Atheist Meme of the Day: Popularity Isn't a Good Measure of Truth

Today's Atheist Meme of the Day. Pass this on; or don't; or edit it as you see fit; or make up your own. Enjoy!

"Lots of people believe it" is not a good reason for thinking something is true. Including religion. If you ask a lot of people who have never seen the Emperor, "How tall is the Emperor?", would you decide that the Emperor was probably six feet tall, simply because that's what lots of people said? Pass it on: if we say it enough times to enough people, it may get across.

Comments

[Corbin]

I'm not quite sure I like the wording of this one, Greta. I think asking people the height of the emperor is an ok source, as long as many agree on the same number, or range of numbers. Also as long as you accepted it provisionally rather than an absolute truth.

It's similar to researching on Wikipedia.

[Greta Christina]

Corbin, I think you may have missed one of the pertinent parts: "If you ask a lot of people who have never seen the Emperor..."

If none of them have ever seen the Emperor, how is their opinion about his height going to be more accurate simply because those opinions are averaged over a large sampling?

[gruntled atheist]

If "Lots of people believe it" made it true, the earth would be flat. Good meme.

[Eclectic]

...and infectious disease would be caused by unbalanced humours. And Cholera by bad smells.

[valhar2000]

And global warming would not exist, nor would there be any shortage of oil. Boy, I'll say! It really makes you wish that "lots of people believe it" were a valid measure of truth, doesn't it? But there goes the universe again, with its perverse habit of posing unsolvable problems with mutually incompatible constraints.

[Michael]

Unfortunately "lots of people believe it" is the answer for most abstract concepts created by humans - morality, justice, honor, love. How else would you answer the question "How evil is the Emperor?"

P.S. I am an atheist, though a rational look at our society makes me shiver when I think of all the things that function just because "lots of people believe them".

[Corbin]

If none of them have ever seen the Emperor, how is their opinion about his height going to be more accurate simply because those opinions are averaged over a large sampling?

Thanks for replying.

I reread the meme and I think the problem is that you're talking in absolutes and I'm not.

I agree with you that believing something to be absolutely true based only on hearsay is very flawed. However, I don't think it's necessarily wrong to provisionally accept majority opinion, depending on the topic and the triviality of it.

For example, I'd provisionally believe the majority opinion on the height of the emperor, but 100 billion people believing in God wouldn't sway me at all, not even provisionally.

[Veronique]

I am often irritated if told that 'most people would agree with me'.

So what? I don't happen to be 'most people' and usually have my own opinions about things be they important issues or frivolous ones.

I don't feel diminished just because my opinion doesn't agree with someone's idea of 'most people'.

The point is that 'most people' is not a good indicator either. It is merely someone else's raison d'etre to get agreement with his/her opinion.

[Joshua Zelinsky]

Also, there's an issue that some sorts of issues are connected to common cognitive biases. Belief in deities hits this pretty heavily. Belief in the height of an individual doesn't do that as much.

[DSimon]

The usefulness of the popularity of a belief for determining whether the belief is true rests solely on the rigor with which the group that holds that beliefs came to do so.

Or in other words; you can do the science yourself, or you can get somebody else to do the science for you, and they both work pretty well. However, guessing doesn't work very well, whether it's you doing the guessing or somebody else.

[Greta Christina]

Corbin: It's certainly true that, as a practical matter, if I don't know something, and don't have time or resources to find out for myself, I will sometimes ask a bunch of people if they know the answer. And if most or all the people I ask give the same answer, I'm likely to think that there's a good chance that it's right.

But doing that is contingent on whether the people I'm asking are likely to actually have real information on the topic -- as opposed to just completely guessing or making it up. If I want to know what kind of gas mileage a Honda Civic gets, I'll ask people who drive them -- not goat herders in Mongolia.

And believing in God -- or even thinking that the God hypothesis is plausible and deserves to be taken seriously -- simply because a lot of other people believe it is like asking goat herders in Mongolia what kind of gas mileage a Honda Civic gets. Nobody has any real information on the topic. Nobody can point to any good evidence supporting their opinion. It's all just people who have never seen the Emperor speculating on how tall he his. And as a source of information, that is no better than just me speculating on my own. Worse, in many ways -- because my cognitive biases deceive me into thinking that it actually has some authority.

[Corbin]

Greta: Then we completely agree :)