belief poll #1

[spoonless]

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]

Comments

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

"Determined by"? This I object to outright. Math is a language and corresponds with relationships. It doesn't determine them.

Very interesting objection. I found the results of this question the most fascinating of all of them. 12 people picked 1, 2 or 3, two people picked 10, one picked 8 and one 5, plus your objection to the whole question (which I think is basically a 10, but it was better that you explained it). When writing this question, it went through several different phrasings. It started out as "is materialism false?" and then went through several changes and elaborations because I imagined various objections to the phrasing of it, and wound up being what I feel like is the issue at the heart of materialism, but perhaps not strictly equivalent to it. It's basically the question of supervenience, but phrased in a way that I prefer so that it avoids speaking of "physical properties" and instead speaks of mathematical relationships. Also interesting is that the 2 people so far who picked 10 are the people with the heaviest philosophy backgrounds, whereas the 12 who picked 1-3 mostly have science or engineering backgrounds. I picked 3, but if you'd asked me a year or two ago I would have said 1 or 2... although I still debated whether to pick 2 or 3 for it. I'm getting significantly more open-minded I think!