[slumdev]

> In general, if lots of people feel a certain way, and your conclusion is completely contradictory, you should assume you’re wrong until strong evidence says otherwise.

This is a useful heuristic for becoming popular but not for making moral decisions. It is the worst possible approach to forming one's conscience.

> You’re essentially assuming you know better than everyone.

You're assuming everyone else formed a reasoned opinion rather than following the loudest existing herd.

[tjs8rj]

In general, people are about as intelligent as you, and at least the same order of magnitude. People are prone to trends as much as the market is, but the market of ideas tends to be somewhat efficient (not least because all profits from financial to business to psychic stem from people and their expectations). So the conclusion that everyone is wrong requires serious burden of proof. Doesn’t mean you can’t be contradictory and correct, it just means that’s unlikely. You can beat the market, but usually you won’t without good evidence

This is less true with morals, unless you’re a relativist.

[dragonwriter]

> In general, people are about as intelligent as you, and at least the same order of magnitude.

> This is less true with morals, unless you’re a relativist.

Even assuming moral absolutism is valid, that very much depends on what measure you choose to apply to values that, even if they are naturally quantifiable (which I doubt for morality, even one assumes it is absolute), clearly have no obvious natural ratio-level measure, making orders of magnitude and other ratio-dependent comparisons entirely arbitrary.

[slumdev]

Statistically, without any other data, about half of the people will be smarter than I am, and half of them won't. How can I be sure that I chose the right half to follow, especially if we're assuming that I'm average?

Regardless, I still hold that following the herd is a recipe for disaster. It is a form of the Just World Fallacy.