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What I meant to say was "It's not just that we don't know how, it's that it's impossible". I don't subscribe to the idea that no humans have figured this all out yet, for I pretty much have. But the conclusion is that humans (myself included) are stupid. I believe that things work out because of human instincts and the laws of nature, and not because we actually know what we're doing.
I think this perspective comes from the modern belief that everything must be justified or proved in order to be correct. I simply don't impose such rules on myself (and reality itself doesn't either). What I want to convery here is that preferences and beliefs aren't "illusions" in the sense that they're false or fake, and that there's no unique, more "real" underlying reality to discover. I'm "calibrated" for the world through my DNA (darwinism), through a process which made us to adapt to reality itself in a sense, so I will simply trust this process.
Anyway, it seems that beliefs influence reality. That your confidence influences your success (and that this applies even if you're entirely alone). Even if a belief is false, it may influence reality and become true. In other words, a belief seems to be an act of creation, making it "real".
I do have those, but everyone must have them, or else they simply don't live very long (since they don't prioritize future states in which they are alive). Even the belief that beliefs are bad is a belief, so there's no easy way out.
A lot of highly educated people don't seem all that intelligent to me, they just seem good at memorizing things. That said, I'd prefer it if people simply stopped believing that they were smarter than nature (including their own nature). There's so many things about life which are unintuitiv, one of them is eustress, and not knowing about it has caused a lot of damage (helicopter parenting etc). But there's a lot more. Thing seem to go better when one is not so antagonistic towards existence, nature and oneself
Oh, sorry. I agree with you on most of this. In fact, it's basically what I wanted to say originally.
OP wrote that the West has abandoned "the dispassionate search for truth" and I wanted to say that such a search is impossible. You have to put something of yourself in, and that will colour what you get out. This is true at both a personal and a societal level. I differ slightly from you in that I do believe there is some objective reality in the moral dimension, some true "oughts"; God knows them, we don't, and we won't understand until he shows us personally. But that's not going to happen in this life so it's not super relevant to actual interactions between people.
I would call this the standard post-modernist worldview. It works fine for a confident person or a confident civilisation, but the problem is that it devolves when you have a second actor who doesn't share the majority of your beliefs. Since there is no "dispassionate search for truth" that will inevitably lead those people to the same place, it's not necessarily possible for A to justify their beliefs to B in a manner that B finds convincing. So you end up in a power struggle where both sides use the incentives available to them to bend the other to their perspective. Even in liberalism or post-modernism this occurs on the meta level - both sides must agree on the base principle of liberalism in order to agree to disagree on the concrete issue.
Again, I agree with much of this. But, if you will forgive the standard dig, I presume you aren't living in a cave wearing furs from something you killed. Which parts of our society are an improvement over nature and which are not is hugely contested: you have the degrowthers, the anti-vaxxers, the Liver King, the socialists, the anti-feminists, etc. all criticising different aspects of our society for not being an improvement over nature while fervently defending other parts.
Ah, I see! And "You have to put something of yourself in" is a great way to put it! I do think that there's an objective reality, but that it cannot be described or modeled. If I make a mental model of you, that model would reveal more about myself than it would reveal about you. As for oughts, there seems to be actions which bring better results than others. Any process which is not sustainable will eventually cease, so that which wishes to stay in existence must play by certain rules, or make sure not to step too much out of line for too long. I don't really believe in something like morality, but my personal preferences looks a lot like what people call morality, and finally, it would be bad taste of me if I attacked your moral beliefs since it wouldn't benefit you.
Is that so? I don't like post-modernists though. Do you think they understand any of these things? Average people who are post-modernists likely don't know about axiomatic systems or the incompleteness theorems. Human perception is very malleable, they got that much right, but they want reality to be malleable as well, and they think we can achieve this if we simply agree that we can. We could agree that people were equal, and that would largely succeed, but IQ test results would remain entirely unchanged.
Like spiritualists say, everything we need to be happy is already inside of us. We have incredible power over our own reality. We only really need to deal with objective reality enough that we can meet physical needs like nutrition and shelter, which is quite easy. But treating reality like it's malleable is just immaturity, for social methods like "If I just complain enough, I will get my way" only work on other people, they do not work on reality. And treating reality like fantasy is dangerous, it very quickly leads to ruin.
I don't think the issue is necessarily diversity of though, for that actually works well to the extent that everyone is self-sufficient. When people are "enough in themselves", it doesn't matter much if there's other people who also have their own worldview. It's only when people are incomplete that they need other people to be coherent enough that the sum of whoever is present exceeds one person who can live independently. Of course, shared language and such is highly useful, but the more mature and developed you are, the bigger distances you tend to be able to cope with (which is why the old internet used to have many wildly different people co-existing somewhat well, while the modern internet is intolerant of differences as disagreement immediately results in drama and hurt feelings)
But what OP meant was probably "People are now valuing feelings over correct information, and their mental defense mechanisms kick in when they encounter evidence that their precious beliefs aren't workable, and they get hostile towards you if you cause them to reflect on themselves or if you ask them questions which makes them comfortable" and I can only agree with this. What he said wasn't exactly true, but what he meant still carries a good point.
While this is true, you can increase the tolerance for differences in beliefs by about 10 times by focusing on terminal values. For instance, two groups might be in a conflict, both claiming "We're civilized, while you're uncivilized!" very well, but they're in agreement in this: Both groups prefer civilized behaviour to uncivilized behaviour. They merely need to learn how to communicate better to resolve this issue. The reason communicating (talking about things) can resolve conflicts in the first place is probably because most peoples terminal values are highly similar, or because it allows people to understand eachothers perspective in a way which they can respect (in other words, it doesn't conflict with their core values, as that would likely be irreconcilable). Mentally immature people get triggered and misunderstand others quite easily, over minor perceived differences which tend to not be differences at all (at least not as you get closer to terminal/core values)
I don't think they're honest, even if they don't realize it. They will likely criticize the aspects in which they are at the bottom rather than at the top (meaning that they just want more power). And to be honest, I might enjoy society better if I was in the top 1% myself, or if I felt more compatible with the modern society than I do now. But besides a bit of technology (Computers, virtual reality, dishwashers, washing machines, driers, ovens, fridges and freezers, medicine and the ability to communicate over long distances with voice, video and files) I don't really need any aspects of the modern society. The modern society fulfills my physical needs better, but not my psychological needs. I like civilized people more than uncivilized people, but civility now seems to be decreasing as society gets more modern. In any case, what's important to me is peoples actual character. I've recently read some of the guodian bamboo strips from about 500 BC, and they resonate better with my own values than modern ideologies do. So civility does not necessarily require modernity nor scientific thinking.
I wrote quite a lot here, but I think we agree on most of it?
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