliefs are dangerous if the harm no one.

"external reality" What ever that is. That's a matter of individual perception. While we believe we have much in common our perceptions are as varied as people are.

we should inidividually seek to believe things that are as close to what is colloquially understood as truth as possible and to avoid believing things that in all likelihood are nowhere near true.

"should" Seems like your telling people what to believe. I'll believe what I want thank you very much.

Personal satisfaction, much as it pains some of us to admit, should neither be the only criterion, nor is it a good one

Personal satisfaction I gain from my beliefs is well personal and good for me. If I'm not satisfied then I need to discover why and change. That's what living is about.

A lot of this comes down to right and left brain type of thinking....... and I dare say Ying and Yang.

It's always about the Ying and the Yang baby!

The thing with public spaces is that while you may not convince the one you are talking to, or at least not during your first few encounters, the fact that it is public allows a much larger impact overall through everybody who reads and is being moved one way or the other, again, even if no single conversation will actually sway anybody. Likewise, intellectual discourse is not an all-or-nothing game of that kind to begin with. Every progress is progress. Your time and efort are seldom wasted just because you didn't get a crowd to chant your cause that night nor is the battle won because one night you did. And then of course if you are yourself an open minded fellow, there is always the possibility not only to grace the world with your own wisdom but perhaps also to learn from others in the process, too. This is a primary goal to very few, but it is a potential benefit not to be overlooked still.
Of course, I say that, yet often enough these days choose to stay out of potentially enlightening conversations because in many cases the resources one has to spare are just too limited. So we do have, in a way, to pick our battles and cannot take them all on, and while I think there may or may not be a few individual "lost causes", as it were, next to nothing we find that we can spare indeed ends up spent completely in vain, in my opinion.

Rickie wrote:

The further our internal model of the world is from the external reality of it, the worse and more dangerous our decisions can be and often are

Short of anti social or extreme behavior I for one can not say someone's beliefs are dangerous if the harm no one.

I said nothing about beliefs being dangerous. If you read again, I said that there is a correlation between dangerous decisions and the rate of correspondence between what we believe and how things actually are.

"external reality" What ever that is. That's a matter of individual perception. While we believe we have much in common our perceptions are as varied as people are.

This is why I distinguished in the text you quoted between internal model (of the world) and external reality (of the world). One of these refers to the mind-dependent you speak of, the other refers to everything else. If you want to say there is nothing that is part of mind-independant reality, that's fine, then we can identify the latter set as empty and the former as its complement.

we should inidividually seek to believe things that are as close to what is colloquially understood as truth as possible and to avoid believing things that in all likelihood are nowhere near true.

"should" Seems like your telling people what to believe. I'll believe what I want thank you very much.

So again you didn't read what you quoted. I did not tell anybody what to believe. First of all, and this you conveniently left out, that instruction, if you will, was conditional on empathy. Secondly, I did not say what people ought to believe, I said what people (who are empathetic) should seek to believe, i.e. what the criterion should be by which we allow ourselves to believe things. The reason I did not explicitly frame it as my opinion (which of course the entire post is) is that this was not an incorrigible statement about my feelings on the matter, but rather an informal conclusion of the reasoning relayed prior to that quote. Also, good for you that you believe what you want. I don't. I believe what I can.

Personal satisfaction, much as it pains some of us to admit, should neither be the only criterion, nor is it a good one

Personal satisfaction I gain from my beliefs is well personal and good for me. If I'm not satisfied then I need to discover why and change. That's what living is about.

Again, it looks like all you read is "Personal satisfaction not good" when this is not at all what I said. What I understood you were effectively saying is that we shouldn't worry much about what or how we believe so long as we can be happy with it. Now, maybe this is not what you meant, and maybe my argument misses your point. You are in turn missing all of my points so evidently this happens and it's fine. Whether this is what you meant or not, I am here disagreeing with it. Whether we are happy with what or how we believe doesn't matter because our personal happiness doesn't magically make every choice we make good for either ourselves or everybody else out there, which to an empathetic person is something to consider. This is why I said that personal satisfaction is "neither the only criterion (for evaluating beliefs), nor a good one." I never said that personal satisfaction is bad for you. I said it is bad as a metric for judging the values of beliefs.

Rickie wrote: Short of anti social or extreme behavior I for one can not say someone's beliefs are dangerous if the harm no one.

True but the problem comes when ones beliefs do harm others, or at least give the perception of harm to those outside the belief system. Case in point is my above mentioned young earth creationists who are actively trying to get evolution (a scientific theory the don't "believe in") thrown out of public schools. At the very least they want intelligent design taught along side it. This sort of thinking, if it were enacted in our schools, will only lead to the decline of scientific excellence.

I think they have every right to believe what they believe and they have every right to teach that within their religious organizations. I will defend that to the death. Its just when they try to force others into that belief system that the trouble begins. This is why it is so imperative that we as a species maintain strict standards and employ critical thinking in all aspects of our lives so that we make decisions based on data that is as close to actual reality as possible.