Holding something to be true means you can do deductive inference on it and ignore the cases where it is untrue.
Again, I am uneasy with the mixing of “belief” language an “probability” language in one and the same sentence, perhaps because I’m only recently delving into probability theory and the two are not yet well integrated.
If probabilities are quantities between 0 and 1, but never either of these extremes—such that everything is a “level of uncertainty”—we can never use “belief” in the sense of ignoring or rejecting the complement entirely. (And even though: for things I’m really sure of, I tend to use “I know” rather than “I believe”.)
Based on an incomplete examination of my own writing (email archives of the past year or so), I use the phrase “I believe” to express conclusions I have provisionally reached but that new evidence could invalidate. (I use the phrase “I don’t believe” much more rarely, and so I can say that in none of my emails for the past ten years does the phrase appear with the meaning “I don’t believe in X”. Of course, per my earlier statement about modals, I don’t expect that my beliefs will actually be expressed using the phrase “I believe”.)
In that sense, “I believe” does have to do with deductions; my beliefs are the conclusions I judge to be plausible enough based on the evidence that they are worth following through to further conclusions. If I believe Brian will be at the conference in August, then I may email Brian to plan a meeting at the conference. If I believe probability theory is a useful tool, I therefore believe I should learn more about probability theory.
Do you normally think through the consequences of sending an email to Brian if he doesn’t happen to be going to the conference?
More than you might think. Warning: irrelevancies ahead.
I’m an introvert, i.e. I tend to only reach out to people after some agonizing over whether it’s the right thing to do. My default attitude is to clam up. Sometimes it’s hellish: I pass someone on the street, I smile and say hi, they fail to acknowledge me, and I spend the rest of the day in a blue funk over either a) what some stranger is thinking of me now or b) having suffered rejection.
Yes, it’s a fucked-up way to be. You learn to adjust. :)
But you get the point I was trying to make? A more extreme example is you don’t think through the possibility that turning on your bathroom tap might cause a negative singularity (due to it causing a unusual mixture of bacteria that have sex and form a self-aware gene network capable of creating novel regulatory pathways and recursive self improvement).
That possibility doesn’t cross your mind, and probably shouldn’t when making decisions about turning on taps. You X that turning on your tap won’t cause a singularity. I want a word for X. Believe seems to be tainted.
“I’m confident” seems a good antonym of “I worry”. I’m confident that turning on the tap is safe for humanity. I have reasonable expectations of getting water when I turn on the tap (though these are sometimes violated).
The tap example is reminiscent of the blue tentacle line in Technical Explanation. Riffing on that, beliefs perhaps correspond to scenarios you construct without really thinking about it, plausible extrapolations from actual knowledge.
I’m finding this exchange quite interesting.
Again, I am uneasy with the mixing of “belief” language an “probability” language in one and the same sentence, perhaps because I’m only recently delving into probability theory and the two are not yet well integrated.
If probabilities are quantities between 0 and 1, but never either of these extremes—such that everything is a “level of uncertainty”—we can never use “belief” in the sense of ignoring or rejecting the complement entirely. (And even though: for things I’m really sure of, I tend to use “I know” rather than “I believe”.)
Based on an incomplete examination of my own writing (email archives of the past year or so), I use the phrase “I believe” to express conclusions I have provisionally reached but that new evidence could invalidate. (I use the phrase “I don’t believe” much more rarely, and so I can say that in none of my emails for the past ten years does the phrase appear with the meaning “I don’t believe in X”. Of course, per my earlier statement about modals, I don’t expect that my beliefs will actually be expressed using the phrase “I believe”.)
In that sense, “I believe” does have to do with deductions; my beliefs are the conclusions I judge to be plausible enough based on the evidence that they are worth following through to further conclusions. If I believe Brian will be at the conference in August, then I may email Brian to plan a meeting at the conference. If I believe probability theory is a useful tool, I therefore believe I should learn more about probability theory.
I’m starting to feel like we should probably chuck out our current language for dealing with states of knowledge and start over.
For example how does
mean we should be assessing the pay-offs of various actions? How much evidence should we expect to tip the scales in the other direction?
Do you normally think through the consequences of sending an email to Brian if he doesn’t happen to be going to the conference?
More than you might think. Warning: irrelevancies ahead.
I’m an introvert, i.e. I tend to only reach out to people after some agonizing over whether it’s the right thing to do. My default attitude is to clam up. Sometimes it’s hellish: I pass someone on the street, I smile and say hi, they fail to acknowledge me, and I spend the rest of the day in a blue funk over either a) what some stranger is thinking of me now or b) having suffered rejection.
Yes, it’s a fucked-up way to be. You learn to adjust. :)
But you get the point I was trying to make? A more extreme example is you don’t think through the possibility that turning on your bathroom tap might cause a negative singularity (due to it causing a unusual mixture of bacteria that have sex and form a self-aware gene network capable of creating novel regulatory pathways and recursive self improvement).
That possibility doesn’t cross your mind, and probably shouldn’t when making decisions about turning on taps. You X that turning on your tap won’t cause a singularity. I want a word for X. Believe seems to be tainted.
Yes, I think I get your point.
“I’m confident” seems a good antonym of “I worry”. I’m confident that turning on the tap is safe for humanity. I have reasonable expectations of getting water when I turn on the tap (though these are sometimes violated).
The tap example is reminiscent of the blue tentacle line in Technical Explanation. Riffing on that, beliefs perhaps correspond to scenarios you construct without really thinking about it, plausible extrapolations from actual knowledge.