= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
fubarobfusco comments on Betrand Russell's Ten Commandments - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (18)
Sounds like survivorship bias to me: yes, every opinion now accepted was once eccentric, but most eccentric opinions of the past have been rejected so thoroughly that we're unlikely to have ever heard of them.
However, if we accept the premise of the quote that every opinion now accepted was once eccentric (and the implicit inference that every opinion that will be accepted in the long run is now eccentric), and your goal is to have opinions that are accepted in the long run, then it is true that you have to pick opinions that are currently eccentric (even if it is also true that most eccentric opinions, both in present and past, are crazy ones that never become accepted).
The main problem is that the premise is false. Most conventional opinions of the past are still accepted today (e.g. "clouds lead to rain", "fire is hot", et cetera).
I suspect the kind of opinion the quote is talking about is as defined here; a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty. Neither “Fire is hot” nor “Clouds lead to rain” count as examples of this as most people have a fair amount of evidence on hand to back those beliefs up.
In light of this, could you please provide alternative examples of conventional opinions that were also held in the past?
Adherents of rule #1, however, will never have grounds sufficient to produce complete certainty, in which case, "fire is hot" is an opinion by that definition.
However, a a pure counterexample rather than a mere logical knot:
Sure. "Murdering your brother out of jealousy is wrong." That's a fairly conventional opinion, no?
If you define "opinion" as something which is not obviously true then every opinon had once to be at least a bit eccentric by definition.
I'm having trouble parsing that, could you re-phrase?
Also it's not so much about what I'm defining "opinion" to be, but rather about what the quote means when it says "opinion". If we're going to say that the quote is wrong, we should at least aim to attack what the quote is intended to mean, rather than what we can interpret it to mean.
Varying forms of xenophobia have existed throughout the ages and those ideas are still alive and kicking today.
However within a good deal western media (at least in England) xenophobic ideals are portrayed as to the "far right", and essentially eccentric. Whereas back in the day racism/nationalism was normal, and to not conform to that was considered eccentric.
Also I was looking for something a little less general than just xenophobia, a lot of opinions fall under that category.
"Happiness is good"?
Not sure that quite counts as an opinion, but what the hey. Close enough.
The particular quote should be ammended to something like: