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Mass_Driver comments on The Sin of Persuasion - Less Wrong
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My subjective impression is that most moderately religious people in industrialized countries haven't. Otherwise, when relatives drop out of the faith, you would expect to see them get daily evangelical phone calls, rather than frosty silence.
Likewise parenting and politics -- there are 10 partisan hacks who have trouble making friends with people of the opposite party for every 1 activist who actually leaves her county to do some electioneering. You hear a lot about parents who don't want their kid associating with what they see as the children of unduly (lax / anal-retentive) parents, and these people might urgently defend their views at, e.g., a dinner party, but you rarely hear of campaigns where a parent goes around trying to convince all her closest friends (let alone the whole community) that X parenting style ruins kids' lives. Hell, people usually don't even do that when they think mercury in vaccines causes autism.
People believe that they believe that parenting, politics, and religion have consequences, but they don't actually believe it. That's my opinion, anyway.
That's more a case of people saving their own kids before saving their neighbors'. If it's sufficiently hard to save oneself, people won't always get to the save one's neighbor part.
That makes plenty of sense, Eugine_Nier, but the premise of this whole little exchange (admittedly, several layers up in the comment thread) was that at least some people do care enough to try to save their neighbors, and only refrain because of social norms against being annoyingly evangelical.
In particular violating that social norm would make it harder for them to save themselves.
By the way, this comment has inspired me to make a top level post on the distinction between belief in belief and internalization
That sounds like a factual belief rather than an opinion.
And I think you're right that most people haven't internalized a sense of the consequences of their beliefs, although they may consciously recognize that they have consequences. This isn't surprising, people have a pretty general weakness at internalizing beliefs when they pertain to things they can't observe up close on a regular basis.
I think there's probably a salient difference between things you only believe you believe though, and things that you believe but haven't truly internalized. I really do believe, for instance, that more than a billion people in this world suffer from starvation. I can confidently make predictions contingent on it being true. But if I had really internalized that belief, it would have a significantly greater bearing on my actions than it does.
Difference?
Opinions are subjective, and thus can't be confirmed or denied as matters of fact. Perhaps people will sometimes try to employ "in my opinion" as a fully general defense against having their statements disputed, but some beliefs are opinions and some are not.
Let's unpack this. When some statement is expressed "as an opinion", does the statement have any meaning? If it doesn't have any meaning, that's a serious problem. If it does, can we inquire about its correctness? If we can't, that's rather surprising, give an example of when that happens.
The statement does have meaning, but it's subjective to the person expressing it. For instance, I might say that "In my opinion, Cowboy Bebop is the greatest animated series ever made." It has factual implications; I may predict that I will enjoy watching Cowboy Bebop more than any other animated series, or notice more artistic choices that I consider to be well done. But I will not be able to predict that other people will enjoy Cowboy Bebop more than other series, or have similarly positive assessments of its artistic merit. I could make those predictions for anyone I knew to have the same preferences and values as I do, and I can provide arguments in favor of those preferences and values, but I can't provide evidence for them.
A factual claim can well be limited by one's inability to communicate its truth to others, that doesn't make that claim any less about the world, it just indicates a certain technical difficulty in managing it. Furthermore, if the claim is about your emotions, as you suggest with your example, and you set out to figure out a way of communicating or re-examining it (like with any other factual claim), then you can find creative ways of doing so, such as taking measurements of brain activity in the relevant contexts.
A statement of opinion can certainly be factual, in that it is objectively true that it is your opinion. If I say that I believe that kicking dogs is wrong, this can certainly be a true statement, but it's a statement about me. You can't go out into the world and measure the wrongness of kicking dogs.
If it were only Mass Driver's opinion that people do not internalize their beliefs on matters such as politics, parenting or religion, you might be able to confirm that he believed it, but you would not expect to be able to test its truth by examining the behavior of other people. If the belief does carry the expectation that you would be able to test its truth by examining the behavior of other people, then it's not really an opinion.
This is exactly what I'm going to do. And the world will be filled with mass-produced goodness-of-not-kicking-dogs. But you won't be there to see its moral hollowness, because you're made out of atoms.
Then it can well be incorrect, for example because of misremembered detail, biased account or as an intentional lie. My previous comment describes a possible way of getting a second account of its correctness other than through your own words. Recall that what we started with was your statement, which this discussion seems to clearly disarm:
A statement of opinion can be a lie, its truth value is simply only observable as an effect on the person making it.
My original statement was imprecise, but I'm confused as to why you would take issue with the idea that there's a distinction between statements that are and are not opinions.