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belief poll #1
I think I'm going to start taking a series of surveys about people's beliefs. I've always been fascinated by belief/epistemology, how beliefs form, how people justify them, how different they can be in different social groups, etc. I wanted to put many more questions in the first poll, but it limits the number of questions to 15 so I had to stop there. Another reason for doing this is that I want to get started thinking more about creating some kind of epistemology-net, where it's easier to track different cultural, scientific, and political beliefs and people can register their opinions about different subjects and their justifications for them, and any expert credentials they have on the subject. I think that people should share and talk about beliefs more in general, to help accelerate memetic evolution, and improve the quality of beliefs held by people across the world. You can't do much with a simple poll, but I at least made them each a scale from 1 to 10 where 10 is "yes, definitely!", 1 is "no way!" and 5 is "don't know" or "haven't thought about it". These polls won't accomplish much in the way of the larger goal of getting an epistemology-net started, but they will hopefully at least give me more of a sense of what people's opinions are out there other than my own. (Even the questions one asks tend to be biased by your own perspective, as I'm sure mine are.) I'll try to put a mix of questions, some which I feel strongly about and others which I'm not so sure about. I tried to word them as clearly as possible, but obviously there is always ambiguity so some may depend on how you interpret the question... feel free to take whatever interpretation seems most appropriate to you.
[Poll #1412180]
[Poll #1412180]
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It seems that if someone reads the question, they're thinking about it.
I think that some of my answers would be pretty different if I had answered the first time I had thought about each of these questions, and it would be interesting to track how my opinions shifted as I spent more and more years of thinking about each. I guess I'm not sure I understand what your objection is... is there a significant difference between not knowing because the information is out there but you haven't pursued it or processed it enough, and not knowing because the information is simply not out there?
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