I don’t think that the key element in the aging example is ‘being about value claims’. Instead, it’s that the question about what’s healthy is a question that many people wonder about. Since many people wonder about that question, some people will venture an answer. Even if humanity hasn’t yet built up enough knowledge to have an accurate answer.
Thousands of years ago many people wondered what the deal is with the moon and some of them made up stories about this factual (non-value) question whose correct answer was beyond them. And it plays out similarly these days with rumors/speculation/gossip about the topics that grab people’s attention. Where curiosity & interest exceeds knowledge, speculation will fill the gaps, sometimes taking on a similar presentation to knowledge.
Note the dynamic in your aging example: when you’re in a room with 5+ people and you mention that you’ve read a lot about aging, someone asks the question about what’s healthy. No particular answer needs to be memetic because it’s the question that keeps popping up and so answers will follow. If we don’t know a sufficiently good/accurate/thorough answer then the answers that follow will often be bullshit, whether that’s a small number of bullshit answers that are especially memetically fit or whether it’s a more varied and changing froth of made-up answers.
There are some kinds of value claims that are pretty vague and floaty, disconnected from entangled truths and empirical constraints. But that is not so true of instrumental claims about things like health, where (e.g.) the claim that smoking causes lung cancel is very much empirical & entangled. You might still see a lot of bullshit about these sorts of instrumental value claims, because people will wonder about the question even if humanity doesn’t have a good answer. It’s useful to know (e.g.) what foods are healthy, so the question of what foods are healthy is one that will keep popping up when there’s hope that someone in the room might have some information about it.
I think the value-ladenness is part of why it comes up even when we don’t have an answer, since for value-laden things there’s a natural incentive to go up right to the boundary of our knowledge to get as much value as possible.
I don’t think that the key element in the aging example is ‘being about value claims’. Instead, it’s that the question about what’s healthy is a question that many people wonder about. Since many people wonder about that question, some people will venture an answer. Even if humanity hasn’t yet built up enough knowledge to have an accurate answer.
Thousands of years ago many people wondered what the deal is with the moon and some of them made up stories about this factual (non-value) question whose correct answer was beyond them. And it plays out similarly these days with rumors/speculation/gossip about the topics that grab people’s attention. Where curiosity & interest exceeds knowledge, speculation will fill the gaps, sometimes taking on a similar presentation to knowledge.
Note the dynamic in your aging example: when you’re in a room with 5+ people and you mention that you’ve read a lot about aging, someone asks the question about what’s healthy. No particular answer needs to be memetic because it’s the question that keeps popping up and so answers will follow. If we don’t know a sufficiently good/accurate/thorough answer then the answers that follow will often be bullshit, whether that’s a small number of bullshit answers that are especially memetically fit or whether it’s a more varied and changing froth of made-up answers.
There are some kinds of value claims that are pretty vague and floaty, disconnected from entangled truths and empirical constraints. But that is not so true of instrumental claims about things like health, where (e.g.) the claim that smoking causes lung cancel is very much empirical & entangled. You might still see a lot of bullshit about these sorts of instrumental value claims, because people will wonder about the question even if humanity doesn’t have a good answer. It’s useful to know (e.g.) what foods are healthy, so the question of what foods are healthy is one that will keep popping up when there’s hope that someone in the room might have some information about it.
I think the value-ladenness is part of why it comes up even when we don’t have an answer, since for value-laden things there’s a natural incentive to go up right to the boundary of our knowledge to get as much value as possible.