The balance between risk taking and comfort

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zachadamcook
Newbie
Posts: 14
Joined: Tue Jul 25, 2017 9:33 am
Diet: Vegan

The balance between risk taking and comfort

Post by zachadamcook »

I recently posted a post called (Sun gazing the most efficient diet?) and not long after others helped me see the facts. With a topic like that the question isn't hard to answer at all, comfort over risk taking because in that situation you will go blind and receive no benefits from gazing at the sun.

Where is the line and can we tell at times? Maybe I have been blindly running into things with to much ambition and not even logic or rationalization. I find myself wanting to keep a open mind but as I learned from the previous post keeping a open mind and broadcasting it can create consequences that make the problem I am trying to solve worse. For example I was keeping a open mind to sun gazing and did little research so I could have potentially inspired someone to try such a thing and go blind when all I wanted to do was find the most efficient way of living a healthy life.


So what do you guys think, how can I balance the risk taker in me with more common sense so I can solve more problems instead of creating them. How can I stop being naive but yet keep a open mind to things? Where is the line?
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brimstoneSalad
neither stone nor salad
Posts: 10273
Joined: Wed May 28, 2014 9:20 am
Diet: Vegan

Re: The balance between risk taking and comfort

Post by brimstoneSalad »

You have to battle the Dunning Kruger effect as you learn:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

It's not an easy task; it means being skeptical of anything revolutionary you come up with, particularly when it goes against mainstream consensus. It pretty much means abandoning pursuit of the supernatural, at least until you fully understand the natural (get an undergraduate degree in physics, for example, then you might be ready to start looking beyond the known).

There's an old saying that you have to know the rules before you start breaking them. People who reject evolution or climate change, for example, do not start with an understanding of these things at all, and they only learn enough about them from other anti-science sources to confirm their biases. They can't correctly answer basic questions about how evolution or global warming work.

It is generally safe to trust consensus. Consensus isn't always right (I can give a couple examples where it's misleading or even wrong), but it is usually right, or much closer to right than you can get on your own without being an expert and spending years studying the issue. If you just trust consensus, you'll probably be right 99% of the time, and that's a lot better than the coin flip of intuition and personal theories.

Consensus in nutrition, for example, is that properly planned vegan diets are adequate for all stages of life and may offer health benefits.
Consensus (or about as close as you can get) among philosophers is that animal agriculture/eating meat is an ethical problem.
Consensus among climate scientists is that animal agriculture contributes somewhere around ~15% of global warming.

We don't need to look beyond consensus to make strong arguments for veganism, and then people arguing against these things are basically conspiracy theorists and we can refer them pretty easily to professional views.
If you want to make claims beyond consensus that takes a bit of study, and if you want to contradict consensus you have to be something near an expert in the field in terms of your knowledge and have some very strong arguments and experts to back you up.
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