Last time I was this early I didn't believe P.

Hold on, when you become convinced of P, then your explanation of your friend's belief in P can change. Before, you reasoned that the truth of P could not factor into her beliefs (because P was, in your view, not true), so you gave some other reasons. Let's call these reasons Q. We could say that ~P implies Q. The falsity of P, implies some specific explanation for our friend's belief of this false fact, and in our judgement it is Q. However when we become convinced of P, we no longer need to believe Q. Q *might* still apply, but we're no longer comitted to believing it. We might repeat our process of wondering how our friend came to believe P, and Q might happen to still apply (like bias etc), but perhaps we judge there is some other reason, R, which does originate in the truth of P. Maybe we used to think that Q was sufficient for our friend to believe P, but we don't have to believe this anymore. We might, but maybe R is the sufficient reason they believe P instead, and Q is false or is contingently true.

When is Verity coming on the channel?

i like your mind and stuff..

"You must show _that_ a man is wrong before you start explaining _why_ he is wrong." C. S. Lewis, _Bulverism_

6:37 brit saying zee instead of zed 👀

I don’t believe you have hands!

but "changing my mind" means i've gained an insight that i was lacking earlier, and that lack is what caused me to reach for extrinsic rationalizations for the belief. the process of changing my mind does in fact require me to view my prior explanation for the "false" belief of others to be flawed.

J.Krishnamurti spoke about Beliefs in a concise manner too. It's something I'd recall as Meditative Enquiry. Highly recommend.

The skepticism surrounding the future value of complex financial technologies, such as cryptocurrencies and blockchain, mirrors the skepticism often encountered when attempting to explain false beliefs about finance in general. The concept of "complexity requirements" exemplifies this, as my current belief in their necessity is tempered by skepticism about their long-term value. This skepticism stems from the evolving nature of financial systems and the potential for new technologies to render existing complexities obsolete. This posses a challenge for what it means to be employed for certain generational cohorts of a population given compute power and the the Byzantine's generals problem where the messenger is intercepted so foiling consensus belief in when to attack.

How tall are you Kane? Im Guessing 6"1.5?

Thank you! One problem I felt was comparing the veracity of an empirical belief such as 'I have hands' which has overwhelming social normativity which can be understood by a toddler using easily accessible and immediate empirical evidence to a proposition from an academic field which by it's very nature lacks a rigorous scientific methodology, is severely constrained by being unable to control all the variables, and as you say can be construed and influenced by a whole host of socio-political biases is a tad problematic.

Excellently explained, as always.

There is always a true causal explanation for belief. Sometimes there is a rational one too. In your example, before you know your friend's reasons, you default to explaining her belief causally. After you learn her reasons, you can explain her beliefs rationally too (whether you are convinced or not -- false beliefs can be rationally explained). Both explanations can be true, and the former does not automatically undermine the latter. (If you did give an undermining causal explanation of her belief initially, before you knew her reasons, you would have to rethink it. It was a "just so" story anyway.)

It is hard to truly contend with the fact that we are animals, and that all of our experiences are mediated by instinct. That is not to say that our beliefs are completely automatic reactions depending only on immediate stimulus, but it should be clear that we have internal states that are animalistic in nature. I have seen birds constructing nests and thought "that is a very sophisticated activity to do on instinct. what does that instinct feel like?", only to later that day take immense satisfaction in reorganizing my bookshelves and think "Ah! So that is what an instinct feels like!". Of course. Many of the things that we think of as "feelings" are instinctual reactions, and this includes the feelings of "true" and "false". There are many more feelings that we would like to think of as reflecting something external to us that are actually internal. Several of these feeling come in pairs, such as "intelligible" vs "unintelligible" or "purposeful" vs "pointless", and some seem to come alone, such as our sense of self or "me-ness". In any case it is evident that these feeling, both in ourselves and others do not necessarily correspond to a universally true state of affairs. In fact, the search for such a Truth which is independent of human experience of truth looks deeply flawed in the light of these observations about how we experience truth. For example, the sensation of truth is often connected to our experience of beauty. Research scientists are often put in the position of choosing what theories to test next. Usually, they are testing these theories because they feel that the evidence is not yet conclusive, and that therefore the theories do not have the status of scientific convention. I.e. it is not clear if they are true. And in this liminal space, scientists often search for evidence to confirm (or disconfirm) theories that they find elegant/beautiful (or inelegant). As you have pointed out, there are many such situations where if we look at our beliefs, or the beliefs of others, we see that there are just as often the products of our cultural environment as they are the results of deductions from evidence. This is Marx's famous take on Hegel, I.e. how the geist can be given a material explanation. He would say, "tell me you economic and political background, and I will tell you what you believe about the world". Perhaps we can say more generally that we can explain the experience of truth in terms of human behavior, which is a kind of animal behavior. There seems to be no refuge from this way of thinking about truth. Mathematics may seem to provide one, but only to those ignorant of the history and practice of the field. Mathematical consensus seems to exist because we can fine-tune our experience of truth to be very precise if we give up on the idea that truth needs to account for our experience of the world. Even then, there have been numerous crises of consistency and intelligibility in math that have been resolved along sociological and aesthetic lines. See Brouwer vs Hilbert, or the various early 20th century attempts to make Euclidean geometry precise (Tarski, Birkhoff) which are logically incompatible. Science is very interesting in this light, since it is a collective project that is attempting to build a type of truth that is not necessarily connected to our experience of truth. That does not mean that it is True in any universal sense, just that it can do things like make predictions using ideas that feel false. For example, take the problem of measurement in quantum mechanics, for which no one has yet found a satisfactory explanation, but which has had great predictive success. The excellent novel "When we cease to understand the world" really encapsulates this tension beautifully. Anyway, I have settled on the notion that if you try hard enough, you can come believe that most thinkers are correct from within there own frameworks, and incorrect from without. This makes philosophical systems of truth like clothes. You can take them off, put them on, and the decision to believe in one over another is principally aesthetic. I embrace all the contradictions herein.

Something being motivated by social and psychological factors is not a debunking. If your friend believes something to be true, but in fact it is false, it is false not because of the same factors that made your friend believe it's true. It's like saying that someone commits theft because he's a thief.

I think this completely misses that when one changes one’s mind and begins to believe p, it usually (if not always) comes with not only believing we were incorrect about the falseness of p, but also we were incorrect about our attribution of why p is falsely believed. I feel like there is something profound to investigate in this discussion, but the shallowness of the investigation obscures the profundity.

I think there's a pretty straightforward solution to this problem. At t1, the best explanation, by your lights, for why others believe that P is one that doesn't involve the truth of P. After all, any explanation that involved the truth of P would (by your lights, at t1) involve a falsehood and so would be a bad explanation. But that changes at t2; now, there are many explanations for why others believe that P that involve the truth of P but that don't involve any falsehoods, by your lights. And quite possibly, one of those explanations is much better, by your lights at t2, than any alternative explanation that doesn't involve the truth of P. To put things another way: In some cases, learning that P amounts to learning that the best explanation for why others believe that P is one that involves the truth of P. When you learn, based on your friend’s arguments, that minimum wage laws raise unemployment, you learn that the explanations for her belief that involve its truth are better than you thought. Of course, there are some cases in which even if P is true, the best explanation for why others believe that P still doesn't involve the truth of P. Such debunking explanations are quite epistemically threatening. I take it that proponents of evolutionary debunking arguments against moral and religious beliefs aim to offer such explanations, explanations that are so good that they would still be better than any alternatives even if the beliefs they target were true.

We can believe true propositions without (valid) justification. Because of that, our old description of why a belief is held does not debunk our new belief. It never debunked the belief in the first place-- it's irrelevant to the truth of the belief! But "Man got to sit and wonder, why, why, why?... Man got to tell himself he understand." I don't believe that we reach our beliefs via some single, straightforward path. Multiple reasons (some, perhaps, unjustified) combine to create our belief or disbelief in any particular proposition, as well as the too often ignored *strength* of that belief. But I think if we trace our beliefs backwards, then somewhere along that path we almost always find, "Somebody I trusted told me so." Our changes in belief usually involve (cause or effect, who can say?) discovery of contradictions among the people we trust or changes in who we trust. A talking head, our econ professor, our parents, somebody told us that minimum wage affects unemployment in such and such a way. Our logic professor told us that "A implies B" does not mean "B implies A." Even with regards to sense impression, if we visit a strange mountain monastery where it is held that reality is illusory, do they believe in their hands? I suspect some do not.

Old systems won't work in this coming paradigm. I can't ask for liberal individual power of entrepreneurship and responsibility + representing stock ownership in tech + free power and utility while local regional owns and operates it leaving tech oligarchy to pay. For American our mastership is in private sector because the founders always knew we would build a beast of burden robot means of production that eats the public sector library and all statistical anylitics systems. It makes inverted to most of the west despite how we self sacrificed like all others to finalize achieved the European enlightenment goals. Transfered wealth righted wrongs liberated marginalized industrialize new nations on their feet. It's very serious for urban city's more than anyone else. New challenges to come

Hopefully we are aware of good and bad reasons to believe P, and we introspect to make sure we only have good reasons

My girlfriend says I'm constantly watching Kane B videos.

9:00 I don't think I ever really experienced the feeling of, I believe something *because* it is true? On an intuitive level, it always felt to me moreso like, I want to believe true things, and uncovering the truth of things is the job of my reasoning. So the truth of something is the hopeful conclusion I uncover, not one of the *starting* evidence or causes. Ironically, it is my deliberate thought rather than my feeling/gut that comes somewhat closer to that. Because the way I usually think about whether something is true is "given X sets of observations about Y, are they more likely to all be simultaneously present in worlds where Y is true, or in worlds where Y is false" which does sort of create an entanglement between the truth and my beliefs.

I think that since social factors are not universal among people, this reasoning does not quite work. For example, if she is immersed in a libertarian environment and you are not, and as a result of a debate you changed your opinion regarding minimum wage, you cannot apply the explanation regarding her views to your own views.

I have two problems. First, can't it be that the social/psychological factors motivating a belief are not necessarily debunking, they just produce an alternative explanation for why one might have that belief that is indifferent to its truth? i.e., if Alice has a belief that P, and I believe that P is false, then if I want to explain away Alice's belief, I don't have to give a reason why she believes that P from the falsehood of P, I just have to give motivations to believe P that don't turn on the truth of P. These motivations may exist whether or not P is true. I don't think I would have any problem admitting that I have a lot of motivated beliefs, but that these beliefs are also true. Certainly, if I'm motivated to believe that Q, and none of these motivations are why Q is really true, that may inspire some doubt in me as to the truth of Q, but if I seek out information that substantiates a commitment to Q independently of my existing motivations, then I can increase my confidence that I believe in Q legitimately, even if I know the initial commitment was motivated. Second, if Alice convinces me of P, doesn't that change my beliefs about why one believes in P? That one has very good reasons I didn't previously know about for believing in P changes my story about why someone might believe that P. I may find "there are just very good arguments for P" to now be a more plausible explanation than the one I had before, or I may consistently just add "and there are very good reasons to believe that P" to my list of explanations. In fact, one would think I might have to do either of those things to update my beliefs, as the motivations I initially believed to underpin Alice's belief, I must have found unmotivating, since I was not moved by them, I thought that they were not sufficient to convince me of P. Furthermore, if Alice convinces me of P, then I will believe there are good reasons to believe that P, as I will have found her reasons good enough to come to believe that P. If there is an alternative explanation for believing that P that doesn't turn on the truth of P and I find unmotivating, well, I know it didn't motivate me to believe that P. On the other hand, if I learn of a good reason why P is true, that's new to me and may change my mind on P. I will have to add that reason to my list of explanations as to why some people believe that P, and I will have to admit that some people believe P for good reasons.

Two people can come to the same conclusion from different perspectives - a la you may believe that the false conclusion P is true for reasons X, Y, and Z, but I may believe that P is true because of A, B, and C, neither of which invalidate X, Y, and Z or A, B, and C as the reasons each of us believe the false conclusion P.

Belief is based on awareness of facts, not on the facts alone. I dont see an issue with someone considering P and once one’s considerations change their new set of assumptions includes/derivates that not P. The truth of P may or may not be a part of the belief that P. We acquire beliefs based on seemingly true despite being patently false sense data all the time. Cue Descartes’ stick in water example. There the truth that the stick does not break in the water glass does take part in the appearance that the stick does break inside it. Thats one example of how the truth of P can lead to the impression that not P. There are more kinds of correlation between truth and appearance than identity alone.

how does this "skeptical scenario" translate into anything more radical than "at any given time, it is possible that my belief is caused by non-truth tracking mechanisms". So, it is possible for you to discover situations like that (i might discover that i like manchester city because i grew up there, not because they are actually that good). It has no global consequences, and it seems a pretty straightforward feature of belief in general

Plato, in the Theatetus, found it pretty perplexing that people can have false beliefs at all...

Maybe this problem could be stated like: for any belief, one could establish a psychological/sociological reason for endorsing it. This is the case even if the belief is true or even if the person holding the belief has a rational justification for the belief. The point is that a person can hold a belief mainly for the psychological reasons and not the rational ones. That being the case, then a skeptical scenario arises because you can never know if any belief that you hold is motivated by psychological reasons. Every argument that you give in favor of the belief that seems convincing could appear that way to you for psychological reasons.

I think resolving this requires a differentiation between evidence and the readiness to accept that it is sufficient. My argument as a turncoat to defend my newfound belief would be that since I was unconvinced Initially, I was more thorough in my search for evidence than the person who didn't initially convince me. Thus my reason for believing would be more justified, because it took a higher hurdle. This is just relative though (if I were honest with myself). The reasons why people are ready to accept a belief - at least in regards to something that touches my personal interest for example as a member of an economy that might thrive or collapse - and cease to be skeptic from the viewpoint of their Initial belief, I assume are always irrational. You could always ask, if you are so inclined: but is that sufficient to convince me of this new position? Or do I feel something is missing/has been overlooked? Maybe Im just a know-it-all and can't bear the thought of standing corrected? That's a strong motivation for doubt. Maybe my belief will only change then when I see an opportunity to convince someone else they are wrong anout what I formerly believed myself and against which I have found good arguments? That would offset the emotional cost of admitting I was wrong. My general view on this is that we use some methods to select for truth, but beyond that, we are always selected for truth by all the realities that affect us that we don't know. So our irrational ways of finding satisfaction in our beliefs and not asking further questions - even just bc someone else doesnt hold them - is productive in a grander scheme of meta-individual truth-tracking where it might be good for different individuals to have different beliefs so not all fall prey to the same delusion. There might be a rational reason to hold irrational beliefs.

Does a deflationary view of truth have any relevance here? What if truth isn't a special and separate property of anything, but just a descriptive fiction we use to mean that a proposition or belief is strongly justified? E.g., The Newtonian model of gravity was "true" until it was replaced by the Einsteinian model because, before the Einsteinian model, the Newtonian model was the most justified explanation. Some beliefs are "truer" than others because of the state of the evidence (e.g., the truth of water being H20 vs the truth of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics over other interpretations).

Not sure if this is in the same depth as your video but I was at a large family gathering and the things people offhandedly said like ohh they just found out that ALL of the fundamentals of mathematics are indeed wrong so now they have to figure it out all over again isn’t that interesting. Another one is Terrence Howard thinking 1x1=2 . How would I be able to detect if I have such absolutely false beliefs? And I am sure I have false beliefs because it would be very unlikely that everything that I think is true turned out to be true.

Is it also true that, if people are unaware of X,Y and Z, they'll always come up with another reason for believing P that seems valid? And what if on top of that, now, since you believe P, you've become aware of U,V and W, for why people believe that -P, etc? So basically the reverse? Because in that case you're realy in a pickle.

Regarding truth as a property of beliefs is only viable if we regard a "belief" as a mode of activity within a given umwelt. You're locked into a very Deficient-Kantian perspectivalism in which human experience is regarded as a screen upon which the world is projected like some sort of metaphysical heads up display feature. You will drive yourself insane - as some quite literally have - attempting to break through the walls of that (illusory) prison. The phenomena which we find within our experience are in fact the contents of the world. This is obvious to ordinary people who don't question their innate wisdom, and highly dubious only to intellectuals who have a propensity for getting hopelessly lost within their own cerebral fantasy worlds due to a severe lack of grass-touching.

It seems that if you have an explanation for the false belief - factors xyz - that this explanation either necessarily has to be proven or believed to be wrong when you are persuaded to believe P OR you have to necessarily believe that P is true regardless of there also existing social and psychological factors xyz which influence your belief that P is true. In other words I don't think there's really any problem at all here? Maybe i'm misunderstanding, but we can't forget that the explanation for the false belief of other's is subject to change too. And it's probably necessary to disprove that explanation in order to persuade you OR at least necessary to show you that P is true even if there are also social and psychological factors which induce biases. It's just not possible to believe P is true while also believing the explanation for the false belief is the only accurate explanation. So if you are persuaded to believe P, then that implies there has been an alternative explanation that explains why people believe P and that this explanation seems to show that P holds indeed, true.

The Fox and the Crow

Suppose both I and the people I trust are rational actors. Some of the people I trust hold beliefs I find to be caused by social and psychological factors. They percieve the same of me. I do not judge myself to be any better a rational thinker than they are. How can I be sure any of my own beliefs are not caused by social and psychological factors? Am I, too, a goldfish swimming around my fishbowl, unaware of the truth of what's going on in the world? If I can't be sure that any of my own beliefs are valid, am I even a person? Then I turn off twitter and feel better.

I’m confused. Your presentation of the situation makes it out like some kind of logical contradiction but to me it just seems like you need to appeal to human psychology. Motivations of the subconscious. I feel like I am missing something. Nonetheless very interesting video sir, thank you.

It seem like the motivation for not thinking the truth wass involved in the belief was that you though the beleif was false.If you change you mind then you cna us ethe truth of the beleif to explain it. Of casue if you change you mind you now have to explain your prior beleif in terms of social or phychological factors, which cast doubts on your judgement.

What happened to Jacques?

Minimum wage increase unemployment.

I don't get the problem? The answer to "What do I think best explains why he believes that p, given I believe p is true?" is going to be different to "What do I think best explains why he believes that p, given I believe p is false?". And of course the 'actual' explanation doesn't depend on what I believe.

Why do you pronounce "X, Y, Z" as "ex, wye, zee"?

I disagree with your premise that, in your given scenario of Alice explaining Bob's belief through X and later herself being convinced by Bob's arguments, nothing changes about whether X accurately describes Bob's reasons. Namely, X must have been chosen as a set of reasons that don't convince Alice, but Bob later does give a reason that convinces her, so Bob must have had at least one reason that isn't part of X. Before Bob gave this reason, it made sense for Alice to assume that X was all there is to Bob's belief, but after Alice is convinced, she must accept that X was an inaccurate description. However, Alice having better reasons than X doesn't mean that there aren't some other people sharing her beliefs who have no better reasons than X, so even if X isn't an accurate explanation for everyone anymore, it may still explain some people's beliefs. Also, for me, X isn't always just psychological factors or faulty reasoning, but can also be actual arguments that I can see being genuinely convincing to some people, but rely on premises that I disagree with. In this way, I don't necessarily have to be degrading towards a reason, as everyone will have slightly different starting points. But to get more to the point about being skeptical of your own beliefs: I think what the scenario teaches is that even if there are bad reasons to believe something, that doesn't mean that there are no better reasons, and so it can make sense to keep looking.

7:16

why would i assume with any certainty that my future change of believe was caused by bias, instead of by gaining new insight? you seem to jump from talking about uncertainty to assumed certainty and vise versa a lot of times. also, it is absolutely possible to hold a belief and at the same time be certain that bias is present (though less plausible if not per se implausible to believe that this bias was a nessecary cause for holding this belief). i know this from personal experience: being envious and holding a grudge against a certain person correlated with me believing that this person was acting against me in unjust ways. I had clues about this and evaluations of other people, but the extent to which it was true wasnt clear to me, especially BECAUSE I was aware of my own bias (motivation for motivated thinking).

You might have changed your belief because you changed your beliefs re: the initial explanation.

Bro thinks he's got hands

That you have or have not an arm is how the world is. This is not a proposition. The predicate is true applies to propositions. As for your skeptical worry, the vast majority of our beliefs are both 1) causal and 2) sociallly mediated as in I hold x is true about the world because Hilary Putnam holds x is true about the world. But this does not rule are purely causal internalist account of belief formation.

I dont think this is a Problem. Lets say I believe in a flat earth. All my friends hold the belief, that the earth is a sphere, because they read it in a comic book. And I make fun of them, for holding a belief, because they read it in a comic book. As I grow older, I see pictures from space of the earth and learn about the topic, and start to realize, that the earth actually is a sphere. And I change my mind. Still it is true in this scenario, that my friends believe it, because they read it in a comic book, but that doesnt undermine or invalidate my new found believe. As long as I have better reasons to hold my believe its fine. To hold a believe, because you read it in a comic book isnt great from an epistemological point of view, but: 1) It doesnt mean that the resulting belief is wrong 2) It doesnt mean there cant be way better reasons leading you to the same conclusion But maybe I just missunderstood it and just fail to see the issue.

Let's say I thought Kane B was crazy and pulled ideas about scientific realism straight out of his butt. But then I watched some Kane B videos and he had arguments that convinced me that his views on scientific realism were correct. The fact that Kane B had good arguments would refute the idea that he pulled his ideas about scientific realism straight out his butt. Contrasting this, let's assume that I thought that Kane B had his views on scientific realism because he read Popper. Let's also say that I disagree with Kane B's views on scientific realism, but I come to believe them after reading Kant. In this case, the justifications for my change do not refute the fact that Kane B read Popper. So what you are saying in this video works in some cases, but not in others.

X = the belief that beliefs in P must not be motivated by the truth of P You probably only believe X because you don't believe P. Once you come to believe P, you won't believe X. Maybe X was not true. You might not have any defeater for P.

I think you're making a couple of assumptions that are flat out wrong. And you also managed to get through the whole ten minutes without mentioning the most relevant factor, which is justification. Firstly, it is absolutely not the case that the truth of a proposition is a factor in why people believe it. Instead it is all down to specific evidence and reasoning, which is the justification for the belief. Why we believe we have hands for instance is that it is a conventional (as opposed to consciously decided) belief we inherit from upbringing and biology and it's part of a core of practical belief without which we cannot function. It's still possibly the case that an evil demon has created an illusion of hands, but assuming we do have hands that fact is no more involved than if the evil demon story is true. In both cases the reason for the belief has to do with what and how we experience and how we reason from that experience. Secondly, it is absolutely not the case that if you change your mind about an issue you cannot also change your mind about why people come to the opinions they do about the issue. On the contrary people are at absolute liberty to do so, and frequently do, and it would barely make sense if they didn't. In fact not only do people's opinions about such factors change around the same time as their opinions about the issue itself, they can often change *before* the opinion on the issue and the opinion on the issue effectively changes *because* of change of opinion on the factors. There is an obvious example using your minimum wage and unemployment example, namely if someone converts to libertarianism. You gave belief in libertarianism as an example of why someone would believe that raising minimum wage would lead to unemployment, and from the point of view of the person who was sceptical about that they were presumably sceptical about libertarianism, as they're using to explain in a sceptical way a belief they believe to be false. But suppose they then come to believe in libertarianism - nothing to do with minimum wage, some other cause - and this leads them to come to believe all sorts of other things libertarians might believe, including that raising minimum wage leads to unemployment. There's no problem for them here. Where scepticism comes in here is not in any issue about discrepancies in how we see factors responsible for beliefs when we change beliefs. It's in the relationship between how we see factors as responsible for beliefs in connection with the truth. The truth is it doesn't matter whether a proposition is true or not, if someone believes it they will have their reasoning and evidence. Some of that is undoubtedly better than other of it, but the question of truth is not part of it. Instead there is just a logical infinite regress of justification structures going ever down. There is no foundation, no first principles, no 'basic beliefs', just beliefs and evidence and arguments and if we want to be more sure or safer in our choice of beliefs we have to examine those evidence and arguments and compare them. We can do that with the existence of hands, whether raising minimum wage leads to unemployment, and any other question. However in some cases there may be no obvious winner, and when people are convinced it will always be very hard to change their mind.

I’m skeptical you’ve slept at all for 5 years

Isn’t there a genetic fallacy in your argument? Just because you can point to social and psychological factors influencing belief doesn’t necessarily mean they are false beliefs.

I am challenged in abiding with the 'scientific method'. 'Scientists' are often wrong and often revised, yet each time the new position is generally adopted as the 'truth'' until it isn't. Much of theoretical physics is probably false, and it has nothing to do with demons and everything to do with sense perception, cognitive deficits and biases. Not to channel Kant, but what knowledge do we have that's not socially conveyed beyond direct experience, and that gets codified by social conventions, particularly language.