This is actually a piece about social justice.<p>As it relates to the title: basically the author doesn't understand why altruism was difficult for evolutionary biologists and game theorists to explain, and instead of learning about those fields and the questions they raised then answered, they call for an "explanatory inversion" where their own beliefs are correct by default.<p>The titular question is maybe only interesting if you've been steeping in post-modernism for too many semesters and are trying to blow some epistemic bubbles to see which way is up.
It's worth noticing that a rational mind can believe an unlimited amount of true things without needing to un-believe anything. The same is not true for non-truths. Non-truths conflict with truths and other non-truths.
Is anyone else troubled by the historical graph of global GDP? It looks to me like your typical deceptive hockey stick graph specifically design to shock the public.<p>First, GDP is a total amount, not a per-capita figure. The population has grown dramatically, so even if everyone throughout history was equally wealthy, the graph would still have the same general shape.<p>Second, even though the scale on the left side is equally divided into $20T increments; going from 0 to $20T is not the same as going from $20T to $40T. Exponential growth is required to achieve the first milestone. A mere doubling gets you to the second one.
If "Why do people believe true things?" tickles your brain, wait until you try "Why is there something rather than nothing?"<p>Especially once you go beyond the surface-level responses that try to rely on things like particle physics. It is fundamentally a philosophical question, not a science question.
This is basically just a reiteration of Hobbes (life in the natural state of man is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short".)<p>But still, it is interesting to consider that the three phenomena he talks about -- poverty, crime, and ignorance -- are now mostly thought of as aberrations from the norm that needed to be eliminated, when in fact they're the state that the vast, overwhelming majority of humans in history were born, lived and died in.<p>If you do think of the problems in the reverse way -- how do we _increase wealth_, and _increase cooperation_ and _increase knowledge, they're all become sort of the _same problem_ -- ie: how do we as a society increase the benefits of cooperation with each other? You see the problem of tackling crime not as a problem of devising the correct punishment scheme, but as devising a way such that the benefits of cooperation outweigh the benefits of free riding.
Humans probably believe in true things because lack of conception of logic would lead to cognitive retardation. It is also possible to say that it is impossible to not to believe in true things, because belief may be a definition of the truth. Finally, truth may not really be related to belief at all very directly: for example Bayesian, quantum, fuzzy logics can have somewhat strange conceptions of truth—modelling quantum phenomena gets even stranger. Yet the most interesting interpretation of truth is not, unlike many of our times would like to have believed (!!!), related to Gödel but Embeddes Agency which models the behaviour of an agent under various environments.
What more is there to say than philosophy, the social sciences, life sciences, computer science and mathematics, education and journalism schools have said about this already. Modern media culture has been well characterized since the 60s - "we are back in the acoustic space of tribal pre-literate society".
Ancient Greek's have two separate world for "knowledge": doxa and gnosis. Doxa is the practical, notional ability of doing things, gnosis is the understatement of things.<p>Today schools push doxa and try to their best to avoid gnosis and even speculation about gnosis. They form useful idiots <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef...</a> or Ford-model stereotypical workers, not acculturated citizens.<p>As a result modern society is practically ignorant as the middle-age societies, only most does not know that because they think knowledge is only doxa.
This is being dense for no reason. 'Why is there poverty? ' means 'Why is there poverty [when there could not be]?', obviously. Same with every other question they pretend to be surprised by an inverse formulation of.