I’m not sure that lack of noticing effects like this is an indication that they aren’t there.
I’m aware of the possibility, and I have also mentioned it in the facebook debate. Or, more likely, I have problems finding the right words to express what I want to say:
I had situations where I didn’t know something, when I forgot things, when I believed an information that was wrong, etc. Lots of them. Still doing it. Most likely will always do.
In the past (before finding LW) I have repeatedly experimented with belief in belief (because I wanted the placebo effects or social approval), but those experiments were always half-assed and very short-termed; they felt incompatible with my personality. I couldn’t stop being aware that I am merely acting.
I also fail a lot at instrumental rationality. I am aware of what I should do… and I somehow just don’t do it.
But I don’t remember having a situation where I enjoyed being wrong or didn’t care about being wrong, like described here and here. That just feels completely strange to me. I have problem empathising with people who, upon learning that they were wrong, just don’t give a fuck.
Therefore—that’s why I mentioned it in the debate—I have no clue about what to tell them to help them change their ways. I have never been there (as far as I know), and I have no idea what it feels like to be there. So I have no model that would help me test which ideas might be attractive enough to draw a person out of there.
EDIT: I feel like I should add so many disclaimers here. I am happy that at least Gleb understands what I was trying to say.
Of course there are reasons when you want to keep a map despite knowing it is not correct. When it is a useful simplification, like Newtonian physics. I am talking about people whose maps are not even approximately correct, but they still keep them because… I am only guessing here… they still provide emotional comfort.
I don’t feel comfortable with having an obviously wrong map, even if it would be socially approved. I have problem belonging to most groups, because sooner or later there is a shared group map you have to accept. For example, having a political opinion (in the sense of: completely buying a standardized map) feels like insanity; on the same level as belonging to a cult. (I am strongly sympathetic to the libertarian ethics of not initiating force. That doesn’t convince me that the best way to organize a society is to dismantle all states and let the warlords fight it out in the “free market”.)
There may also be unlucky situations where I am wrong, other people are right, but they lack the right words to convince me (sometimes because they themselves believe the right thing for the wrong reasons, e.g. because it is a standard belief in their social group). But I don’t have an epistemic strategy for avoiding such situations without making things worse on average; or course believing everything wouldn’t be an improvement.
Viliam, I indeed do understand what you’re saying. Having a belief that I know is wrong is anathema to me.
But I think you and I, and probably many Less Wrongers, are on the far end of the spectrum of having a strong emotional valuation of having true beliefs, and there are so many people who give much less of a fuck about that than we do. Moreover, they have a strong emotional value of being attached to their beliefs.
That’s why the project of spreading rationality is hard—only a small subset of the population has that strong intuitive value. This is why I’m posting about this here about the challenge I run into with Intentional Insights—how do we expand that subset through equipping those who want to learn the truth with the emotional tools they need to do so.
As a very rough intuitive model, we could divide people into three rationality stages:
R0 -- does not care about having true beliefs
R1 -- cares about having true beliefs, but does not know the rationality techniques
R2 -- cares about having true beliefs and knows the rationality techniques
I can imagine moving people from R1 to R2. More or less, you give then the Sequences to read, and connect them with the rationalist community. At least that is what worked for me. No idea about R0 though, and they happen to be a vast majority of the population.
(There is even the technical problem of how to most effectively find R1 people in the general population. Is there a better method than making a website and hopind that they will find it?)
Another problem is that if we succeed to make LW-style rationality more popular, we will inevitably get another group growing:
R3 -- does not care about having true beliefs, but learned about the rationality techniques and keywords, and uses them selectively
I think “cares / does not care about having true beliefs” is too coarse: the actual question is, in which domains do people care about true beliefs?
Most people care about having true beliefs when it actually lets them achieve things. Few parents would prefer a false belief that their child is safe, to the true belief that their child is in danger, if the true belief allowed them to get the child out of danger. The issue is just that when we talk about things like evolution or religion, it genuinely does not matter what your beliefs are, or if it does, “false” beliefs often allow you to achieve things better.
Think of beliefs as tools. People will care about having the right tool if they couldn’t get the job done otherwise, but if the wrong tool still lets them get something done, they don’t care. Except for some weird “rationalist” guys who insist that you should have the right tools for their own sake, because there’s a theoretical chance that having the wrong tool for some problem might cause you trouble, perhaps.
If it helps, think of it as physicist/mathematician thing. A physicist might calculate something using a way that’s not quite correct and would drive the mathematician up a wall. While the physicist is like, hey, my result and method are good enough to do the job I care about, so so what if I never proved all of my assumptions.
If you want to get people to actually care and think about the truth in more domains, you need to give them habits of thought that do that in one domain, and see if it’d transfer to some other domain. E.g. this is the approach that CFAR settled on:
...the sea change that occurred in our thinking might be summarized as the shift from, “Epistemic rationality is about whole units that are about answering factual questions” to there being a truth element that appears in many skills, a point where you would like your System 1 or System 2 to see some particular fact as true, or figure out what is true, or resolve an argument about what will happen next.
We used to think of Comfort Zone Expansion[6] as being about desensitization. We would today think of it as being about, for example, correcting your System 1′s anticipation of what happens when you talk to strangers.
We used to think of Urge Propagation[6] as being about applying behaviorist conditioning techniques to yourself. Today we teach a very different technique under the same name; a technique that is about dialoging with your affective brain until system 1 and system 2 acquire a common causal model of > whether task X will in fact help with the things you most care about.
We thought of Turbocharging[6] as being about instrumental techniques for acquiring skills quickly through practice. Today we would also frame it as, “Suppose you didn’t know you were supposed to be ‘Learning Spanish’. What would an outside-ish view say about what skill you might be practicing? Is it filling in blank lines in workbooks?”
We were quite cheered when we tried entirely eliminating the Bayes unit and found that we could identify a dependency in other, clearly practical, units that wanted to call on the ability to look for evidence or identify evidence.
Our Focused Grit and Hard Decisions units are entirely “epistemic”—they are straight out just about acquiring more accurate models of the world. But they don’t feel like the old “curse of epistemic rationality” units, because they begin with an actual felt System 1 need (“what shall I do when I graduate?” or similar), and they stay in contact with System 1′s reasoning process all the way through.
When we were organizing the UK workshop at the end of 2014, there was a moment where we had the sudden realization, “Hey, maybe almost all of our curriculum is secretly epistemic rationality and we can organize it into ‘Epistemic Rationality for the Planning Brain’ on day 1 and ‘Epistemic Rationality for the Affective Brain’ on day 2, and this makes our curriculum so much denser that we’ll have room for the Hamming Question on day 3.” This didn’t work as well in practice as it did in our heads (though it still went over okay) but we think this just means that the process of our digesting this insight is ongoing.
We have hopes of making a lot of progress here in 2015. It feels like we’re back on track to teaching epistemic rationality—in ways where it’s forced by need to usefully tackle life problems, not because we tacked it on. And this in turn feels like we’re back on track toward teaching that important thing we wanted to teach, the one with strategic implications containing most of CFAR’s expected future value.
I have never met anybody who has changed their reasoning first and their habits second. You change your habits first. This is a behavioral conditioning problem largely unrelated to the logical structure and content of the behavior. Once you’ve done that, you learn the new conscious analysis and synthesis patterns.
This is why I would never attempt to debate a literal creationist. If forced to attempt to convert one, I’d try to get them to learn innocuous habits whose effectiveness depends on evolutionary principles (the simplest thing I can think of is A/B testing; once you learn that they work, and then understand how and why they work, you’re on a slippery slope towards understanding things like genetic algorithms, and from there to an appreciation of the power of evolutionary processes).
People come to consider beliefs true if those beliefs work in giving them rewards. This is similarly the case for meta-beliefs, like “having true beliefs is important”—people come to believe that true beliefs are important if they frequently work for acquiring more accurate beliefs, and this lets them perform better. If you want to make people to adopt that metabelief, come up with habits that explicitly cause them to acquire more true beliefs, and which also help them forward, and get them to adopt those habits.
Most people care about having true beliefs when it actually lets them achieve things.
Here I have a general feeling that any true belief may be useful in the future, and any false belief may be harmful in the future. I feel the world as connected. (As a most obvious example, a belief in supernatural in any area implies a belief in supernatural in general, which in turn influences all areas of life.)
Maybe “the world is connected” is one of the unspoken premises for rationality. If you don’t have it, any rationality technique will be merely something you use inside the lab.
(Of course, not everything is equally likely to be useful, so I try to get more info in some areas and ignore other areas. But I would still feel bad about making false beliefs even in the less important areas. If I don’t feel certain about my knowledge somewhere, and don’t have time to improve the knowledge, I update to “don’t know”.)
Nice typology! Let’s dive into this a little deeper.
I agree that we can’t do anything with R0.
I think many people belong to R1, but there is a huge spectrum along which they place a value on having true beliefs. At the far end of the spectrum are people like you and I, and I think most Less Wrongers, before we learned about rationality—we already cared a lot about having true beliefs. For us, giving us the Sequences, and connecting with the rationalist community, was sufficient. We can call people like that R1.999, to indicate that maybe 1 out of a 1000 people is like that. That’s a rough Fermi Estimate, and I may be optimistic (I have a personal optimism bias issue), but let’s go with that for the sake of the discussion.
Now what about the people who range from R1.001 to R1.998? This is the whole point of the Intentional Insights project—how do we move these people further up the sanity waterline spectrum? The challenge is that these people’s emotional intuitions do not line up with truth-seeking. So to get them into rational thinking, we need to increase their positive emotions around rational thinking, decrease their negative emotions about letting go of their current beliefs, and even before that bring rationality to their attention.
To do so, we at InIn do several things:
1) Increase the emotional intuitive valuation they place on rational thinking. To do so, here are active steps we are taking: making engaging videos and blogs that say “yay rational thinking, you should have warm fuzzies around it and value it emotionally to reach your own goals.”
2) Decrease the negative emotions they have around letting go of their past beliefs. That’s been a challenge, and one of the reasons I wrote this discussion post. I listed above some things that worked for us. We also write blogs highlighting people’s personal stories about updating their beliefs, to make this appear more doable and cognitively easy.
3) Getting this information to people’s attention. The way we do this is through out website, through collaborating with a wide variety of reason-oriented groups, and through publishing articles and doing interviews in prominent media venues.
So those encompass the what I think it takes to move R1 to R2. I also agree about the dangers of R3, which is why it’s important to get people into a community with more advanced rationalists, otherwise they might just remain half a rationalist.
I doubt there can literally be someone who “does not care about having true beliefs.” No matter how false and irrational someone’s beliefs are, he still wants those beliefs to be true, so he still wants true beliefs. What happens is this:
Some people want to believe the truth. Position X seems likely to be true. So they want to believe X.
Other people want to believe X. If X is true, that would be a reason to believe it. So they want X to be true.
The first people will be in your categories R1 and R2. The second people will be in your category R0, in the sense that what is basically motivating them is the desire to believe a concrete position, not the desire to believe the truth. But they also have the desire to believe the truth. It is just weaker than their desire to believe X.
But as you say, if someone wants something more than the truth, he wants that more than the truth. No argument is necessarily going to change his desires.
In the past (before finding LW) I have repeatedly experimented with belief in belief (because I wanted the placebo effects or social approval), but those experiments were always half-assed and very short-termed; they felt incompatible with my personality. I couldn’t stop being aware that I am merely acting.
Normal people don’t experiment with belief in belief. They just have it.
Slaves could not own property, but their masters often let them save up to purchase their freedom,[97] and records survive of slaves operating businesses by themselves, making only a fixed tax-payment to their masters.
Normal people don’t experiment with belief in belief. They just have it.
Yes… and I envied them. :D
I suspect that if there is a parallel universe where I got religious, the proper strategy was to find a sufficiently intelligent clever arguer (someone like Chesterton, but with 50 more IQ points), or more likely, a group of Chesterton-level clever arguers I could spend a lot of time with, and thus have a social proof for their rationalizations. (Something like Dark CFAR.)
If I wanted to make someone religious I would give them experiences that aren’t easily reconciled with their previous world view and then provide a religious belief system that can explain those experiences.
It’s not easy to sustain being an atheist when you have a vision of Jesus rising from the cross.
It not that hard to theoretically accept that the human mind can produce visions at random but it’s another issue not to take one’s own experience too seriously.
A few times I got a reaction like: “I don’t want to hear your facts!” which I translated as: “If there is a part of reality that doesn’t match my map, I don’t want to know about that part.”
The part “your facts” is already weird. As if saying that different people live in different realities, and I don’t want my reality to become contaminated by your reality (which could happen if I start to observe your reality too close or under your guidance). But of course we are talking about maps here. So basicly “your facts” means: “There is only my map and your map, and I am not interested in your map.” So it’s not like I don’t want my map to correspond to the territory, but rather like there is no territory that could judge my map and find it wanting. There are only maps, and of course your map is going to differ from my map, but if you insist on me looking at your map, that is merely an aggression, a status move.
(I can even see how our educational system contributes to this feeling that it’s maps all the way down. Most of what happens in schools is students copying the teachers’ maps. But I digress.)
EDIT: Another example, maybe better. There are people who love to tell “their opinions” on theory of relativity, quantum physics, evolution, whatever. But if you suggest thay they read a textbook, or a popular science book on the topic, to fix at least their most obvious misconceptions, they proudly refuse. They prefer their original bullshit interpretation, even if there is an option to fix the obvious mistakes and improve their bullshit to make it more credible (which IMHO should be preferable even for people who like their own bullshit theories).
As if saying that different people live in different realities, and I don’t want my reality to become contaminated by your reality (which could happen if I start to observe your reality too close or under your guidance). But of course we are talking about maps here.
There are various new agey people who would disagree with you on that.
But if you suggest thay they read a textbook, or a popular science book on the topic, to fix at least their most obvious misconceptions, they proudly refuse.
Most people don’t read textbooks. A sizeable portion of people doesn’t even read any books once they left school.
If you disagree with a religious person and they tell you that you just have to read the bible or another religious book and then you would understand, that likely wouldn’t be enough either to get you to read the book.
Yes, and in fact telling someone, “I disagree with you but I don’t have time to explain why, read this book to discover the truth,” will often come across as being arrogant, since the person doesn’t want to spend a lot of time explaining things, but he wants the other person to spend a lot of time reading a book.
A few times I got a reaction like: “I don’t want to hear your facts!”
I think that’s more a case of people becoming jaded from constantly being presented with “facts” that are false or at least highly misleading backed by arguments too clever for them to refute.
I think that’s more a case of people becoming jaded from constantly being presented with “facts” that are false or at least highly misleading backed by arguments too clever for them to refute.
I’m sure that you will never be guilty of such a presentation.
I very much did have those interactions, especially with religious people about religion. They specifically denied truth/reason as having any value, and specifically oriented to faith as the thing one must have.
Truth and reason are not the same thing. If you believe that the truth is that god works in mysterious ways that aren’t decipherable by humans reason loses it’s value.
Sure, I agree that truth and reason are not the same thing. I meant to indicate that I heard both types of comments, and often together, from religious people—that the truth as determined by science, reason, and logic do not have value in comparison to personal felt experience.
Yup, I hear you. I think this is a matter of semantics—I am using the word truth as it is generally understood on Less Wrong, meaning the truth of reality as indicated by concrete sensory experience, the closer to the senses, the better.
I think the question of whether someone wants to have correct beliefs is quite distinct from whether they believe that reason is a method that’s useful for finding the truth.
I think it’s probably impossible not to care at all whether your beliefs are true, but some people care a lot more than others. And I have had a number of people who told me to “forget about arguments” because I came to a conclusion that they didn’t want me to believe.
That is not caring about truth in an effective sense, even if strictly speaking they still want their beliefs to be true, and in that sense they care about the truth of their beliefs.
I am talking about people whose maps are not even approximately correct, but they still keep them because… I am only guessing here… they still provide emotional comfort.
Two points. First, a very important word here is “matters”. A lot of maps don’t matter. If I believe that there are adepts meditating in secret caves in Tibet and they have direct access to the the Akashic records and so can see into the future and into the past—so what? Does that affect my life in any way? (note, by the way, the difference between “could matter” and “does matter”).
Second, an incorrect map is also known as “fiction”. That makes for an interesting connection to the parallel thread about the use{full|less}ness of fiction.
I enjoy fiction. Also, when I talk e.g. with religious people, I imagine that we are all talking about some imaginary world; then it doesn’t bother me that their arguments do not apply to our world. I can discuss Bible the same way I can discuss Tolkien, and sometimes it’s fun. Only when people remind me that they actually believe the elves are real, it gets weird.
Your first example… that’s also in the weird territory. I could enjoy it as a fiction. I don’t see any other use for it. -- Is it just an aesthetic difference?
I’m aware of the possibility, and I have also mentioned it in the facebook debate. Or, more likely, I have problems finding the right words to express what I want to say:
I had situations where I didn’t know something, when I forgot things, when I believed an information that was wrong, etc. Lots of them. Still doing it. Most likely will always do.
In the past (before finding LW) I have repeatedly experimented with belief in belief (because I wanted the placebo effects or social approval), but those experiments were always half-assed and very short-termed; they felt incompatible with my personality. I couldn’t stop being aware that I am merely acting.
I also fail a lot at instrumental rationality. I am aware of what I should do… and I somehow just don’t do it.
But I don’t remember having a situation where I enjoyed being wrong or didn’t care about being wrong, like described here and here. That just feels completely strange to me. I have problem empathising with people who, upon learning that they were wrong, just don’t give a fuck.
Therefore—that’s why I mentioned it in the debate—I have no clue about what to tell them to help them change their ways. I have never been there (as far as I know), and I have no idea what it feels like to be there. So I have no model that would help me test which ideas might be attractive enough to draw a person out of there.
EDIT: I feel like I should add so many disclaimers here. I am happy that at least Gleb understands what I was trying to say.
Of course there are reasons when you want to keep a map despite knowing it is not correct. When it is a useful simplification, like Newtonian physics. I am talking about people whose maps are not even approximately correct, but they still keep them because… I am only guessing here… they still provide emotional comfort.
I don’t feel comfortable with having an obviously wrong map, even if it would be socially approved. I have problem belonging to most groups, because sooner or later there is a shared group map you have to accept. For example, having a political opinion (in the sense of: completely buying a standardized map) feels like insanity; on the same level as belonging to a cult. (I am strongly sympathetic to the libertarian ethics of not initiating force. That doesn’t convince me that the best way to organize a society is to dismantle all states and let the warlords fight it out in the “free market”.)
There may also be unlucky situations where I am wrong, other people are right, but they lack the right words to convince me (sometimes because they themselves believe the right thing for the wrong reasons, e.g. because it is a standard belief in their social group). But I don’t have an epistemic strategy for avoiding such situations without making things worse on average; or course believing everything wouldn’t be an improvement.
Etc.
Viliam, I indeed do understand what you’re saying. Having a belief that I know is wrong is anathema to me.
But I think you and I, and probably many Less Wrongers, are on the far end of the spectrum of having a strong emotional valuation of having true beliefs, and there are so many people who give much less of a fuck about that than we do. Moreover, they have a strong emotional value of being attached to their beliefs.
That’s why the project of spreading rationality is hard—only a small subset of the population has that strong intuitive value. This is why I’m posting about this here about the challenge I run into with Intentional Insights—how do we expand that subset through equipping those who want to learn the truth with the emotional tools they need to do so.
As a very rough intuitive model, we could divide people into three rationality stages:
R0 -- does not care about having true beliefs
R1 -- cares about having true beliefs, but does not know the rationality techniques
R2 -- cares about having true beliefs and knows the rationality techniques
I can imagine moving people from R1 to R2. More or less, you give then the Sequences to read, and connect them with the rationalist community. At least that is what worked for me. No idea about R0 though, and they happen to be a vast majority of the population.
(There is even the technical problem of how to most effectively find R1 people in the general population. Is there a better method than making a website and hopind that they will find it?)
Another problem is that if we succeed to make LW-style rationality more popular, we will inevitably get another group growing:
R3 -- does not care about having true beliefs, but learned about the rationality techniques and keywords, and uses them selectively
I think “cares / does not care about having true beliefs” is too coarse: the actual question is, in which domains do people care about true beliefs?
Most people care about having true beliefs when it actually lets them achieve things. Few parents would prefer a false belief that their child is safe, to the true belief that their child is in danger, if the true belief allowed them to get the child out of danger. The issue is just that when we talk about things like evolution or religion, it genuinely does not matter what your beliefs are, or if it does, “false” beliefs often allow you to achieve things better.
Think of beliefs as tools. People will care about having the right tool if they couldn’t get the job done otherwise, but if the wrong tool still lets them get something done, they don’t care. Except for some weird “rationalist” guys who insist that you should have the right tools for their own sake, because there’s a theoretical chance that having the wrong tool for some problem might cause you trouble, perhaps.
If it helps, think of it as physicist/mathematician thing. A physicist might calculate something using a way that’s not quite correct and would drive the mathematician up a wall. While the physicist is like, hey, my result and method are good enough to do the job I care about, so so what if I never proved all of my assumptions.
If you want to get people to actually care and think about the truth in more domains, you need to give them habits of thought that do that in one domain, and see if it’d transfer to some other domain. E.g. this is the approach that CFAR settled on:
Similarly Venkat:
People come to consider beliefs true if those beliefs work in giving them rewards. This is similarly the case for meta-beliefs, like “having true beliefs is important”—people come to believe that true beliefs are important if they frequently work for acquiring more accurate beliefs, and this lets them perform better. If you want to make people to adopt that metabelief, come up with habits that explicitly cause them to acquire more true beliefs, and which also help them forward, and get them to adopt those habits.
Here I have a general feeling that any true belief may be useful in the future, and any false belief may be harmful in the future. I feel the world as connected. (As a most obvious example, a belief in supernatural in any area implies a belief in supernatural in general, which in turn influences all areas of life.)
Maybe “the world is connected” is one of the unspoken premises for rationality. If you don’t have it, any rationality technique will be merely something you use inside the lab.
(Of course, not everything is equally likely to be useful, so I try to get more info in some areas and ignore other areas. But I would still feel bad about making false beliefs even in the less important areas. If I don’t feel certain about my knowledge somewhere, and don’t have time to improve the knowledge, I update to “don’t know”.)
Nice typology! Let’s dive into this a little deeper.
I agree that we can’t do anything with R0.
I think many people belong to R1, but there is a huge spectrum along which they place a value on having true beliefs. At the far end of the spectrum are people like you and I, and I think most Less Wrongers, before we learned about rationality—we already cared a lot about having true beliefs. For us, giving us the Sequences, and connecting with the rationalist community, was sufficient. We can call people like that R1.999, to indicate that maybe 1 out of a 1000 people is like that. That’s a rough Fermi Estimate, and I may be optimistic (I have a personal optimism bias issue), but let’s go with that for the sake of the discussion.
Now what about the people who range from R1.001 to R1.998? This is the whole point of the Intentional Insights project—how do we move these people further up the sanity waterline spectrum? The challenge is that these people’s emotional intuitions do not line up with truth-seeking. So to get them into rational thinking, we need to increase their positive emotions around rational thinking, decrease their negative emotions about letting go of their current beliefs, and even before that bring rationality to their attention.
To do so, we at InIn do several things:
1) Increase the emotional intuitive valuation they place on rational thinking. To do so, here are active steps we are taking: making engaging videos and blogs that say “yay rational thinking, you should have warm fuzzies around it and value it emotionally to reach your own goals.”
2) Decrease the negative emotions they have around letting go of their past beliefs. That’s been a challenge, and one of the reasons I wrote this discussion post. I listed above some things that worked for us. We also write blogs highlighting people’s personal stories about updating their beliefs, to make this appear more doable and cognitively easy.
3) Getting this information to people’s attention. The way we do this is through out website, through collaborating with a wide variety of reason-oriented groups, and through publishing articles and doing interviews in prominent media venues.
So those encompass the what I think it takes to move R1 to R2. I also agree about the dangers of R3, which is why it’s important to get people into a community with more advanced rationalists, otherwise they might just remain half a rationalist.
I doubt there can literally be someone who “does not care about having true beliefs.” No matter how false and irrational someone’s beliefs are, he still wants those beliefs to be true, so he still wants true beliefs. What happens is this:
Some people want to believe the truth. Position X seems likely to be true. So they want to believe X.
Other people want to believe X. If X is true, that would be a reason to believe it. So they want X to be true.
The first people will be in your categories R1 and R2. The second people will be in your category R0, in the sense that what is basically motivating them is the desire to believe a concrete position, not the desire to believe the truth. But they also have the desire to believe the truth. It is just weaker than their desire to believe X.
But as you say, if someone wants something more than the truth, he wants that more than the truth. No argument is necessarily going to change his desires.
Normal people don’t experiment with belief in belief. They just have it.
Wikipedia writes for Athenian slaves:
Yes… and I envied them. :D
I suspect that if there is a parallel universe where I got religious, the proper strategy was to find a sufficiently intelligent clever arguer (someone like Chesterton, but with 50 more IQ points), or more likely, a group of Chesterton-level clever arguers I could spend a lot of time with, and thus have a social proof for their rationalizations. (Something like Dark CFAR.)
If I wanted to make someone religious I would give them experiences that aren’t easily reconciled with their previous world view and then provide a religious belief system that can explain those experiences.
It’s not easy to sustain being an atheist when you have a vision of Jesus rising from the cross. It not that hard to theoretically accept that the human mind can produce visions at random but it’s another issue not to take one’s own experience too seriously.
Did you have 1-on-1 interaction with people where you believe that didn’t care at all about whether their beliefs are true?
A few times I got a reaction like: “I don’t want to hear your facts!” which I translated as: “If there is a part of reality that doesn’t match my map, I don’t want to know about that part.”
The part “your facts” is already weird. As if saying that different people live in different realities, and I don’t want my reality to become contaminated by your reality (which could happen if I start to observe your reality too close or under your guidance). But of course we are talking about maps here. So basicly “your facts” means: “There is only my map and your map, and I am not interested in your map.” So it’s not like I don’t want my map to correspond to the territory, but rather like there is no territory that could judge my map and find it wanting. There are only maps, and of course your map is going to differ from my map, but if you insist on me looking at your map, that is merely an aggression, a status move.
(I can even see how our educational system contributes to this feeling that it’s maps all the way down. Most of what happens in schools is students copying the teachers’ maps. But I digress.)
EDIT: Another example, maybe better. There are people who love to tell “their opinions” on theory of relativity, quantum physics, evolution, whatever. But if you suggest thay they read a textbook, or a popular science book on the topic, to fix at least their most obvious misconceptions, they proudly refuse. They prefer their original bullshit interpretation, even if there is an option to fix the obvious mistakes and improve their bullshit to make it more credible (which IMHO should be preferable even for people who like their own bullshit theories).
There are various new agey people who would disagree with you on that.
Most people don’t read textbooks. A sizeable portion of people doesn’t even read any books once they left school.
If you disagree with a religious person and they tell you that you just have to read the bible or another religious book and then you would understand, that likely wouldn’t be enough either to get you to read the book.
Yes, and in fact telling someone, “I disagree with you but I don’t have time to explain why, read this book to discover the truth,” will often come across as being arrogant, since the person doesn’t want to spend a lot of time explaining things, but he wants the other person to spend a lot of time reading a book.
I think that’s more a case of people becoming jaded from constantly being presented with “facts” that are false or at least highly misleading backed by arguments too clever for them to refute.
I’m sure that you will never be guilty of such a presentation.
I very much did have those interactions, especially with religious people about religion. They specifically denied truth/reason as having any value, and specifically oriented to faith as the thing one must have.
Truth and reason are not the same thing. If you believe that the truth is that god works in mysterious ways that aren’t decipherable by humans reason loses it’s value.
Sure, I agree that truth and reason are not the same thing. I meant to indicate that I heard both types of comments, and often together, from religious people—that the truth as determined by science, reason, and logic do not have value in comparison to personal felt experience.
I think most of those people consider personal felt experience to show the truth.
Yup, I hear you. I think this is a matter of semantics—I am using the word truth as it is generally understood on Less Wrong, meaning the truth of reality as indicated by concrete sensory experience, the closer to the senses, the better.
I think the question of whether someone wants to have correct beliefs is quite distinct from whether they believe that reason is a method that’s useful for finding the truth.
Yes, I agree that these are distinct things.
I think it’s probably impossible not to care at all whether your beliefs are true, but some people care a lot more than others. And I have had a number of people who told me to “forget about arguments” because I came to a conclusion that they didn’t want me to believe.
That is not caring about truth in an effective sense, even if strictly speaking they still want their beliefs to be true, and in that sense they care about the truth of their beliefs.
Two points. First, a very important word here is “matters”. A lot of maps don’t matter. If I believe that there are adepts meditating in secret caves in Tibet and they have direct access to the the Akashic records and so can see into the future and into the past—so what? Does that affect my life in any way? (note, by the way, the difference between “could matter” and “does matter”).
Second, an incorrect map is also known as “fiction”. That makes for an interesting connection to the parallel thread about the use{full|less}ness of fiction.
I enjoy fiction. Also, when I talk e.g. with religious people, I imagine that we are all talking about some imaginary world; then it doesn’t bother me that their arguments do not apply to our world. I can discuss Bible the same way I can discuss Tolkien, and sometimes it’s fun. Only when people remind me that they actually believe the elves are real, it gets weird.
Your first example… that’s also in the weird territory. I could enjoy it as a fiction. I don’t see any other use for it. -- Is it just an aesthetic difference?