You don’t – in life you pitch in with you best guesses (which, in the case of science are usually pretty good) and try to enjoy yourself.

That’s not what I’m suggesting. What I’m suggesting is that we should always have the humility to acknowledge that we could be wrong, and be prepared to change our mind when presented with good reason to do so because certaintly is fundamentally unobtainable (and would be boring in any case).

The philosophical debate about the underpinnings of science is very relevant to this., because it says that you can never confirm a theory beyond doubt (because you can’t try it out in every possible circumstance).

Where this leaves faith, is unknowable. To my mind people of faith arbitrarily adopt a belief which claims absolute certainty because of their inability to cope with a world where there are no certainties, in which their understanding might have to radically change at any time.

Now you are adding to me denial, projection, fundamental attribution error and ultimate attribution error. Lots of prejudices fulfill the role of reinforcing “I am a good person, I deserve better, other people I don’t like are bad and deserve worse, I have not been given a fair chance, they have advantages they shouldn’t”

The key is certain demographics, particularly white, male, Christians of the upper class in America have the advantages in terms of a combination of income, political power, wealth, educational opportunities, employment opportunities, in group bias favoring them and numerous statistics and studies support this but a significant number see either no advantage or think minorities have all the advantages despite a lot of social science supporting the opposite.

Sometimes people say minorities get all the good jobs and when a sociologist says show me these great jobs on a significant scale and not just as an anecdote or statistically insignificant cherry picked data point the people turn silent.

In America most powerful positions like executive, Senator, Congressman, General and on and on go to white men. In disproportionate number to their representation in the population by a lot.

I think often the emotions regarding outgroups motivate the thoughts.

I think the idea that all conclusions are tentative is a nice ideal but in reality we are not just separate from life cautiously watching. You have to act like you should eat, drink, work and so on and you have to make definite and real decisions.

I am sure you don’t qualify every decision with “now I don’t really know if I exist or anything exists but will tentatively act as if it hasn’t been falsified – yet while reserving the option to change my mind. Maybe this coffee is real or maybe not. Should I drink it ? If I exist ?”

We act like things are real, ideas are true or false and feelings are genuine because that is how we get through life.

I gave my comments on political groups because your claims that no one takes the philosopher king idea seriously is not accurate. I run into lots of people that have variations on the idea that hard work builds wealth and good character generates hard work. And that talent creates success, so they see the wealthy and their own race, gender and religion as suitable to rule and own everything.

It’s an unfortunate reality that many people adopt beliefs that include the idea their successes and those of their ingroups prove good character but the failures of other groups prove inferiority while the failures of their own groups show social causes and interference by oppressive forces.

That’s a set of biases that start with the fundamental attribution error and spreads to ingroups and outgroups bias and ends up at the ultimate attribution error.

Part of why I give information on bias so much importance is because the conscious level self evaluation “I am not biased or prejudiced, it’s someone else.” Is almost universal.

The bias blindspot in my opinion has dominion. It’s like how about 80% of drivers see themselves as above average or about 19% of Americans see themselves as in the top 1% financially.

We for whatever reason don’t accurately observe and estimate certain things and further by experiments it has been found highly resistant in some cases to change by education.

I believe regarding safe driving people with many accidents could be informed what averages for driving accidents were and that number of accidents is a way to rate driver safety. Many drivers with a lot of accidents explained they are both above average in skill and safety because THEIR accidents were caused by outside forces like weather and other drivers while assuming the accidents of others are due to low skill and unsafe habits.

I’m not arguing for meritocracy at all (and please don’t bracket me with libertarians or republicans). Just intellectual honesty, and fair play as far as far as we are capable of it.

I don’t go near political discussion groups and certainly not US ones, which are a bit of culture shock.

When I said “you can’t prove such ideas” I was going back to our previous discussion about the philosophy of Karl Popper and falsificationism.

That is: it’s logically impossible to prove anything because we can’t test every possible case. What science does instead is try to disprove its most cherished ideas. If they stand up, we can have more confidence in them. If they fall down, we can use what we have learned to build something better. We abandon ‘certainty’ in favour of slow progress towards great confidence – but never absolute proof.

I take that idea seriously, and all of my own conclusions are tentative and subject to change.

Our prejudices are often fully worked out because they serve us. For example xenophobes who hate immigrants because ‘they take their jobs’ are rationalising their own inability to find the employment they think they are entitled to.

I think your analogy lacks context. Lots of the frames we think in affect our thoughts, emotions and behavior below conscious level. Cognitive scientists acknowledge this.

Our prejudices are almost entirely subconscious. That’s relevant.

I think you have not been reading the comments at several political discussion groups. Lots of people fall for various meritocracies based ideas. There’s a whole branch of libertarian and republican ideology built on the justification that successful people are superior to unsuccessful people and deserve more wealth and political power.

And the word prove is ambiguous here. If prove only means established to some standard that is not defined then no. But that applies to everything.

If you mean look carefully and find a preponderance of evidence supports a claim or a consensus in the relevant field exists then ideas can be supported to a degree.

We can all pull out “you can’t prove that” for something we disagree with but oddly don’t use it for our own beliefs.

No one is above error – that why we have things like peer review and open discussion. I think we can get closer to the truth in such ways, despite our limitations.

I don’t claim that makes the people who inherently superior. That would be an erroneous ‘excluded middle’ kind of argument because there are all kinds of shades of grey in between.

PS again, you can’t ‘prove’ such ideas – you can only try to refute them. If you succeed, they are gone. If you repeatedly fail, you can place more confidence in them. I think nobody takes Aristotle’s ‘philosopher kings’ seriously today, except as an excellent debating point.

Then how are we having this conversation. The ideas we are exchanging are too complex for ‘autopilot’. How are they being formulated except through reflection and conscious thought?

There is a reason hat we are only only aware of a small proportion of our thought processes – because that’s the important part – the rest is ‘workings’ that we don’t have to show, and would only distract.

When you type a message into this forum, it shows you a text box, not the thousands of lines of code that go into creating it, because that’s the only part that matters. The rest can take place behind the scenes.