Anecdote, Intuition, and Hearsay

[Linked]

I'm listening to the book Farsighted, by Stephen B. Johnson (I think the B in this case is for clarity, not prestige), which is about how people make decisions when they have time to deliberate. He talks about several different cases. One is the case of Darwin's (Origin of Species Darwin) choice of medical care when he was really sick. It was very holistic by today's standards, but at the time all medicine was pretty holistic, evidence-based healing was not yet common.

The author said medicine at the time was based on "anecdote, intuition, and hearsay". Medicine got much more effective after it became evidence-based. My personal journey mirrors the advancement of medicine. The church offers a path to happiness based on anecdote, intuition (spiritual), and hearsay. The rest of my life was evidence-based. Upon realizing that, I stopped trusting the teachings of the church at face value.

It's difficult to find an evidence-based path to happiness in all the noise. Compounded by the fact that ditching my belief in the church makes me an outcast in many of my closest social circles. But I don't buy what the church is selling, so what else can I do?

[wtfluff]

It's difficult to find an evidence-based path to happiness in all the noise. Compounded by the fact that ditching my belief in the church makes me an outcast in many of my closest social circles. But I don't buy what the church is selling, so what else can I do?

Find different social circles.

[Reuben]

It's difficult to find an evidence-based path to happiness in all the noise.

I don't think it exists. I think you can determine the overall structure of how to obtain happiness from evidence, but that actually obtaining it requires believing in fiction and bullshit.

That probably comes across as negative.

There are things that are true only because everyone who has an interest in them believes in them. The value of money is one. The fact that Trump is president is another. The basis of your relationship with your wife is another (i.e. you love each other). Sometimes they're called "social constructs." There's evidence for them, but mostly in the form of symbols created specifically to provide evidence for them, such as bank notes, oval offices, and sweet nothings. When these truths relate to the real world, it's because we agree on ways to make them relate.

Humans form peaceful groups of up to hundreds of millions of unrelated individuals by believing in social constructs. We also believe in them simply by identifying as a member of a group. The whole process of creating beliefs in social constructs is thus cyclic and baseless. From a scientific standpoint, we form groups around fiction and bullshit.

This has made us tremendously successful as a species. And so evolution, in its blind wisdom, has made our happiness depend critically on belonging to groups. Therefore, the thing we yearn for the most - belonging - can't be obtained by following evidence.

The best we can hope for is that the fiction and bullshit we hold most dear doesn't contradict our personal evidence too much, and doesn't cause too much harm. Happiness can only be had by believing in things that, at best, we can't disprove.

[Hagoth]

It's difficult to find an evidence-based path to happiness in all the noise. Compounded by the fact that ditching my belief in the church makes me an outcast in many of my closest social circles. But I don't buy what the church is selling, so what else can I do?

Find different social circles.

Hang out with wtfluff.

[wtfluff]

It's difficult to find an evidence-based path to happiness in all the noise. Compounded by the fact that ditching my belief in the church makes me an outcast in many of my closest social circles. But I don't buy what the church is selling, so what else can I do?

Find different social circles.

Hang out with wtfluff.

YES!

(Fair warning: Hanging out with me might make your social life/status worse than it already is.)

[achilles]

It's difficult to find an evidence-based path to happiness in all the noise.

I don't think it exists. I think you can determine the overall structure of how to obtain happiness from evidence, but that actually obtaining it requires believing in fiction and bullshit.

That probably comes across as negative.

There are things that are true only because everyone who has an interest in them believes in them. The value of money is one. The fact that Trump is president is another. The basis of your relationship with your wife is another (i.e. you love each other). Sometimes they're called "social constructs." There's evidence for them, but mostly in the form of symbols created specifically to provide evidence for them, such as bank notes, oval offices, and sweet nothings. When these truths relate to the real world, it's because we agree on ways to make them relate.

Humans form peaceful groups of up to hundreds of millions of unrelated individuals by believing in social constructs. We also believe in them simply by identifying as a member of a group. The whole process of creating beliefs in social constructs is thus cyclic and baseless. From a scientific standpoint, we form groups around fiction and bullshit.

This has made us tremendously successful as a species. And so evolution, in its blind wisdom, has made our happiness depend critically on belonging to groups. Therefore, the thing we yearn for the most - belonging - can't be obtained by following evidence.

The best we can hope for is that the fiction and bullshit we hold most dear doesn't contradict our personal evidence too much, and doesn't cause too much harm. Happiness can only be had by believing in things that, at best, we can't disprove.

This sounds like that Harari Sapiens book...