I agree with you and your reasoning on what you should believe following that. Yet still, I find myself saying to people, “I believe that …” to emphasise that it is my belief. Maybe I am wrong in doing this but it appears to help people understand that “she is attractive” is not a property of her. I guess I could just make it explicit another way by saying “I find her attractive”.
I will concede that it is not the most sensible use of the phrase “I believe” but people will still use it and it will remain helpful to have it as one of the buckets we can separate uses of that phrase into.
Generally people on Less Wrong use “belief” to refer to objective beliefs rather than opinions, as it seems to be a better way to carve reality reality along its joints. There’s no reason to assume that other people will adhere to this convention though.
So for a particular statement X, a rationalist will put it into one of two categories:
A mixture of 1 and 3 for different people: some people expressing belief in X have a low confidence, others believe they believe X
2: people expressing belief in X are expressing an opinion
The first is for facty statements, the second for subjective ones.
“opinion” is itself a fuzzily defined word. In this case it think you mean “opinions” in the sense of subjective tastes/preferences/likings—not in the sense of different beliefs about the truth-value of factual statements.
I agree with you and your reasoning on what you should believe following that. Yet still, I find myself saying to people, “I believe that …” to emphasise that it is my belief. Maybe I am wrong in doing this but it appears to help people understand that “she is attractive” is not a property of her. I guess I could just make it explicit another way by saying “I find her attractive”.
I will concede that it is not the most sensible use of the phrase “I believe” but people will still use it and it will remain helpful to have it as one of the buckets we can separate uses of that phrase into.
Generally people on Less Wrong use “belief” to refer to objective beliefs rather than opinions, as it seems to be a better way to carve reality reality along its joints. There’s no reason to assume that other people will adhere to this convention though.
So for a particular statement X, a rationalist will put it into one of two categories:
A mixture of 1 and 3 for different people: some people expressing belief in X have a low confidence, others believe they believe X
2: people expressing belief in X are expressing an opinion
The first is for facty statements, the second for subjective ones.
“opinion” is itself a fuzzily defined word. In this case it think you mean “opinions” in the sense of subjective tastes/preferences/likings—not in the sense of different beliefs about the truth-value of factual statements.
Yep—thanks for clarifying.