thank you for this! I really appreciated reading it. I would describe it in my words as, "narrow, oversimplistic, overdeterministic, procrustean assumptions about other people's beliefs are convenient, dehumanizing, dispiriting" – and likely to set off a cycle of conflict"
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circling back to the QT'd thread – I think scrutiny, second-guessing, thought-experimenting, devil's-advocating, flipping, reversing, doubting, etc can all be super healthy to do introspectively if you can be playful about it – but doing it with someone else requires their buy-in
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and doing it AT someone, ABOUT someone, etc – is absolutely toxic behavior. I guess the lines blur with public figures, but even there I think it's good to be tentative, acknowledge uncertainty, and be clear that any hypothesizing we do always reveals more about us than them
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I think additionally you’re talking about two different kinds of belief. V is talking about factual beliefs - what facts you believe make up the reality of the world you live in such as “women experience XYZ” and that which facts you are presented with can be a matter of comfort
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Tri, you seem to be talking about beliefs in the sense of Values - what we think the world should be like. Not facts as such, but imperatives to act upon, and how these may not be the same as we thought they would be when push comes to shove
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I think V can be right when he says: the facts about the world we are presented with are sometimes tailored to what is convenient for us, our beliefs can be "purely convenient" rather than the most accurate reflection of reality as we often think they are
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Tri, you seem to be talking about something else completely to me: a discrepancy between the values we think or say we hold, and the ones we actually hold. These are also called ‘beliefs’ but aren’t empirically testable. Compare ‘grass is green’ to ‘grass should be green’
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Both beliefs about what actually is (fact based) and beliefs about what should be (value based) are called beliefs. But saying "not all grass is green" (fb) isn’t contradicted by "all grass should be green"(vb) - you could believe both after all
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Vi wasn’t saying our value-beliefs change purely based on what is convenient (which sometimes they do, but like you point out, sometimes they don’t) he’s saying that our factual-beliefs, and what facts we have been allowed to uncover, have been changed based on convenience
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I wasn't just responding to Visa, though. Part of the point was that these things conflate in people's minds, as in your example here.
I could have been more technical, but I was less interested in the technical distinction between e.g. beliefs/values, more in social dynamics.
So I wasn't speaking to whether or not something is a belief, a value proposition or whathaveya, but whether or not people cynically box *all* these things into a packaging that reads "signalling, status games etc."
Not Visa, but I know some Visa-adjacent people w/that habit.
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In the broadest sense, I think we can even discard all of the content and just ask: is the description the beginning of exploration, or the end of it? I try to be the former, and/but I do encounter an unfortunate # of the latter