I have been working on the C++ webserver design and it’s going to take some time to get it right, so that post is going to be somewhat delayed. In the meantime, here’s a little post on a dogma (anti-dogma?) that I’ve worked out based on rationality.
Note: “Belief” and “knowledge” are, here, used quite loosely. Read the first and second paragraphs of Defining Belief and Knowledge for the definitions I’m using over this post.
Knowledge is, quite simply, information you possess. Your very existence doesn’t depend on its being true - you could probably learn that gravity isn’t an inherent property of matter (this is probably not true, but it’s an example), or that the stars aren’t actually little dots on a huge canvas and are in fact massive balls of nuclear fusion (look, if you don’t know this you should get off this blog), pretty easily. Knowledge is “there are 5 apples in my house” and “there is a tree in my house because it’s December” - you aren’t particularly invested in it, and you can learn that you only have 4 apples or that the tree has been gone since the 26th without having a breakdown. Knowledge is mutable information.
It doesn’t matter what your knowledge is - you can possess the information that pigs are green and carry Glocks, if you like; as long as that knowledge changes when you see a pig that is in fact slightly off-pink and un-beweaponed, it’s perfectly fine. That is a guess or assumption, and knowledge isn’t necessarily correct at all - the important part of knowledge is that it is shaped by objective fact and that your knowledge changes when confronted with such fact.
Belief is a whole ‘nother matter. Belief can be conceptualized as when you operate under the assumption that your knowledge is perfect and immutable and, here’s the important part, are not willing to accept that your knowledge might be wrong. A flat-earther can do as many experiments as they like, can be shown as much data as you like, can be walked through as many thought experiments as you can think of, can build homemade rockets to see it for themselves, they will never actually accept that their knowledge is incorrect and that the Earth is round. They refuse to accept that scientific experiments they themselves conduct are at all conclusive - because to them, there is only one answer, and if objective reality says the answer is different then objective reality is wrong.
Even if they walk outside and observe, a person that believes the sky is deep purple with pink spots will refuse to admit that they are wrong. On the flip side, if you believe the sky is in fact blue, you will refuse to admit the violet tinges really are hovering up there in the atmosphere. This is the fundamental flaw of belief: belief requires a person to be absolutely invested in knowledge and refuse the very notion that their knowledge might possibly be in some universe wrong.
Belief is, in short, the refusal to admit you are wrong in face of objectivity.
Given an understanding of the nature of belief, we now turn to the different ways belief can present itself. At the risk of sounding like a clickbaiter, this might surprise you.
Disbelief: Disbelief is the belief that a piece of knowledge is objectively not true. Most people disbelieve that the world is flat and thus believe that the world is round - if you were to prove suddenly, objectively that it is in fact flat, they would refuse to acknowledge that your evidence exists at all. This is just as invalid as the belief that the world is flat! Remember, belief is when your knowledge is impermeable; you cannot, even in the face of objectivity, admit that you’re wrong or allow your knowledge to change. The round-ness of the world should NEVER be more than just well-backed knowledge - it’s easy to find very simple thought experiments, rational proofs, and direct evidence that the world is round, but that doesn’t mean you should allow yourself to commit the fundamental flaw of belief in the opposite direction. Knowledge can be more or less valid, but knowledge should never become belief.
The key is in the last six letters of the word: disbelief. You can’t disbelieve something without believing the opposite, and that is fundamentally irrational. The more prone to doubt of you in the audience are now cringing - I can’t possibly be right, can I? It must be perfectly fine to disbelieve in [any list of topics; it’s not that hard to think of a few]! Sadly, it isn’t perfectly fine at all. You can have all the knowledge you want, but ridicule of such viewpoints requires disbelief in them, and belief is exactly the problem. Take this thought experiment: Say some mathematician finally works out a proof for the Riemann Zeta Hypothesis and, as seems logical, it is proven that the real part of every nontrivial zero of the Riemann zeta function is 1/2 (unabashedly copied from that linked Wikipedia page). They receive a Nobel prize and become one of the most famous mathematicians ever, rivaling Riemann and Hilbert themselves. Now, say a few years later, a young grad student compiles a 500-page report on why the proof is wrong and the Hypothesis still unproven (note: this is in no way based on a true story). How do you think the pure mathematics community would react? Well, there’d be a lot of work on deciphering the proof and determining if it really applies, and it turns out that Famous Mathematician was, in fact, wrong. Everyone’s quite sad and goes back to work now. Sounds great, right? Sure, Famous Mathematician is discredited, but his proof was wrong. They probably didn’t know. So Famous Mathematician goes on to successfully solve several of Hilbert’s problems, Grad Student continues his work and even discovers some supporting proofs for Famous Mathematician, and everyone’s great friends and happy and productive.
I haven’t been doing the higher maths for long enough to tell how the pure mathematics community in general reacts to such things, but in this thought experiment everything worked out and everyone lived happily ever after because nobody believed in Famous Mathematician’s proof. Everyone accepted it as knowledge and, when that knowledge turned out to be wrong, everyone accepted the modification happily. If the pure mathematics community as a whole believed in Famous Mathematician’s proof, Grad Student’s paper would have been instantly rejected - how dare they challenge the perfect, immutable facts proved by Famous Mathematician? The world would have continued under the assumption that the Riemann Zeta Hypothesis does indeed hold, and the truth in all her majesty would have been oppressed most shamefully, perhaps forever.
In short: disbelief is belief looked at from another angle, and is just as invalid as belief.
Unbelief, I shall define, is when you refuse to have any belief either way. You neither believe nor disbelieve anything. In Kotlin, an un-believer’s belief could be thought of as a boolean set to Null. In C++, a nullptr. In Python, None. Unbelievers have as much knowledge and objective proof to support it as they want - they will never actually believe either way. In practice it is nearly impossible for a human to actually refuse to believe in anything; whether societally or neurally, we appear to be very, very good at believing in things. However, a person who wishes to be truly rational must strive to quash belief in all forms and see their world in terms of mutable knowledge instead of objective perfect truths.
Oftentimes I catch myself believing in things. Up until recently, my devout atheism was the big one - an older post of mine reflects this perfectly, literally titled “On Religion: My Views and my Justifications”. Just another way to say “things I believe in”. That was wrong!
I cannot prove that there is no God, and even if I could it would be irrational to believe in the non-existence of a Creator deity. There is proof that evolution works, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything at all in relation to religion, and even if it did, it would be irrational to believe in it. The utter lack of any form of belief is, I should think, the only true rationality.
I tend to think of this as my “anti-dogma”. A dogma is, as defined by Google, a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true. Ignoring the semantic fact that this isn’t defined by any authority that I know of, this is a set of principles defining how nothing, not even itself, should ever be thought of as incontrovertibly true. Belief is when you think that your knowledge is incontrovertibly true.
I hope you found some kind of useful information in this post.
As mentioned above, I haven’t forgotten about the C++ webserver post; however, it’s a problem with a lot of complexity that deserves a lot of thought. I initially underestimated the difficulty of the problem and am in the process of writing a server to learn more about the process of working the C-style system calls into a fast, memory-efficient, object oriented form - quite a difficult process, as you might imagine. I’ll probably write the post and publish the server sometime in January.
My friend's blogs: Wizardwatch's overall site, Sawyer's blog (the .org part bemuses me), Luke's site. If ryleu decides to actually put something on his site, I'll link it here.