Holding unpopular but true opinions
Allow me to preface what will be a short post by saying that an unpopular opinion is not true because it is unpopular. It is true because it is true. Popular opinions are often held because they are true. There are topics where we do not have enough information to come to the correct belief on and there are some that are too complex to parse. Then there are others that we simply don’t have an excuse to be wrong about. The information is there and the complexity isn’t so high. Here are our collective blind spots that allow us to collectively believe things that we should know better than to believe.
What concerns me more than people collectively believing the wrong thing is the sense of angst and self-doubt that naturally skeptical and critically thinking people feel when they hold a justified but unpopular belief. You feel like your ability to interpret facts may be compromised. After all, you’re not just saying X is true. You’re saying that X is true and you were able to figure out X is true while hundreds of million of others believe Y. The sort of people who this situation doesn’t bother are the same sort of people who are likely the believe unpopular untruths, such as nonsense conspiracy theories. However, by virtue of becoming confident of your unpopular but true belief, you feel you may be one of those people who believes unpopular untruths, returning you to self-doubt.
It’s a difficult thing to balance. What it comes back to is you must forget what everyone else believes. You should forget about the consequences or implications of a belief being true. You should look at the evidence for a belief objectively. Realistically, you should figure out who are the best proxies for valid beliefs. When it comes to rejecting belief in God, being aware that 90% percent of the members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, whose job it is to rigorously examine the world and understand it, do not believe in God can be reassuring, for instance. Likewise, for other beliefs you can find proxies that are similarly helpful, although those beliefs you rely on proxies for holding should of course be more tentative than ones where you fully understand the underlying evidence and reasoning for the belief or rejection of belief.
In the meantime, don’t let others beliefs concern you. All you can do is try to be honest with yourself and honest with others. Truth is the endgame, so even if you’re wrong the worst case is that you’ll have made your best effort to get things right.
