You trust what you see in the news, on tv, in some internet article, study blurb, school rumor/gossip, magazine tabloid, social media feed, forum, lawsuit story, jury vote, political propaganda, fear mongerer, or religious book, etc..
Just why? Its not like you can confirm any of it.
Why do you trust people? Why do you pay attention to any of this crap?
People are liars.
You get lied to far more often than you hear honesty, and people are also dumb, and they hear things wrong, and they conclude the wrong answers, and they make assumptions, and they cut corners on research. etc.
But people are so quick to believe any bullshit story they hear.
Why?
I just don't get it.
It's like people are allergic to saying "I don't know".
Well guess what? You don't know most of the things you think you know.
If you're an exception to this nonsense, thank you. But to everyone else, wtf is wrong with you?
1 mo
Why are people so trusting?
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Innocent until proven guilty if I summarize it. If I start with the assumption that someone is untrustworthy, I don't see a practical way for them to "earn" that trust any more than if I assume someone is a murderer, I don't see a practical way for them to prove their innocence unless we find strong evidence that someone else is the murderer.
I'm also very much into Stoicism and have been practicing its ideas for almost 20 years now. What I've found more and more over the years as I practice it with the strong dichotomy of control is that the ultimate source of disappointment is myself.
The less I suffer from external factors, the more I suffer from internal ones, it seems. So I have reached a stage now where I would suffer more if I mistreat someone than if someone mistreats me because guilt has become the ultimate and remaining source of pain for me, not what other people can do to me but the guilt that comes about based on what I can do to them.
For news and things of this sort though, I am the ultimate skeptic. I'm the opposite of the type who can entertain any conspiracy theories. Yet that's not "distrust" per se, based on the assumption that people are deliberately deceiving us. That could be the case; I'm not going to assume the average politician is all that honest. Yet innocent until proven guilty is my whole thing now if I'm going to believe that someone is lying about anything.
Like as difficult as it might sound to some people, with all the practice I've done trying to constantly remind myself of the dichotomy of control all these years, it would legitimately hurt me more now if I cheated on my wife than if she cheated on me. The guilt the former would bring would hurt me more than anyone can ever hurt me.
The Stoic dichotomy of control in case people aren't familiar is to focus and worry entirely on things within our control: our actions, not other people's, not the weather (I can control whether or not I bring an umbrella when it rains, I can't control the rain), etc.
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I have genuinely reached a point where the only person that can deeply wound me now is me by failing to live up to my expectations.
For me its just that if you want me to think something is true, you have to provide evidence. If you want me to think something is possible, you have to provide sound logic.
Its not a matter of innocent vs guilty of being a liar, its a matter of refusing to stray from the scientific method. I don't contemplate people "earning" my trust, I just see trust itself as worthless.
I'd rather just say "I don't know", if my only option is trusting them or not trusting them.
I'm not going to say I know something if I don't actually know it.
So, for example, if I mistreated a stranger because I distrusted them when they were being honest, that would hurt me more than if I trusted them and it turned out they betrayed my trust. It is actually a form of risk-aversion that I default to trusting every stranger to be honest, as counter-intuitive as it might sound to those who haven't practiced Stoicism for almost two decades.
I see. If you think of "I don't know" as not trusting a person yet, that makes sense to me from a semantic standpoint. I equate "I don't know" with "trustworthy", since we have no evidence yet that they are guilty of lying.
As far as being stoic goes, not my thing personally. I'm really not into philosophical stuff either, its my view that in order to have the type of life i want, society needs to shift away from beliefs in general.
People can say they can be happy by ignoring the world around them and shifting their expectations down, but only until your house gets exploded in a war started by idiots who assumed this or that, Or until your food is poisoned by pollution or toxic ingredients, or your products you have access to buying start to suck, or people try canceling you on social media, or people spread religion and impede scientific progress, or stupid laws get passed, or some jackass smokes next door and you are stuck brrathing that shit in, ir you get framed for a crime, or you get harrased by jehovas witnesses, or people mass buy toilet paper over overhyped panic on an outbreak, leaving you none, etc, etc.
I could go on for hours with examples of how idiots make the world a terrible place, but you get the point, and to suggest its beyond anyone's control to reduce that is to ignore the progress our species has already made.
Education does change the world.
"I don't know" is choosing knowledge over trust.
It does not matter who a person is or what character they have, trusting them is still bad, because trust as a concept is bad judgment when the goal is to never be wrong.
A lot of my focus on Stoicism as well as psychotherapy and so forth is just my own exploration into how to be very happy and at peace with my life, to minimize conflicts with others, etc. I was really, really miserable in my 20s. I was getting into arguments all the time, always wanted to prove everyone wrong and myself right, I needed a framework of thinking to mellow me out: above all else to start getting along with girlfriends: they can be a bit challenging sometimes. 😅
It's admittedly irrational but governed by my sense of ethics but let's take an extreme example and say there were 10 people in a room, and 9/10 of them were not just compulsive liars, but really Machiavellian, manipulative, with the worst ulterior motives for me. Maybe even making a fool out of me with my desire to trust. But 1/10 is a legitimately good and honest person.
I would still be hurt more if I distrusted all of them and realized that included that 1/10 good person that might have become my best friend in the world than if I trusted all of them and failed to realize initially that 9/10 were my enemies.
I just don't see trust as something interpersonal, to me its just faith vs facts.
I'll take the facts.
As far as conflicts go, I notice how others' bad choices have domino effects that come to bite me in the ass, so I see education and teaching critical thinking as a weapon to combat and minimize that domino effect on my life.
If I just let it all go and ignore it, everything that makes me happy will vanish more and more until nothing is left.
Ad far as relationships go though, I wouldn't need to trust a girlfriend, I'd just know her well, when there are no secrets, there is no need for trust, because there is no unknown.
I actually like to idealize a bit but I want to separate it from faith. Faith tends to work towards optimism which works towards prophecies of the future. I try to minimally concern myself with the future since it's largely beyond my control; all I have control over is the present.
Glass is half-full for sure, but not expecting someone to buy me another drink for my happiness.
Critical thinking is a must from my perspective, but I'm very governed by my passions and emotions, so I utilize it to arrive more at a style of thinking that makes me happy and strives to find beauty in every corner of the world, in everyone, as idealistic and impractical as it sounds. It still makes me happy over the analyst side of me that wants to reduce everything to just the sum of their material components.
Faith, belief, trust, and assumptions are synonyms, they just mean a person is claiming they know the answer to a question when they don't.
My ideal world is one where everyone thinks scientifically. Where there is no desire to trust or be trusted. No rumors, no gossip, no false convictions in courts, no eyewitness accounts taken as evidence, no religion. etc.
The vast amounts of knowledge gained in such a world would be astounding.
Something I would really like to see is probability-based thinking. The mainstream seems to think of things as "This is right" vs. "This is wrong", instead of assigning probabilities and reevaluating as they collect more data. It's rare that I found someone who says, "I think this has a 70% probability of being correct based on the evidence I've collected so far, and I'm constantly reevaluating as I collect more."
Well chaos prevents statistical analysis, there are too many variables to accurately guess the likelihood of something in most cases.
It's more a humbling mindset as I see it to avoid being 100% certain about anything. It means we don't mind as much when we find data to the contrary. You seem way more logical than me. I'm mostly concerned with the emotional/psychological obstacles. 😅
It would be a great improvement just from the emotional/psychological level if being proven very likely incorrect was more like, "Wow, cool! I didn't know about that! Let me look into it more now," instead of, "Fuck you!" You know? And I think probability-based thinking, no matter how accurate or inaccurate, does humble people a lot and make them less attached to their beliefs.
My emotional/psychological needs socially speaking are very compact, a bit like a child's for the most part. I want to have fun playing and being creative and learning things.
Your second paragraph I agree with, I'm just relatively anti-statistics because of chaos.
I like the idea that people acknowledge unpredictability.
Fear of being wrong. The old raising your hand in the classroom and challenging the teachers opinion. You risk a lot sticking your neck out.
People are wrong far more often when they trust.
If you trust no one and require evidence for any claim, then you end up almost never being wrong.
Fear of being wrong should therefor cause people to trust no one.
And never learn anything.
You learn things by evidence, not trust.
Trust makes you think you know things when you really don't.
But you have to trust the evidence.
No you don't, thats why its evidence.
It confirms things, it has you understand them, it verifies and removes the unknown aspects, making trust no longer needed.
If you are trusting the evidence, then either its not evidence, or you don't understand it.
Evidence isn't proof though. It's circumstantial until proven which is something you trust.
Thats actually not true at all. You are talking about evidence in a legal sense I think, I'm talking about it in the scientific sense, where evidence is in fact proof.
Courts tend to throw around the word evidence when its not appropriate to use it.
For example if I told you I had a specific item, and then I reached into my pocket, pulled the item out, and showed you that item, that is evidence proving my claim.
Yeah.. but (for example) if it was a droid phone instead of an apple I would be disappointed in said evidence 😎
I'm not really a smart phone person. I just don't get the point of them, I'd rather have handheld gaming systems.
I can understand that. I didn't either until having to look heavily after my dementing mother. I wired my home to aid me in her care. I don't think I could have handled it as well as I did without it all.
Ah, yeah that makes sense.