My first thought is that belief popularity is often (usually?) specific to a particular community, and for most of my beliefs I can identify at least one community I identify with in which the belief is not unpopular.
For example, I recently told someone that most people are not consequentialist decision makers, and instead think in terms more akin to separate magisteria, doing in each context what they and their culture customarily do. This person was shocked and took some time to process that. I don’t think it would have been shocking to anyone here.
But to answer the spirit of the question: many of my mainstream!unpopular opinions come from the fact that I’m naturally drawn to more esoteric ideas and chains of reasoning, whether those take the form of math, physics, philosophy, or something else. That’s how I ended up here in the first place. Examples include:
Humans should be using vastly more nuclear power than we currently do, and this would be true even if we didn’t have better reactors designs available than those currently in use, but only if everyone believes this. This is based on my reading of historical data on relative safety and pollution output of different options, as well as the financial costs of delays due to public opposition
By the time I retire, humans will have the technology to regrow and replace every organ in the body except the brain. This is based on my professional work studying the development and trajectory of bio-3D printing and tissue engineering, as well as a study I did of the historical development timelines of a variety of different technologies.
Meditation, properly translated out of bronze-age-religious-language, should be part of everyone’s education, up to the level where most people will at least understand that there is a real thing that phrases like “stream entry” and “jhana” point to. This is partly based on how much my own subjective experience of the world improved from understanding this, partly from how it helped me learn to further separate myself from my thoughts and senses (to better understand others’ viewpoints as valid, and to more instinctively admit my own ignorance in practice in real time), and partly because I think it could greatly improve our individual and collective mental health as beings with brains not designed for the world we’ve built for ourselves.
Someday, anyone who bothers to remember me at all will probably think I was a horrible person (in some ways I think I can predict, and in some ways I’ve never even thought of), and from my perspective this is a good thing, because it means we’ve made moral progress as a society.
and from my perspective this is a good thing, because it means we’ve made moral progress as a society.
I know this is off-topic, but I’m curious how you would distinguish between moral progress and “moral going-in-circles” (don’t know what the right word is)?
I don’t know. In practice, I don’t think I do. On the one hand, I look over what I know about the last few thousand years of history and find that the farther back I go, the more horrible many of the people that were, in their own time, considered saintly, mainly seem, like St Augustine. On another hand, I have the most famous moral teachers of history from Jesus and the Buddha and Mohammed and Confucius and so on, and I feel like as a society we have been grappling with the same handful of basic underlying moral principles for a really long time. And on yet another hand, I have Robin Hanson’s discussion of forager and farmer values arguing for cyclic trends on an even longer timescale. I’m sure I can find a few more hands besides.
If I had to give a more concrete answer, I might go with something like this: over time we try to individually and collectively reconcile our moral intuitions and ethical precepts with the actual world we live in, while at the same time we’re developing better methods of evaluating arguments and evidence to reduce mistakes in thinking. We keep finding contradictions in the practices we inherited, and look for ways to resolve them, and so on average those discrepancies will decrease with time. For the past few thousand years, despite huge oscillations and real losses, there seems to me to be a general trend in some overall direction that involves greater wealth, more options for individuals to choose their own lives, and capacity for cooperation among strangers across larger distances. So I think, if you sent me forward a hundred years, that once I got over the shock and started to understand the new world I was in, I’d be able to look at morally significant changes and consistently evaluate them as gains vs losses, even the ones the intuitively horrify my early 21st century expectations.
My first thought is that belief popularity is often (usually?) specific to a particular community, and for most of my beliefs I can identify at least one community I identify with in which the belief is not unpopular.
For example, I recently told someone that most people are not consequentialist decision makers, and instead think in terms more akin to separate magisteria, doing in each context what they and their culture customarily do. This person was shocked and took some time to process that. I don’t think it would have been shocking to anyone here.
But to answer the spirit of the question: many of my mainstream!unpopular opinions come from the fact that I’m naturally drawn to more esoteric ideas and chains of reasoning, whether those take the form of math, physics, philosophy, or something else. That’s how I ended up here in the first place. Examples include:
Humans should be using vastly more nuclear power than we currently do, and this would be true even if we didn’t have better reactors designs available than those currently in use, but only if everyone believes this. This is based on my reading of historical data on relative safety and pollution output of different options, as well as the financial costs of delays due to public opposition
By the time I retire, humans will have the technology to regrow and replace every organ in the body except the brain. This is based on my professional work studying the development and trajectory of bio-3D printing and tissue engineering, as well as a study I did of the historical development timelines of a variety of different technologies.
Meditation, properly translated out of bronze-age-religious-language, should be part of everyone’s education, up to the level where most people will at least understand that there is a real thing that phrases like “stream entry” and “jhana” point to. This is partly based on how much my own subjective experience of the world improved from understanding this, partly from how it helped me learn to further separate myself from my thoughts and senses (to better understand others’ viewpoints as valid, and to more instinctively admit my own ignorance in practice in real time), and partly because I think it could greatly improve our individual and collective mental health as beings with brains not designed for the world we’ve built for ourselves.
Someday, anyone who bothers to remember me at all will probably think I was a horrible person (in some ways I think I can predict, and in some ways I’ve never even thought of), and from my perspective this is a good thing, because it means we’ve made moral progress as a society.
I know this is off-topic, but I’m curious how you would distinguish between moral progress and “moral going-in-circles” (don’t know what the right word is)?
I don’t know. In practice, I don’t think I do. On the one hand, I look over what I know about the last few thousand years of history and find that the farther back I go, the more horrible many of the people that were, in their own time, considered saintly, mainly seem, like St Augustine. On another hand, I have the most famous moral teachers of history from Jesus and the Buddha and Mohammed and Confucius and so on, and I feel like as a society we have been grappling with the same handful of basic underlying moral principles for a really long time. And on yet another hand, I have Robin Hanson’s discussion of forager and farmer values arguing for cyclic trends on an even longer timescale. I’m sure I can find a few more hands besides.
If I had to give a more concrete answer, I might go with something like this: over time we try to individually and collectively reconcile our moral intuitions and ethical precepts with the actual world we live in, while at the same time we’re developing better methods of evaluating arguments and evidence to reduce mistakes in thinking. We keep finding contradictions in the practices we inherited, and look for ways to resolve them, and so on average those discrepancies will decrease with time. For the past few thousand years, despite huge oscillations and real losses, there seems to me to be a general trend in some overall direction that involves greater wealth, more options for individuals to choose their own lives, and capacity for cooperation among strangers across larger distances. So I think, if you sent me forward a hundred years, that once I got over the shock and started to understand the new world I was in, I’d be able to look at morally significant changes and consistently evaluate them as gains vs losses, even the ones the intuitively horrify my early 21st century expectations.