Lots of people call stuff they dont like "delusional belief systems" while ignoring the truths, even if nuggets, behind those systems...

But don’t confuse that tendency with the idea that there are no delusional belief systems.

Oh of course, wasn't saying that at all. It's just that I have noticed an uptick in using this kind of phrasing when trying to dismiss other positions on things as a version of the "thought terminating cliche". Not trying to say there are no delusion belief systems.

That said, the bar should be very high for calling other peoples beliefs as such. I disagree with lots of people on lots of things, but one of the things I've learned is that by approaching topics with such a judgemental, holier-than-though attitude, one puts on blinders to truly understanding a persons position, and more importantly, how they got there. The power of empathy is strong in giving the brain more information to work with, but the power of harsh judgement is that it stifles the flow of information prematurely.

> and more importantly, how they got there

That's the most important part, isn't it? Beliefs of humans are path-dependent. Nobody can perfectly rationally re-evaluate all evidence they've encountered and compute a belief to hold. We always start with a belief, and adjust it over time. Some more eagerly than others, some more correctly than others, but it's always an additive shift. Integration of evidence, if you like. That's why when I see someone believing something that's clearly (to me) absurd, I'm mostly interested in how did they get there - something must have convinced them, and I found it useful to discover what it was, because often it's a piece of real evidence I haven't encountered before.

> Beliefs of humans are path-dependent.

Thats such simple yet profound statement to me. Thank you for the response, it has definitely given me something to ponder. Ugg. Now I'm imagine companies/govs doing path dependent profiling of people for their minority report-esque systems.

I don't know man?

People don't like, a lot of things, they don't call them delusional. We call things delusional because they are, in fact, delusional. What makes it dangerous is that people deeply believe that their delusions are "truth". Belief to the point of fundamentalism, where they will kill non-believers in their delusions.

Both obviously happen. The “delusional” label is used (rightly) to dismiss certain claims, but then of course people use the same label incorrectly when attempting to dismiss claims they don’t like.

Naturally you can’t refute the claim that your stated belief there is delusional.

Sure you can. You can provide explanation of why your claim is not delusional.

Averages are one kind of truth though, and if your worldview is based on averages it has some amount of accuracy to it. The trick is that there are more averages than just the mean, such as standard deviation, so to have a correct view you must care about all averages.

> Averages are one kind of truth though, and if your worldview is based on averages it has some amount of accuracy to it.

I think that is a fallacy. Just because some standpoint is in between two other standpoints, does not make it correct. Each side might look at some facts from a different perspective and might be correct but at the same time contradicting (at least at the first glance), but the 'average' could still be wrong.

Here is the way I think of it, if a cylinder passed through two perpendicular planes, flatlanders living on those two planes, with different perspectives on life, might call each other to discuss their observations. One flatlander might report the observation of a circle, while the other might say they saw a rectangle. Both have observed part of the truth, but different parts of it, and to a flatlander it may seem these observations are irreconcilable. A third flatlander who decides to simply average the observations together into a rounded rectangle is more wrong than either of the others. The key to resolving the apparent contradiction is recognizing that the truth exists in a dimensional space higher than the flatlander is capable of perceiving.

Well what I'm claiming is not that averages can be used to arrive at all truth, or to observe all things. Many things however are distributions and averages can be accurately used to characterize them in a way that works. In that example, one might say that the mean viewpoint is correct within the error bars that encompass the two observations, which could be quite large if they are opposite observations.

Sounds like you two are saying nearly the exact same thing, using different words.