The first thing is to realize that you don’t have even the irrational belief, because if the map is wrong, it’s worse than useless. You should regress to the prior, accept not knowing the answer, but at the same time being careful about “you either win the lottery or lose, hence equal odds” fallacy (it’s “privileging the hypothesis” lingering even after you remove a given hypothesis from dominance). Incidentally, it’s rarely a mistake to let go of your beliefs: if they are correct, reality will imprint them back.
I think I understand you. Let me repeat what you said with my words and see if I get it:
An irrational belief is damaging. It is better to hold no belief and regress to the “I don’t know” state of assigning probabilities to outcomes.
Unfortunately, “privileging the hypothesis” is pulling an “article I should have read by now” tag from my memory. Apparently I should go read an article. :)
The followup question I have is how do I act when I cannot find an alternative hypothesis? In other words, I have an irrational belief and I have to use that area of the map. “Do nothing,” is an action. Should I just insert that an hope for the best? What if “Do nothing” is the rational belief? Act randomly? And so on so forth.
My point here can be boiled down to this: Beliefs fuel actions. Actions are expected from reality. Better beliefs produce better actions. What happens when I have no belief or only irrational beliefs when deciding how to act? Assume there is no time for further introspection or fact-finding.
The second-best guess after the disabled known-irrational solution is often more interesting than “do nothing”. On the other hand, “do nothing”, when it’s the way to go, may be hard to accept for a number of reasons (it can be seen as a signal of not caring, or of excessive loyalty to your position of disbelieving). This is a dangerous pressure, one that can push you to accept a different dogma in place of the discarded one just to fill the gap.
Soft reminder: This is just theory-chat and it has nothing to do with me or my post.
Part of the problem is that some maps don’t keep track of second-best solutions. Namely, a common irrational behavior is to chuck everything that doesn’t match or adhere to principal dogma. The problem is not so much that there needs to be a way to choose a second-best. The problem is what happens when there is no second best.
This is a dangerous pressure, one that can push you to accept a different dogma in place of the discarded one just to fill the gap.
I am unable to parse, “This”. What are you referring to? As in, what is a dangerous pressure?
The pressure to “do something”, in particular to accept a system of beliefs that promotes a particular “something”, when for all you know you should just “stay there”.
I think I understand you. Let me repeat what you said with my words and see if I get it:
An irrational belief is damaging. It is better to hold no belief and regress to the “I don’t know” state of assigning probabilities to outcomes.
Unfortunately, “privileging the hypothesis” is pulling an “article I should have read by now” tag from my memory. Apparently I should go read an article. :)
The followup question I have is how do I act when I cannot find an alternative hypothesis? In other words, I have an irrational belief and I have to use that area of the map. “Do nothing,” is an action. Should I just insert that an hope for the best? What if “Do nothing” is the rational belief? Act randomly? And so on so forth.
My point here can be boiled down to this: Beliefs fuel actions. Actions are expected from reality. Better beliefs produce better actions. What happens when I have no belief or only irrational beliefs when deciding how to act? Assume there is no time for further introspection or fact-finding.
The second-best guess after the disabled known-irrational solution is often more interesting than “do nothing”. On the other hand, “do nothing”, when it’s the way to go, may be hard to accept for a number of reasons (it can be seen as a signal of not caring, or of excessive loyalty to your position of disbelieving). This is a dangerous pressure, one that can push you to accept a different dogma in place of the discarded one just to fill the gap.
Soft reminder: This is just theory-chat and it has nothing to do with me or my post.
Part of the problem is that some maps don’t keep track of second-best solutions. Namely, a common irrational behavior is to chuck everything that doesn’t match or adhere to principal dogma. The problem is not so much that there needs to be a way to choose a second-best. The problem is what happens when there is no second best.
I am unable to parse, “This”. What are you referring to? As in, what is a dangerous pressure?
The pressure to “do something”, in particular to accept a system of beliefs that promotes a particular “something”, when for all you know you should just “stay there”.
Ah, gotcha. That makes sense.