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Given history is rife with entire civilizations believing things we now consider mad, and given still that I don't consider this age as meaningfully wiser than any previous one, it seems almost certain that I take for granted things that are catastrophically erroneous.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that I believe such things since such a stance is contradictory with my metaphysical skepticism. But I certainly act as if some erroneous things are true.
The more interesting question is if it really matters that much outside of academic affairs or outside of a political regime that derives its legitimacy from public opinion.
I've made no secret in this forum of my attachment to truth as a terminal value, but experience has dispelled in me the conviction that this is a preoccupation of most people, or indeed something they ought to preoccupy themselves with in the first place.
People are prompt to delegate this kind of thinking, with no way to convince them to do otherwise, so the corruption of authoritative institutions seems a much more pressing problem than perennial biases.
Yesterday's news was, "NASA reveals astronauts’ return 'would not have happened' without Trump’s intervention"
By "NASA" here, we mean "Press Secretary Bethany Stevens, appointed a couple weeks ago", so hopefully I'm not indicting our top space-administration minds when I point out that this is a obvious bold-faced lie. The decision to bring back the Starliner astronauts in the Crew-9 capsule, as finally happened a week or so ago, was made last August, months before Trump was elected, much less took office. The Crew-9 launch was performed with two empty seats, reserved for their return as part of this plan, last September.
How can someone appointed to the job of "understand and explain what NASA is doing" be such an utter, unbelievable failure at understanding and explaining what NASA is doing? Well, that's probably why she was appointed.
Exactly! Imagine if, in Stevens' previous job as Ted Cruz's press secretary, she had been very assiduous about explaining that the Crew-9 return had been all planned out during Biden's term, and that the only change in plans during Trump's second term was that SpaceX took a little longer than planned to get the Crew-10 capsule ready and so the rotation was delayed a bit. Does she get praised for her commitment to truth and accuracy, and get her promotion more promptly? Or does NASA instead end up with a different press secretary who isn't such a killjoy?
The interesting thing about Brodski's story, that makes it not another case of "believing lies can be strategically useful", is that he is one of those few people who specifically and deliberately tries to avoid that, and yet one of the "useful" lies still bit him. When people like Stevens or the Boston Globe tell obvious falsehoods, it's good to wonder which of them fell for a dumb idea vs which of them are just being strategically deceptive, but Brodski would have to be playing the long game indeed to post a deep dive into how dumb he was. In his case, I'd like to hope that @pigeonburger had the right idea, that "if it had been a big issue for him I would assume he would have ended up on the correct opinion faster". Indeed the easiest way to fail to answer a question is to fail to truly ask the question, so you'd think Occam's Razor says we're done here. But maybe now I'm the one not paying attention to evidence? E.g. questions of politics and religion have no shortage of dedicated investigators, and yet many major questions don't see those investigators converge toward a single answer, or into a set of different-but-compatible-answers, or even to a state of humble explicit uncertainty.
Perhaps the key phrase there is "politics and religion"? Our ancestors may have all been through too many generations wherein anyone who announced "My epistemic credence is 90% on your side but still 10% on the other" had a good chance of ending up with their bodies 90% on one side of a blade and 10% on the other. The strategically deceptive thing to do in such cases is to keep your solid Bayesian reasoning private and just express false certainty publicly, but humans aren't as good at tricking each other unless we first trick ourselves, and either way why bother hanging on to good reasoning habits you can hardly ever use? Just be part of the tribe. You might get a promotion out of it, and if you were smart enough to ditch those good reasoning habits beforehand then you don't even have to feel ashamed afterwards.
I sense disapproval in your tone, but this is just how we are. And why we developed institutions to make sure that the sort of weirdo that hangs around these parts and cares about what is literally true to an unhealthy degree can be made socially useful.
We used to be more aware of the fact that the masses are rubes who lie all the time to everyone starting with themselves.
The corruption of those mitigating institutions has forced us to engage in a project of uplifting everybody into rationalism (this is what the Enlightenment is really about ultimately). But that was silly and hubristic. There is no way for society to work without useful lies.
You can say a lot of things about The Invention of Lying but the core proposition of the film it demonstrates quite aptly: without lies, society would be brutal and abject to everyone. And unlike the movie characters who get to be deadpan for comedic purposes, we'd be at each other's throats.
Now this is not to discard the merits of truth which are of immense value, but they alone can't order any society that would be human.
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Health seems like the big one. It makes a personal difference to your quality of life and lifespan whether you believe that lead paint is safe, whether you believe that vaccines are good for you, etc. I expect that the biggest thing our descendants are likely to shake their heads at is some benign part of everyday life in the developed world which will have been exposed as having dire long-term consequences on the human body. The "microscopic lithium contamination is causing obesity" people are probably wrong, but something like that.
Our descendants in 100 years seem unlikely to be more longevity maxing or scientifically minded than we are.
I'm not saying they'll be systematically better at taking care of their health, just that something big and loud akin to "yo, lead point is bad for you" might emerge and filter out into popular consciousness to the point they'd be horrified at the 2025 lifestyle for that alone.
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Personal health advice matters up to a point.
I understand this is relevant vis à vis cigarettes or leaded gasoline and the like, but these are matters of public health and public policy. It's only in a democracy that every man must have an opinion on such matters, and we've done fine in the past with more primitive types of holy men declaring things they notice have problems to be unclean and pass down general wisdom like this.
In any case, having a truth seeking apparatus that really works is absolutely necessary, but I would couch that as academic affairs, actually.
In fact, the current state of affairs where no institution is trustworthy and everyone has to build their own opinion of basically anything is a catastrophic failure and a waste of everyone's time. Not some utopian epistemological anarchy.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating we all stop thinking and defer to the closest available authority. But we have to live in a world where most people are going to do that, by necessity. So even if it's unwise, it ought to work.
Surely not? In any era, save some totalitarian hell-scape, I can still use my own judgement to determine if I, personally, am going to take up smoking/let a quack saw up my leg/give the wise-woman's herbal remedy a try. Renaissance, medieval, even ancient literature is full of jokes about doctors prescribing unpleasant/harmful treatments which clearly don't work just to look like they know what they're talking about, and characters rightly giving them a hard pass after the application of a bit of common sense.
You can, but you don't have to for most things.
Consider in the periods you bring up the role of the Church vis à vis morality (protestantism and all), because I think it's a lot more relevant to what I'm trying to illustrate than medicine which has indeed always been suspect of quackery.
There are places that still work like this today. I've lived in some. In some nations, the ruler just says whether something is acceptable or not (which usually really come from his advisors) and people fall in, because that's what you do.
People don't turn off their brain altogether so you can't make insane demands out of them, but they will generally be unconcerned with matters that are beyond their command, and really most dissident talk is about character rather than policy specifics.
This also happens in representative democracies mind you, but this tendency to stick to "is this a good man" rather than "are those good policies" is usually panned as populism because it's rightly recognized as subversive to the ideal of a democratic system.
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