This video got a lot of baggage in the past few years, which is unfortunate since it’s an interesting video. I won’t go into that baggage because there’s more interesting things to talk about.

One big thing is you need to define belief.

I think this video only applies to objective belief. Is elemental silver silver colored? Is elemental gold gold colored? Is pure water in smaller macroscopic amounts clear? These things can have evidence to prove one way or the other. Even if the answers seem obvious it could be that the obvious answer is wrong, but an answer objectively does exist.

For a lot of subjective belief you could argue there is no method to get from evidence to belief. It’s the ought-is problem. You can taste beets the exact same as your friend, but subjectively you think they’re terrible and your friend thinks they’re delicious.

One problem with the whole thing is that morality and ethics are purely subjective beliefs. You have a set of core values that process data in such a way that you perceive the world in a certain way, informed by many things from your DNA to your life history and culture.

So from there, I’d argue that a belief that we have a moral responsibility to back up our beliefs with evidence is a subjective belief, and not necessarily one that would stand up to scrutiny.

We take a lot of things on faith. We believe that running over someone with our car would kill them even though we’ve likely never seen someone hit by a car die and we’ve probably never even seen someone die violently. We have lots of beliefs about situations that we’ve never seen happen that we probably have little to no data to actually know about. If I walk up to some random woman and slap her in the face, I believe that she won’t like it, but I have no evidence that this is the case, maybe she’s one of the substantial group of people who’s into that shit?

Besides that, there are beliefs that are beneficial regardless of whether you have evidence of them or not. If I believe that it is more beneficial to be a good person rather than believing that it doesn’t matter how you act or you should try to get away with any evil you think you can get away with, then the world gets better as a result despite that being a really hard thing to get evidence for.