Quote:
Originally posted by Radar
I think the real question you're asking is whether I have the intellectual honesty to change my opinion on a topic when presented with a decent enough argument and enough irrefutable facts to back it up. The answer is absolutely yes. It doesn't happen as often as it did when I was younger because my education and experience are much more vast. In fact there are very few people on earth with a more complete knowledge of the constitution than myself including most supreme court justices as is evident from their violations of the Constitution as it is written.
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That's exactly what I'm asking, and your answer is really very interesting.
Perhaps this shift in your error ratio has more to do with the fact
(*) that you've stopped actively questioning your beliefs because of the confidence your education has given you. Maybe it's not so much that you stopped being wrong, but that you stopped asking yourself if you were wrong. Could this be the case?
It certainly seems logical that complete knowledge would bring about 100% accuracy on a given topic, but I ask you, how can you be 100% sure of your beliefs? How can anyone be 100% sure?
Also, there's a word we've been bandying about quite a bit lately, and none of us seem to agree on what objects match up to this word. That word is 'fact'. Usually, it's described as a 'cold, hard fact'. This gives it that extra push into 110% certainty. It's not a very useful concept, though, when one party is 110% sure of it's certainty, and the other party is 0-20% sure. I'd go so far as to say that it makes the concept basically useless.
What is a fact? What methods are you using to determine it? How do you know when something's a fact, and how do you know when it's only an opinion? What's the difference between the two? What are your standards of proof?
* - this is just an expression