Comments by "ncwordman" (@ncwordman) on "Caller: Is Anti-Vaxx Merely Mental Illness?" video.

  1. The anti-vaxx thing is just a part of a growing problem in the United States, and, really humanity. People believe they know what they can't possibly know, which is why they "believe," instead of "know." But we confuse knowledge for belief, and, since belief doesn't require facts, our ostensible knowledge (which is really just belief) rejects all facts to the contrary. When I write that this is a growing problem, let's just look at the comments on this video as an example. Take a moment and scroll through them. Most of what you find are people who claim to know what they can't possibly know, i.e., why other people do what they do. And these commenters aren't just positing, they are summarizing what they believe is the equivalent of mathematically proven truth. So their beliefs, which they see as knowledge and thinking, are really the same sort of mislabeled personal confirmation bias. And that is the heart of the Trumpists' conspiracy theories too. And here's an interesting twist, I'm doing the same thing here: I don't know any of these people, what drives them, how they think or feel, etc. But, to qualify something that is obviously unknown to me, so that I can feel above it all, or superior, (or to hide my ignorance from myself) I point out how their thinking is really just them assuming, and believing they're right. Here's some hard truth: We don't know the majority of what we need to know, in order to make informed decisions. This isn't (necessarily) a failing on our part. We just, simply, can't know everything; we're unable to know everyone, let alone how they think. So most of our reasoning has to deal with the real-life equivalents of algebraic unknowns. And there are so many unknowns, and so we can't solve for X. Only thing for it is to substitute our own values for the innumerable unknowable quantities. We can't even treat these as unknowns, or we'd go through life hesitating, unsure, lacking confidence. So we're obliged to make things up as we go, and hide that we're making up stuff, from ourselves and others. Unfortunately, this can lead down extreme paths, before we know what's happening.
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