Mike Dilger on Nostr: I don't know who really won the Venezuela elections. I find anybody that has any ...

I don't know who really won the Venezuela elections. I find anybody that has any certainty about who won to be suspicious and untrustworthy.

It is important to hold many contradictory possibilities in a superposition in your head. Weight their possibilities and adjust these weights as information flows in. If you choose one belief and forget/dismiss the counter evidence, and you happen to be wrong, then it becomes exceedingly difficult to see the obvious truth should further evidence flow in because you have wed yourself to one opinion and no longer have the understanding that is needed to recompute the odds.

For most beliefs this isn't necessary as the evidence is overwhelmingly in one direction. For example, I believe the Earth is nearly spherical and I don't put any weight on flat-earth, or in the existence of a god, because I've spent enough time on these topics to reach a level of certainty that is ridiculous to question at this point. For many issues, however, I keep updating a superposition. Some people call this being "open minded".

I'm open minded about seed oils (I think they are healthy), about who bombed the Nord Stream (I think it was the USA), about Israel/Hamas conflict, and many other issues. That doesn't mean that I consider the two stories to have equal probability, just that there is enough counter-evidence to my beliefs that I won't close the books on any of these issues.