I’ve noticed that when I ask someone “why do you believe X”, they often think that I’m asking them to cite sources or studies or some such. This can put people on the defensive, since we usually don’t have ready-made citations in our heads for every belief. But that’s not what I’m trying to ask; I’m really just trying to understand what process actually caused them to believe X, as a matter of historical fact. That process could be “all the podcasters I listen to take X as a given”, or “my general life experience/intuition has shown X to be true”. You’ve put this concept into words here and solidified the idea for me: that it’s helpful to communicate why you actually believe something, and let others do with that what they will.
The point about uncertainty is really interesting. I’d never realized before that if you present your conclusion first, and then the evidence for it, then it sure looks like you already had that hypothesis for some reason before getting a bunch of confirming evidence. Which implies that you have some sort of evidence/intuition that led you to the hypothesis in addition to the evidence you’re currently presenting.
I’ve wondered why I enjoy reading Scott Alexander so much, and I think that the points you bring up here are a big reason why. He explains his processes really well, and I usually end up feeling that I understand what actually caused him to believe his conclusions.
For the first thing I have been trying to shift lately to asking people to tell me the story of how they came to that belief. This is doubly useful because only a tiny fraction of the population actually has the process of belief formation explicit enough in their heads to tell me.
I really like this post for two reasons:
I’ve noticed that when I ask someone “why do you believe X”, they often think that I’m asking them to cite sources or studies or some such. This can put people on the defensive, since we usually don’t have ready-made citations in our heads for every belief. But that’s not what I’m trying to ask; I’m really just trying to understand what process actually caused them to believe X, as a matter of historical fact. That process could be “all the podcasters I listen to take X as a given”, or “my general life experience/intuition has shown X to be true”. You’ve put this concept into words here and solidified the idea for me: that it’s helpful to communicate why you actually believe something, and let others do with that what they will.
The point about uncertainty is really interesting. I’d never realized before that if you present your conclusion first, and then the evidence for it, then it sure looks like you already had that hypothesis for some reason before getting a bunch of confirming evidence. Which implies that you have some sort of evidence/intuition that led you to the hypothesis in addition to the evidence you’re currently presenting.
I’ve wondered why I enjoy reading Scott Alexander so much, and I think that the points you bring up here are a big reason why. He explains his processes really well, and I usually end up feeling that I understand what actually caused him to believe his conclusions.
For the first thing I have been trying to shift lately to asking people to tell me the story of how they came to that belief. This is doubly useful because only a tiny fraction of the population actually has the process of belief formation explicit enough in their heads to tell me.