A lot of folks seem to be interpreting my heuristic is if it were a hard and fast rule here. Thats not what a heuristic is.

A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows for quick decisions based on "most likely" outcomes. Its a statistical tool.

In my case I said it should be enough of an indicator for you to double check your work, not that you were automatically wrong. I stand by that.

That said, you're getting into epistemology now, and its important to differentiate between the observed facts and the biased interpetation of them.

I mentioned before that reproducibility in this way is important to science, and the reason it works with science is that we decouple the observation from the interpetation.

When most people observe that 2+2=4 and you get 5 it is likely that you're wrong. You should invest the time to double check your work.

If 50% of the world then tortures that observation through convoluted and error filled reasoning until they can interpret it to mean magic sky daddy wants you to let the priest touch your special no-no place you should ignore them.

Observed reality being in agreement is a much more reliable heuristic than agreement of interpretation, which is often filled with bias.

> They said the happiness is "decoupled from truth", which isn't ideal if we care about objective health of a society...

Happiness is an emotion. Imagine if I'd claimed society should only be allowed to feel lust on Tuesdays. This is no different. You are allowed to feel however you'd like to feel whenever you'd like to feel it.

Making up arbitrary rules about when you're "allowed " or "deserve" to feel good will make you miserable, and you don't have the right to tell the rest of us we have to abide by your misery making emotion rules.

You might consider asking yourself where this idea that you must meet specific prerequisites before being allowed to feel specific feelings came from, and then seriously considering whether it has merit, or if it even actually works.

Are you also restricting when you're "allowed" to feel negative emotions? How does that work? Are you really able to just... not be sad if you dont deserve it? Do you always feel happy when you DO deserve it?

I think the Protestant ethos is soo deeply embedded in you that you might not even know its there.