Therefore, assuming the first few statements, having an internally consistent belief system is desirable!
I think that’s a straw man. Nobody denies that it’s advantagous to have a consistent belief system. People rather argue that consistency isn’t the only criteria on which to judge belief systems.
It pretty easy to make up a belief system that’s internally consistient but that leads to predictions about reality that are wrong.
A good example would be the problem of hidden Markov models. There are different algorithms to generate a path.
The Viterbi algorithm creates a path that internally consistent. The forward-backward algorithm creates a path that’s not necessarily internally consistent but more robust against error. In my bioinformatics class we learned that for practical problems the forward-backward algorithm is often better than the Viterbi algorithm.
Fischer Black and Myron Scholes did work that gave financial traders an internally consistent way to measure risk. Nassim Taleb argues in his books that as a result the two reduced the resilience of financial models against errors and wrecked the financial system. To many people believed in the importance of consistency and as a result bad things happened.
If someone tells me there’s global warming I’m much more interested in the question: “Is your model robust against error?” than the question “Is your model internally consistent?”
A lot of current social justice theory comes out of post-modernism which doesn’t see being consistent as the prime value to which one should aspire. Political totalitarianism which presumes that the moral values of the population should be consistent got rejected. Multiculturalism assumes that it’s good to have people with values that aren’t consistent living together.
Making progress in accomplishing goals is a desirable thing. An inconsistent belief system will generate actions that are oriented towards non-constant goals, and interfere destructively with each other, and not make much progress. A consistent belief system will generate many actions oriented towards the same goal, and so will make much progress.
If you are wrong and focus on making progress as fast as possible, that’s pretty dangerous. It’s prudent to think a bit about minizing the damage that you cause when you are wrong.
If you are the social elite and are wrong, you do damage by forcing your values onto a minority that’s right.
Often it’s more important to focus on minizing the cost of being wrong than to focus on progressing as fast as possible towards some goal.
I think that’s a straw man. Nobody denies that it’s advantagous to have a consistent belief system. People rather argue that consistency isn’t the only criteria on which to judge belief systems.
It pretty easy to make up a belief system that’s internally consistient but that leads to predictions about reality that are wrong.
A good example would be the problem of hidden Markov models. There are different algorithms to generate a path. The Viterbi algorithm creates a path that internally consistent. The forward-backward algorithm creates a path that’s not necessarily internally consistent but more robust against error. In my bioinformatics class we learned that for practical problems the forward-backward algorithm is often better than the Viterbi algorithm.
Fischer Black and Myron Scholes did work that gave financial traders an internally consistent way to measure risk. Nassim Taleb argues in his books that as a result the two reduced the resilience of financial models against errors and wrecked the financial system. To many people believed in the importance of consistency and as a result bad things happened.
If someone tells me there’s global warming I’m much more interested in the question: “Is your model robust against error?” than the question “Is your model internally consistent?”
A lot of current social justice theory comes out of post-modernism which doesn’t see being consistent as the prime value to which one should aspire. Political totalitarianism which presumes that the moral values of the population should be consistent got rejected. Multiculturalism assumes that it’s good to have people with values that aren’t consistent living together.
If you are wrong and focus on making progress as fast as possible, that’s pretty dangerous. It’s prudent to think a bit about minizing the damage that you cause when you are wrong.
If you are the social elite and are wrong, you do damage by forcing your values onto a minority that’s right.
Often it’s more important to focus on minizing the cost of being wrong than to focus on progressing as fast as possible towards some goal.