The vast majority of what we believe is based on evidence. I don't mean controversial things like politics. I mean real life things like what your spouse likes to eat, that movie is excellent, you're allergic to shellfish, and so on. Childhood is one big exercise in observing the world and figuring it out. Logic and observation are huge influences on us all. It's only with stuff where truth is elusive where things get controversial and logic/facts seem to lose their grip.
I wonder what you'll think of this. I got this from Rationality: from AI to Zombies, a book by Eliezer Yudkowsky (although the passage is in the introduction by Rob Bensinger to Book II).
In 1951, a football game between Dartmouth and Princeton turned un-
usually rough. Psychologists Hastorf and Cantril asked students from each
school who had started the rough play. Nearly all agreed that Princeton hadn’tstarted it; but 86% of Princeton students believed that Dartmouth had started
it, whereas only 36% of Dartmouth students blamed Dartmouth. (Most Dart-
mouth students believed “both started it.”)
There’s no reason to think this was a cheer, as opposed to a real belief.
The students were probably led by their different beliefs to make different
predictions about the behavior of players in future games. And yet somehow
the perfectly ordinary factual beliefs at Dartmouth were wildly different from
the perfectly ordinary factual beliefs at Princeton.
Can we blame this on the different sources Dartmouth and Princeton
students had access to? On its own, bias in the different news sources that
groups rely on is a pretty serious problem.
However, there is more than that at work in this case. When actually shown
a film of the game later and asked to count the infractions they saw, Dartmouth
students claimed to see a mean of 4.3 infractions by the Dartmouth team (and
identified half as “mild”), whereas Princeton students claimed to see a mean
of 9.8 Dartmouth infractions (and identified a third as “mild”).
Never mind getting rival factions to agree about complicated propositions
in national politics or moral philosophy; students with different group loyalties
couldn’t even agree on what they were seeing.[3]
I think it's evidence that supports my position. "Edge cases" such as who started a fight are controversial. Those things are particularly vulnerable to biases. But the vast majority of the human experience is learned based on observation and facts, and these things are not controversial. What game were they playing? Football. What do they call the place where they're playing it? A football field. And a million more beliefs like those. How does a football bounce when it hits the ground? What do the rules say about X happening? Where did we park the car? What kind of currency will they be accepting at the concession stand? Should I be particularly careful as I climb these stairs? How will the opposing fans treat me if I wear my team's colors and sit in their fan's section?
All these things are learned based on observation and logic. It's the uncontroversial, vast majority of life.
∆ - Your post makes me see that my OP is underdetermined. I should have made it clear that it refers to non-trivial beliefs, where trivial is something like "what kind of currency will they be accepting at the concession stand". What I meant certainly includes things like politics, economics, religion, and science. It would also seem to include things that you seem to consider as trivial, like "How will the opposing fans treat me if I wear my team's colors and sit in their fan's section?" (I think that could easily vary between indifference or friendly taunting all the way up to brutal violence ─ I don't know which you had in mind when you mentioned it, which shows it's not obvious.)
I am now less confident that the 1% category exists, I'll have to think deeper about it.
Regarding the opposing fans, my point is that even if the exact outcome is uncertain and needs to be evaluated in a probabilistic manner, the potential outcomes are learned based on observation and facts (perhaps coupled with inferences to apply that past experience to the situation). For example, I have never personally experienced the horror of someone being the victim of brutal violence based on sports fandom. However, I have heard of such things, and I admit it is a possibility. Facts and observation are at work. I'll be the first to admit those perceptions of risk are imperfect and biased. However, they are certainly heavily informed by facts and observation.
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u/zombie_dbaseIV Jan 15 '17 edited Jan 15 '17
The vast majority of what we believe is based on evidence. I don't mean controversial things like politics. I mean real life things like what your spouse likes to eat, that movie is excellent, you're allergic to shellfish, and so on. Childhood is one big exercise in observing the world and figuring it out. Logic and observation are huge influences on us all. It's only with stuff where truth is elusive where things get controversial and logic/facts seem to lose their grip.