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Yeah, probably should have left the religion analogy out. It wasn't essential to the point you were making and was based on a false model of religion. There's

by wheels 3y ago

Yeah, probably should have left the religion analogy out. It wasn't essential to the point you were making and was based on a false model of religion. There's actually a pretty complex matrix in religious disagreement with or without exclusivity. And not all religions are exclusive at all. Islam's views of other Abrahamic religions is complicated, but it is exclusive about non-Abrahamic religions. Christianity sees Judaism as having been correct, but incomplete. Hinduism isn't essentially exclusionary (particularly to other religions which evolved from old Vedic practices), but is often confused with modern Hindu nationalism, which is. And even within single "religions" there are complicated lines where e.g. some Christians consider themselves to be in "communion" with some Christians, but not others. So, yeah, bad example. It's a terrible thing to have pulled out to try to show clear mutually exclusive groups.

lisper 3y ago
What would have been a better example? The problem with trying to come up with examples of large numbers of people holding objectively false beliefs is that you have to look outside the realm of science. The whole point of science is that it provides a mechanism for resolving disagreements about objective truth objectively (i.e. experiment) and so you just don't get a lot of people holding objectively false beliefs, at least not for any length of time. Religion is all that's left.
- wheels 3y ago
  Most of what humans talk about isn't science or religion, and to reduce the world to just that is pretty weird to say the least. Most things can't be resolved by appeals to objective truth. It sounds like you're working on a model where that's how one resolves conflicts, but literally most of the history of knowledge, humanity, whatever label you want to put on it -- isn't that. Even science isn't by any means that binary. Disagreements can last centuries. And we're even at a spot in science where a lot of the interesting stuff fumbles around for decades before we can even come up with experiments that could possibly test it; and some of it we won't ever be able to test. (A lot of cosmology isn't testable.) But the point me and a few others were making is that you don't seem to know much about religion, so it's probably not a good thing to use in analogies. Religion is definitely not a set of neatly divided mutually exclusive beliefs. Almost all of the world's adherents come from two families of religions -- Abrahamic or Vedic -- and within those groups there's a whole lot of similarity and varying levels of theological exclusivity. I feel like gambling or the stock market may be better examples. If one person takes a long position on a stock and another short, they have mutually exclusive beliefs about it, and one of them will be wrong.

by wheels 3y ago

lisper 3y ago

What would have been a better example? The problem with trying to come up with examples of large numbers of people holding objectively false beliefs is that you have to look outside the realm of science. The whole point of science is that it provides a mechanism for resolving disagreements about objective truth objectively (i.e. experiment) and so you just don't get a lot of people holding objectively false beliefs, at least not for any length of time. Religion is all that's left.

wheels 3y ago
Most of what humans talk about isn't science or religion, and to reduce the world to just that is pretty weird to say the least. Most things can't be resolved by appeals to objective truth. It sounds like you're working on a model where that's how one resolves conflicts, but literally most of the history of knowledge, humanity, whatever label you want to put on it -- isn't that. Even science isn't by any means that binary. Disagreements can last centuries. And we're even at a spot in science where a lot of the interesting stuff fumbles around for decades before we can even come up with experiments that could possibly test it; and some of it we won't ever be able to test. (A lot of cosmology isn't testable.) But the point me and a few others were making is that you don't seem to know much about religion, so it's probably not a good thing to use in analogies. Religion is definitely not a set of neatly divided mutually exclusive beliefs. Almost all of the world's adherents come from two families of religions -- Abrahamic or Vedic -- and within those groups there's a whole lot of similarity and varying levels of theological exclusivity. I feel like gambling or the stock market may be better examples. If one person takes a long position on a stock and another short, they have mutually exclusive beliefs about it, and one of them will be wrong.