If you want to say something important it's important to define "important"
- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/important - Having relevant and crucial value.
- Some people will just not get it
- For a variety of reasons and in different places and time
- Some people will get it even if they come from very different belief systems than ours
- Some people will get what we say but will nonetheless disagree with us
- Some people will get what we say but what they get is not actually what we said
A key element in all this will be arriving at an understanding of how people come to think about things.
A useful shortcut that might help this jorney get underway may be to say that we want our ideas to be meaningful to people coming out of a great variety of belief systems.
Links of interest include:
How do we know what we know: Epistemology
Epistemology from Greek, Modern ἐπιστήμη, epistēmē, meaning 'knowledge', and -logy) is the branch of philosophy concerned with the theory of knowledge.
Epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge, justification, and the rationality of belief. Much debate in epistemology centers on four areas: (1) the philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and how it relates to such concepts as truth, belief, and justification, (2) various problems of skepticism, (3) the sources and scope of knowledge and justified belief, and (4) the criteria for knowledge and justification. Epistemology addresses such questions as: "What makes justified beliefs justified?", "What does it mean to say that we know something?", and fundamentally "How do we know that we know?"
Belief is the attitude we have whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as the truth.[1]
In epistemology, philosophers use the term "belief" to refer to personal attitudes associated with true or false ideas and concepts.
An ideology is a collection of normative beliefs and values that an individual or group holds for other than purely epistemic reasons. In other words, these rely on basic assumptions about reality that may or may not have any factual basis. The term is especially used to describe systems of ideas and ideals which form the basis of economic or political theories and resultant policies. In these there are tenuous causal links between policies and outcomes owing to the large numbers of variables available, so that many key assumptions have to be made. In political science the term is used in a descriptive sense to refer to political belief systems
What do people really want? This is not an easy question. So again we would like a shortcut. So let us see if we can identify as many types of things as possible that most populations are likely to want or need in the course of their lives. There will be games to be played here. For example, I may want a chocolate bar now but what I need in my daily life is food. The goal is to identify a reasonable number of things to discuss, probably not much more tha a few hundred types of things would be nice.
See links in: "Maximize human flourishing and minimize human suffering" in https://github.com/charmor/charmor.github.io/blob/master/notes-for-vision-for-us.md
Our thought processes must be reproducible, verifiable and forkable. Much of what we say must arise directly out of research that is documented and may be duplicated - and links to the sources of such research is always provided.
Our thoughts are likely to start out in a rough state and improve with time and many edits. The evidence of the efforts put in,the many failures along the way, the sign posts to the routes not taken should all be viewable by all readers at any time.
Links of interest