Sometimes you can believe the right thing for the wrong reason.

the end doesnt justify the means... greater good mindset is scary.

It's dangerous to encourage people to believe false things (or quietly fail to correct false beliefs) if they lead to correct conclusions though. Such strategies may work in the short term, but the world is chaotic, and generally a wrong-but-helpful belief today will become a wrong-and-harmful belief tomorrow.

We learned this with the whole 2020-era attempt to try to convince people that covid is not airborne so that people would not hoard masks and leave them for emergency staff. It ended up leading to really harmful misconceptions that are still persisting.

creating and destroying; flying cars, roc.camera, july.rocks

I’ve made a cast a while back about whether being right for the wrong reasons —a Gettier problem— qualifies as being truly right.

My SOLH is that we need to stop listening to people whose correct predictions turn out to be entirely coincidental, while they demonstrably didn’t understand the underlying drivers

Philosophy

If I predict rain tomorrow based on satellite and radar imagery showing a cold front forming, and it does rain, I’m right.

If I predict rain because I saw a black cat walk under a ladder, and it rains, am I right (but for the wrong reasons) or am I just wrong?

Can one ever be right for the wrong reasons?

Gettier problems! One of my favorite class of epistemological failures (along with the free pass given to moral luck, and the tolerance of “little follies”, i.e. seemingly innocuous superstitious beliefs)

Aviator, diver, Etherean, nexialist, PhD in aviation ∩ climate science | Host of /diving /ethfinance /eth-staker /geopolitics /science /singapore /thomas

Indeed! I mentioned moral luck without being aware of “resulting”, but it sounds adjacent if not similar.

Speed on your way home, and if nothing happens, society might view you as just being another bad driver. Maybe you’ll get a stern talking to or a ticket if you get caught.

Speed on your way home and run over a kid, and you’ll be a despised criminal for the rest of your life. You’ll likely see the inside of a prison cell.

In both scenarios, the initial decision to speed was the same. The outcome was only dictated by chance. Yet we treat the perpetrators differently

Gettier problems pair nicely with Annie Duke's "resulting", which is when a decision gets judged as good or bad based on the results

Resulting makes it much harder to know what's good advice in modern domains. When you have millions of entrepreneurs & investors making path-dependent bets, hard to tell whose success was the result of chance

Gettier problems! One of my favorite class of epistemological failures (along with the free pass given to moral luck, and the tolerance of “little follies”, i.e. seemingly innocuous superstitious beliefs)

https://warpcast.com/aviationdoctor.eth/0x63ab01cb

https://warpcast.com/aviationdoctor.eth/0x7f35e5b8

Building /fc-africa while being the greatest GYM CHAD you’ve ever seen. p.s eggs are the secret to life. /muscle /ftc

Great illustration that applies to all of life.  Reminds me of concepts from the book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow".  

In years of following you I've never responded to a post but I really appreciate your logical and rational mindset in what you put forward.  Keep up the amazing work @vitalik.eth !!

As an Indian with Maths background this cringes me so hard 🫠

It's like someone makes excuse to be right

An argument can have a true conclusion but still be unsound.  

A basic fact from syllogisms and the source of many fallacies.

Whole geometry lessons during my school time were about it 
You always could know exact answer but couldn't prove it

Yes, it's not just about being right. How we reach our conclusions matters. Good thinking habits and sound reasoning are crucial, especially when we're dealing with complex issues where we can't always immediately verify if we're correct.

I'd say it illustrates the burden of unnecessary complexities in design we usually face in web3. Experimentally-wise it's ok, but long term scalable deployments shouldn't be based on concrete building blocks.