no stretching necessary

I'm often miffed at the suggestion that my stance is particularly extremist. According to some critics, materialistic naturalism is an excessive interpretation of reality. It's a stretch. They submit that its overall judgment is reaching far beyond the tally of what's known and what isn't. It's displaying its own type of dogmatism: clinging too rigidly to stark principles. It's declaring a larger pattern that isn't really present.

This disagreement about who's stretching further is a useful clue about fundamental differences. It highlights the split in our assumptions about the proper neutral starting point of belief. When two stances have little overlap, the temptation is to hold up a weak mixture of the two as the obvious default, i.e. the most minimal and impartial position. Like in two-party politics, the midpoint between the two poles receives the label of "moderate center". As the poles change, the center becomes something else. I gladly admit that according to their perceived continuum of beliefs about the supernatural domain's level of activity and importance, mine lies closer to one of the clear-headed ends than to something mushier.

From my standpoint, their first mistake is imposing the wrong continuum. Applying it to me is like saying that the length of my fingernails is minuscule next to a meter stick. Although a continuum can be drawn to categorize me as having an extreme stance, the attempt doesn't deserve attention until the continuum itself is defended. It's not enough to decree that people more or less radical depending on how much their stance differs from yours. For a subjective estimation to be worth hearing, the relative basis for the estimation needs to be laid out fairly. Part of that is acknowledging the large role played by culture. Rarities in one culture might be commonplace in a second. Many times, perhaps most of the time, the customary continuum of "normal" belief isn't universal but a reflection of the setting.

The good news is that the preferable alternative isn't strange or complicated: it's the same kind of continuum of belief that works so wonderfully in myriad contexts besides this one. This kind begins with the stance that people have before they've heard of the belief. This beginning stance is perfect uncertainty about the belief's accuracy. It's at 0, neither positive nor negative.

Yet until the scales are tipped for high-quality reasons, the advisable approach is to continue thinking and acting on the likely guess that the belief isn't to be trusted. This is a superb tactic simply because unreliable beliefs are vastly cheaper to develop than reliable beliefs—the unreliable should be expected to outnumber the reliable. In the very beginning, before more is known, to make an unjustified leap to a strongly supportive stance about the belief...would be a stretch.

That's only one point of the continuum. But the rule for the rest is no more exotic: the intensity of belief corresponds to the intensity of validation. Information raises or lowers the willingness to "bet" on the belief to serve some purpose. The information accumulates, which implies that new information doesn't necessarily replace older information. Each time, it's important to ask whether the belief is significantly better at explaining information than mere statistical coincidence.

A popular term for this kind of continuum is Bayesian. Or, to borrow a favorite turn of phrase, it could be called the kind that's focused on fooling ourselves less. It's a contrast to the myth-making kind of continuum of belief in which stances are chosen based on the familiar belief's inherent appeal or its cultural dominance to each individual believer. At the core, Bayesian continua are built around the ideal of studiously not overdoing acceptance of a belief. This is why it's a futile taunt to characterize a Bayesian continuum stance as a fanatical overreach. The continuum of how alien a stance feels to someone is entirely separate. For that matter, when the stance is more unsettling largely as a result of staying strictly in line with the genuinely verified details, the reaction it provokes might be an encouraging sign that pleasing the crowd isn't its primary goal. If someone is already frequently looking down to check that they're on solid ground, they won't be disturbed by the toothless charge that they've stepped onto someone else's definition of thin ice.

The accusation has another self-defeating problem: the absolutist closed-mindedness that it's attacking isn't applicable to most people of my stance. All that's needed is to actually listen to what we say when we're politely asked. Generally we're more than willing to admit the distinction between impossible and improbable beliefs. We endorse and follow materialistic naturalism, but we simultaneously allow that it could be missing something frustratingly elusive. We could be shown that it needs to be supplemented by a secondary stance.

But by now, after a one-sided history of countless missed opportunities for supernatural stuff to make itself plain, and steadily shrinking gaps for it to be hiding in, the rationale would need to be stunningly dramatic. It would need to be something that hasn't come along yet, such as a god finally speaking distinctly to the masses of planet Earth. Corrupted texts, personal intuitions, and glory-seeking prophets don't suffice. The common caricatures of us are off-target. We aren't unmovable. We'd simply need a lot more convincing to prod us along our Bayesian continua. (The debatable exceptions are hypothetical beings defined by mutually contradictory combinations of characteristics; logic fights against the existence of these beings.)

There is a last amusing aspect of the squabble over the notion that materialistic naturalism stretches too far to obtain its conclusions. Regardless of my emphatic feelings that intermediate stances aren't the closest match to the hard-earned knowledge that's available, I'm sure that I'm not alone in preferring that more people followed these in place of some others. While I disagree that their beliefs are more plausible than mine, deists/pantheists/something-ists upset me less than the groups whose gods are said to be obsessed with interfering in human lives. I wouldn't be crushed if the single consequence of losing were more people drifting to the supposed "middle ground" of inoffensive and mostly empty supernatural concepts.

Because outside of staged two-person philosophical dialogues, it's a short-sighted strategy to argue that my stance presumes too much. It'd only succeed in flipping people from mine to the arguer's stance after they added the laughable claims that theirs somehow presumes less than mine, and that it presumes less than deism/pantheism/something-ism...

supertankers and Segways

Back when my frame of mind was incorrect yet complacent, the crucial factor wasn't impaired/lazy intelligence or a substandard education. It wasn't a lack of exposure to influences from outside the subculture. The stumbling block was an extensive set of comforting excuses and misconceptions about not sifting my own supernatural ideas very well for accuracy...combined with the nervous reluctance to do so. It was an unjustified and lax approach to the specific ideas I was clutching.

I wasn't looking, or not looking intently enough, at the ideas' supporting links. Like the springs around the edge of a trampoline, an idea's links should be part of the judgment of whether its definition is stable and sturdy under pressure. If it's hardly linked to anything substantial, or the links are tenuous, its meaningfulness deserves less credit.

This metaphor suggests a revealing consequence of the condition of the ideas' links. When the links are tight and abundant, the ideas are less likely to change frequently or radically. An idea that can be abruptly reversed, overturned, rearranged, etc. is more consistent with an idea that's poorly rooted. Perhaps its origin is mostly faddish hearsay. If it can rapidly turn like a Segway for the tiniest reason, it's not showing that it's well-connected to anything that says unchanged day by day.

However, if it turns in a new direction gradually like huge supertanker-class ships, it's showing that its many real links were firmly reinforcing its former position/orientation. Changes would require breaking or loosening the former links, or creeping slightly within the limits that the links permit. By conforming to a lengthy list of clues, an explanation places the same demands on all modifications or substitutions of it. This characteristic is what separates it from a tentative explanation. Tentativeness refers to the upfront warning that it isn't nailed down or solidified. The chances are high that it might be adjusted a lot in the near future in response to facts that are currently unknown.

Although revolutionary developments are exciting, such events call for probing reexamination of the past and maybe more than a little initial doubt. There might be a lesson about improving methods for constructing and analyzing the ideas' links. Why were the discarded ideas followed before but not now? How did that happen?

Amazing upheavals of perspective should be somewhat rare if the perspective has a sound basis. Anyone can claim to have secret or novel ideas that "change everything we thought we knew". The whole point is to specifically not grant them an easy exclusion from the interlinking nature of knowledge. Do their ideas' links to other accurate ideas—logic/proofs, data, calculations, observations, experiments, and so on—either outweigh or invalidate the links of the ideas that they're aiming to replace?

If their ideas are a swerve on the level they describe, then redirecting the bulk of corroborated beliefs ought to resemble turning a supertanker and not a Segway. Of course, this is only an expectation for the typical manner in which a massive revision takes place. It's not a wholesale rejection of the possible need for it. From time to time, the deceptive influence of appealing yet utterly wrong ideas can last and spread for a long time. So it's sensible that the eventual remedy would have an equally large scale. Paradigm shifts serve a purpose.

But they must be exceedingly well-defended to be considered. When part of an idea's introduction is "First forget all you think you know", the shrewd reaction isn't taking this unsolicited advice at face value. It's "The stuff I know is underpinned by piles and piles of confirmations and cross-checks. How exactly does your supposed revelation counter all that?" The apparent "freedom" to impulsively modify or even drop ideas implies that they were just dangling by threads or flapping in the wind to start with.