Everyone likes to believe they’re thinking independently. That they’ve arrived at their beliefs through logic, self-honesty, and some kind of epistemic discipline. But here’s the problem - that belief itself is suspiciously comforting. So how can you tell it’s true?
What if your worldview just happens to align neatly with your temperament, your social environment, or whatever gives you emotional relief? What if your reasoning is just post-hoc justification for instincts you already wanted to follow? That’s what scares me - not being wrong, but being convinced I’m right for reasons that are more about mood than method.
It reminds me of how people think they’d intervene in a violent situation - noble in theory, but until it happens, it’s all just talk. So I’m asking: what’s your actual evidence that you think the way you think you do? Not in terms of the content of your beliefs, but the process behind them. What makes you confident you’re reasoning - not just rationalizing?
Pick something fringe that you have a belief about, like Bigfoot. Look at the evidence, really look at first hand interviews. How many witnesses before it becomes plausible? Do those hundreds of people really get off on making things up?
You could do this with anything, even western medicine. It takes practice to figure out which part of your understanding was just accepted as truth, and which part you have evidence for.
The biggest bias that everybody has is thinking that a million people can’t be wrong. That surely some other expert would have discovered it if there was anything there.
I recently heard of some physics-breaking experiment that had been repeated by a few YouTubers. Two large torus magnets with opposite ends clamped close together. This object falls slower than one of the same mass and size.