I don’t mean to inspire cruelty. If I successfully gave you understanding, you can use it for kindness, pity or cruelty as you see fit. Mostly I wrote the last paragraphs in the tone of “Humans are Cthulhu” as seen through the eyes of someone who thinks in this anti-epistemology.
Your answer to “objective popularity” is only slightly different from common knowledge, and it has the same properties of being fundamentally observer-dependent. Ask some Greens and some Blues separately “is X popular?” where X is a politician, and you get two very different results. Similarly, “possible joke #3852 is funny” is true for one audience, false for another. “The Sun goes around the Earth” is true for a bunch of hunter-gatherers, false for a group of astronomers. Wait, wait, what? “true for some group” i.e. observer-dependence of the answer-generating process.
Compare the alternative. If someone sticks to “either the question is ill-posed, or the answer must be observer-independent” a bit too strictly, they will end up either concluding that popularity is a wrong concept and doesn’t exist, or falling into the mind projection fallacy and concluding that there must be a little “is-popular” label attached to people.
“Frankly, I’m not entirely sure myself where this ‘reality’ business comes from. I can’t create my own reality in the lab, so I must not understand it yet. But occasionally I believe strongly that something is going to happen, and then something else happens instead. I need a name for whatever-it-is that determines my experimental results, so I call it ‘reality’. This ‘reality’ is somehow separate from even my very best hypotheses. Even when I have a simple hypothesis, strongly supported by all the evidence I know, sometimes I’m still surprised. So I need different names for the thingies that determine my predictions and the thingy that determines my experimental results. I call the former thingies ‘belief’, and the latter thingy ‘reality’.”
If for whatever reason someone builds their epistemology around popularity as a prototypical use-case, they will necessarily make experimental results dependent on peoples’ expectations in some way. They will say, using the words from the quote, that ‘reality’ is literally made out of ‘belief’.
Blue and Greens are likely to agree what an election result is and statements like “politican X beat politician Y in the vote” can’t really be denied even if they are not fun for your side.
The anti-epistemology is not in the question but how you take the question. While it can be illuminating to use a question that most naturally fits that kind of interpretation answering that question is not itself a problem. The concept of Family Feud is different from a trivia contest but the difference doesn’t live in the prompts.
I don’t mean to inspire cruelty. If I successfully gave you understanding, you can use it for kindness, pity or cruelty as you see fit. Mostly I wrote the last paragraphs in the tone of “Humans are Cthulhu” as seen through the eyes of someone who thinks in this anti-epistemology.
Your answer to “objective popularity” is only slightly different from common knowledge, and it has the same properties of being fundamentally observer-dependent. Ask some Greens and some Blues separately “is X popular?” where X is a politician, and you get two very different results. Similarly, “possible joke #3852 is funny” is true for one audience, false for another. “The Sun goes around the Earth” is true for a bunch of hunter-gatherers, false for a group of astronomers. Wait, wait, what? “true for some group” i.e. observer-dependence of the answer-generating process.
Compare the alternative. If someone sticks to “either the question is ill-posed, or the answer must be observer-independent” a bit too strictly, they will end up either concluding that popularity is a wrong concept and doesn’t exist, or falling into the mind projection fallacy and concluding that there must be a little “is-popular” label attached to people.
From The simple truth:
If for whatever reason someone builds their epistemology around popularity as a prototypical use-case, they will necessarily make experimental results dependent on peoples’ expectations in some way. They will say, using the words from the quote, that ‘reality’ is literally made out of ‘belief’.
Blue and Greens are likely to agree what an election result is and statements like “politican X beat politician Y in the vote” can’t really be denied even if they are not fun for your side.
The anti-epistemology is not in the question but how you take the question. While it can be illuminating to use a question that most naturally fits that kind of interpretation answering that question is not itself a problem. The concept of Family Feud is different from a trivia contest but the difference doesn’t live in the prompts.