My take: “Because our cognition is unreliable, we can easily lose sight of truths we started out knowing as we walk along tempting-but-wrong garden paths, especially when strong emotions are involved.”
In other contexts this is sometimes known as “being so sharp you cut yourself.”
That’s a good moral, but to me Lewis’s quote seems to be more simply interpreted as an exhortation against successful doubt. Our thinking is certainly unreliable, but compensating for that with a fixed intention to keep believing whatever we’re currently obsessed with seems like exactly the wrong thing to do; it essentially enshrines motivated cognition as a virtue.
Having a “settled intention of continuing to believe” X shares with having a “high prior probability for” X the property that quite a lot of counterevidence can pile up before I actually start considering X unlikely.
This is not a bad thing, in and of itself.
Of course, if X happens to be false, it’s an unfortunate condition to find myself in. But if X is true, it’s a fortunate one. That just shows that it’s better to believe true things than false ones, no matter how high or low your priors or settled or indecisive your intentions.
Of course, if I start refusing to update on counterevidence at all, that’s a problem. And I agree, it’s easy to read Lewis as endorsing refusing to update on counterevidence, if only by pattern-matching to religious arguments in general.
Point taken, but Lewis wasn’t operating within a Bayesian framework. I haven’t read a lot of his apologetics, but what I remember seemed to be working through the lens of informal philosophy, where a concept is accepted or rejected as a unit based on whether or not you can think of sufficiently clever responses to all the challenges you’re aware of.
From this perspective, a “settled intention of continuing to believe” implies putting a lot more mental effort into finding clever defenses of your beliefs, and Lewis’s professed acceptance of reason implies nothing more than admitting challenges in principle. Since it’s possible to rationalize pretty much anything, this strikes me as functionally equivalent to refusing to update.
And, of course, enshrining the state of holding high priors as virtuous in itself carries its own problems.
My take: “Because our cognition is unreliable, we can easily lose sight of truths we started out knowing as we walk along tempting-but-wrong garden paths, especially when strong emotions are involved.”
In other contexts this is sometimes known as “being so sharp you cut yourself.”
That’s a good moral, but to me Lewis’s quote seems to be more simply interpreted as an exhortation against successful doubt. Our thinking is certainly unreliable, but compensating for that with a fixed intention to keep believing whatever we’re currently obsessed with seems like exactly the wrong thing to do; it essentially enshrines motivated cognition as a virtue.
Having a “settled intention of continuing to believe” X shares with having a “high prior probability for” X the property that quite a lot of counterevidence can pile up before I actually start considering X unlikely.
This is not a bad thing, in and of itself.
Of course, if X happens to be false, it’s an unfortunate condition to find myself in. But if X is true, it’s a fortunate one. That just shows that it’s better to believe true things than false ones, no matter how high or low your priors or settled or indecisive your intentions.
Of course, if I start refusing to update on counterevidence at all, that’s a problem. And I agree, it’s easy to read Lewis as endorsing refusing to update on counterevidence, if only by pattern-matching to religious arguments in general.
Point taken, but Lewis wasn’t operating within a Bayesian framework. I haven’t read a lot of his apologetics, but what I remember seemed to be working through the lens of informal philosophy, where a concept is accepted or rejected as a unit based on whether or not you can think of sufficiently clever responses to all the challenges you’re aware of.
From this perspective, a “settled intention of continuing to believe” implies putting a lot more mental effort into finding clever defenses of your beliefs, and Lewis’s professed acceptance of reason implies nothing more than admitting challenges in principle. Since it’s possible to rationalize pretty much anything, this strikes me as functionally equivalent to refusing to update.
And, of course, enshrining the state of holding high priors as virtuous in itself carries its own problems.
(nods) Mostly agreed.
You get it.