First I haven’t investigated the issue beyond this one book. If you know of a good source arguing the opposite, I’m happy to look up your reference.
Secondly, I don’t think that’s useful to equate mainstream belief, with consensus belief. I think it’s quite useful to have a term for ideas found in mainstream science textbooks compared to ideas that you don’t find in mainstream science textbooks.
Science by it’s nature isn’t certain and science textbooks can contain claims that aren’t true. If I’m discussing a topic like this I think it’s useful to be clear about which ideas from me come from a mainstream science source and which come from other sources such as personal experience or a NLP seminar.
For the purposes of the point that I made it’s also not important whether Homer in particular had a concept of beliefs or whether I find some African tribe who doesn’t have a word for it.
The point is to go back and question core assumptions and getting more clear about the mental concepts that one uses because one doesn’t take them for granted.
Don’t model human cognition in form of beliefs just because your parents told you that humans make decisions according to beliefs. I think that’s a core part of the rationalist project.
At a LW meetup I made a session about emotions and asked at the start what everyone thought that the word meant. Roughly a third said A, a third said B and the last third had no opinion.
If you are not clear what you mean when you say “believe” and make complex arguments that build on the term, you are going to make mistakes and not see them because your terms are muddy and you are making a bunch of assumptions about which you never thought explicitely.
First I haven’t investigated the issue beyond this one book. If you know of a good source arguing the opposite, I’m happy to look up your reference.
Secondly, I don’t think that’s useful to equate mainstream belief, with consensus belief. I think it’s quite useful to have a term for ideas found in mainstream science textbooks compared to ideas that you don’t find in mainstream science textbooks.
Science by it’s nature isn’t certain and science textbooks can contain claims that aren’t true. If I’m discussing a topic like this I think it’s useful to be clear about which ideas from me come from a mainstream science source and which come from other sources such as personal experience or a NLP seminar.
For the purposes of the point that I made it’s also not important whether Homer in particular had a concept of beliefs or whether I find some African tribe who doesn’t have a word for it. The point is to go back and question core assumptions and getting more clear about the mental concepts that one uses because one doesn’t take them for granted.
Don’t model human cognition in form of beliefs just because your parents told you that humans make decisions according to beliefs. I think that’s a core part of the rationalist project.
At a LW meetup I made a session about emotions and asked at the start what everyone thought that the word meant. Roughly a third said A, a third said B and the last third had no opinion.
If you are not clear what you mean when you say “believe” and make complex arguments that build on the term, you are going to make mistakes and not see them because your terms are muddy and you are making a bunch of assumptions about which you never thought explicitely.