Fresh AiR

One of the problems with contemporary social media discourse is jumping around and ahead in the conversation, misusing terms, axioms, and similar and not taking the time to actually have a discussion and understand what the other person is saying.

We are too quick to judge people based on the group we think they belong to and forget to appreciate the nuance between positions. A Christian is judged by how we judge all Christians based on previous experiences with Christians. The same can be said for atheists, Muslims or any other group.

This form of tribalism and cognitive bias makes use too quick to assume positions, all entailed beliefs and rationality, and you find people just name fallacies (often incorrectly) instead of having a dialogue and reaching some accord.

Recap: We often fail to hold conversations and throw out erroneous statements based on poor assumptions.

There is a difference between a belief and a claim.

A belief is something you accept as true. (Think most likely, conclude is the case etc)
A claim is something to say IS true.

So, sure, there is a claim that you believe something, but as we don’t have access to anyone’s mental states this isn’t anything we can prove, and really, why would someone say they believe something that they don’t? (Except for outlier cases and cons which again don’t really apply to social media conversations.)

When you do or don’t believe something, the only real duty you have is to yourself, and even then this duty only applies if you care about rationality.

Recap: Your primary duty to any belief position is to yourself.

Rationality deals with the way we reason, using the rules of logic and probability theory. This entails having no strong evidence against your position, no contradiction in your beliefs, not using fallacious reasoning but also realising that bit everything is a fallacy e.g. there are some authorities you can trust without it being a fallay, and this ties into good theories of testimony and all sorts.

So, if we care about rationality, our burden is to justify our position, at least to ourselves, so that we can ensure that we are holding a rational position.

Recap: rationality deals with the way you reason, everyone has a burden to justify their position to themselves if they care about rationality.

You can be wrong (without knowing it) and still be rational, and you can be correct and irrational.

However, rationality is definitely something that would usually lead one to truth if all all information was available to you and analysed mitigating all bias – which is hard to do, as bias is built into our wiring.

So, one’s rationality is somewhat relative to the information available. Someone in an epistemic bubble could be rational for believing something that outside of that bubble would be wildly irrational.

It can be said one can only be as rational as one can be. We should judge a child as a child, they do not have fully developed brains nor learned adequate reasoning skills, and therefore their behaviour is by default less rational on an adult scale.

This too relates to the information available. Forming an option based on 3 bits of information that point to a single conclusion and not being able to find anything else would be rational, even if that conclusion was wrong.

If you later found additional information that then leads elsewhere and the original conclusion was wrong, it would be irrational to maintain that original conclusion as true.

Recap: rationality should be judged in a more relative way, and based on reasoning, not conclusions.

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