Also, and this perhaps the idea I was most trying to get across, we can't know when out belief differs from the truth because our belief is the way we experience truth.
Regarding your point about the 6 vs 9 cartoon, that's essentially the main point of this article. When there is an objective truth about the physical world, that truth exists outside the mind, and it is distinct from our internal model of truth that's inside the mind.
Our belief is just a simulacrum of the truth, and even though we try to make it as accurate a simulacrum as we can, it's still just a simulacrum.
And perhaps the most important point of my post, is that even though our belief is just a simulacrum of the truth, It will seem, to us, to just be the truth itself because belief is how we experience truth.
Yeah, that's essentially it. I also tried to emphasize the idea that we can't 100% reliably know the truth because we can't perceive truth directly, only indirectly through our senses and reason.
And regarding The Flatlands, do you mean this: https://www.amazon.com/Flatland-Romance-Dimensions-Edwin-Abbott/dp/B0875SRH84/
that symbol on the ground is a metaphor for more complex problems that have multiple faces. The "realistic scenario" isn't a literal number painted on the ground. It's more like the Ronald Cotton case mentioned further above, where there was eye witness testimony and physical evidence which pointed toward him committing the crime, but there was also DNA evidence which showed that he didn't.
I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you're getting at.
I know what Bayes' Rule is, but I'm not sure how it applies to this post. I tried to mostly stick to abstract ideas of truth and perception of truth, and I didn't really get very deep into any real examples which you might want to actually measure and statistically analyze.
I'm also not sure where you're getting this sense of a pending Motte and Baily from. You mentioned something about models that are neither true nor false, but that didn't give me much of a sense of what you were getting at, and if I tried to guess, I'd probably get some important aspect of it wrong. Can you describe what sort of Motte and Baily you were expecting to see? Which position was the Motte? Which position was the Baily?
I’ve been wanting to write down my thoughts on the subject of belief and truth for some while now. The distinction between the two is one of the cornerstones of how I see the world. A good theory of what the truth is, and what it means to have a belief has a profound impact on how we think about the world. It also has a profound impact on how we understand other peoples’ perception of the world.
The objective truth. The true truth. The truth is true even if you don’t believe it is true. It is true even if you don’t know it is true. It is true even if... (read 1334 more words →)
Regarding your suspicion of whether I would apply this to a political topic: Of course I would. There are countless political topics I would apply this to.
The ideas behind this post are a fundamental component of the way I think, how could it possibly not apply to many political opinions I hold?