“I believe that people are nicer than they really are.” That part made me ponder. Because, actually, it’s something I believe, too. So I froze for a while, and looked at that belief. Do I have Escher loops in my belief networks ? Well, maybe, I’m far from being a perfect bayesian, but I can’t allow myself to stop here.
My first justification for that thought was : I don’t refer to the same thing in the two parts of the sentence. A bit like “sound” can refer to acoustic vibrations, or to a perception, and if you switch from one to the other into the same sentence, you can make a sentence that seems self-contradicting but is still valid.
People is a vast group. Nice or not is a characteristic of a person. So, to attribute “niceness” to people in general, you’ve to make an aggregate value. There are many ways to make an aggregate value, for example, mean and median. So that sentence could mean something like “I believe the median people to be nicer than the average people” (implying a minority of very un-nice people who drive the average backward, but don’t change the median).
But then I thought “Hey, stop. You’re trying to find excuses here. That’s not really what you meant with that sentence, or you would have said it clearly. Don’t find yourself excuses, just face the fact you were doing knots with your believes.”
So I tried to dig where this knot could came from. And I think I found it, and it’s linked to the first excuse, but not as simple. The problem comes from the fact that I use different algorithms to evaluate the niceness of a single person I’m interacting with (be it a friend/family, or just a passerby asking me “what time is it ?”) and to evaluate the overall nicest of “people” in general.
When I evaluate niceness of people in general, I think about the horrors of history, about the Milgram experiment, about the crimes the news love to report about, the scary statistics about the number of husbands who hit their wives, … And also about the “heroes”, those who did risk their lives to hide unknown Jews during WW2, those who did run in a house of fire to save their neighbor. That gives me a mitigated image of people in general, neither very nice nor very un-nice, able of the best and of the worst.
When I evaluate niceness in one single person interacting with me, I tend more to recall my own interactions with individual persons. And in those, I had a few bad memories (like being assaulted to steal my money and cell phone once) but mostly good memories, be it by luck or by selective memory, most of the interactions with others I can remember were mostly positive. So when I interact with a new individual person, I assume there is a huge chance of that person being “nice”, even if I have a more mitigated view of humans in general.
That probably comes from deeper, evolutionnary psychology reasons : the individual your interact with are your tribe, they are friendly. People in general are other tribes, not so friendly. But I’m not well versed enough into evolutionnary psychology to go further on that line. But anyway that’s, I think, where the contradiction comes from. It may be partly justified by the fact that the median is higher the average, if it really is (which I’ve no factual evidence of, only a vague feeling). But it mostly comes from just using to different algorithms, which should, in a well-calibrated brain, lead to the same result, but which for many reasons (all the biases, imperfect knowledge, …) just don’t.
“I believe the median people to be nicer than the average people”
But if you’d actually meant this you’d have just said “The median people are nicer than the average people”. Saying “I believe the median people to be nicer than the average people” would indicate that you didn’t believe it but did believe you believed it.
But if you’d actually meant this you’d have just said “The median people are nicer than the average people”. Saying “I believe the median people to be nicer than the average people” would indicate that you didn’t believe it but did believe you believed it.
I don’t quite agree there. Saying “I believe the median people to be nicer than the average people” indicates that you believe that you believe it but it doesn’t indicate that you don’t actually believe it. You could say it is neutral with respect to whether or not you actually believe it but not that it indicates outright that you don’t.
I disagree. In general, saying “I believe x” is evidence that you believe x, and therefore cannot be evidence that you do not believe x. I would be interested to see evidence that people usually use “I believe x” in such a way that it can be taken as evidence that one does not believe x.
I believe that people usually use “I believe x” instead of “x” in cases where they want to stress the possibility, however small, that they are wrong. Usual caveats for religious and “I believe in” statements, as well as unrelated senses of ‘believe’, apply.
Yes, that distinction definitely applies to me. Usually when I say “X” it means “I believe X with almost certainty” and when I say “I believe X” indicates that there is some doubt still, maybe a 90% confidence, but not a 99% confidence.
But in that specific case, as Misha said, I didn’t need to actually believe it—it was a belief in belief in my chain of thoughts, an attempt to rationalize the initial mistake, that appeared, with further analysis, to not be the real cause of it. Having this as a real belief or not wouldn’t change the reasoning.
But then I thought “Hey, stop. You’re trying to find excuses here. That’s not really what you meant with that sentence, or you would have said it clearly. Don’t find yourself excuses, just face the fact you were doing knots with your believes.”
(while we’re on the subject, the plural of belief is “beliefs”, contrary to all reason)
“I believe that people are nicer than they really are.” That part made me ponder. Because, actually, it’s something I believe, too. So I froze for a while, and looked at that belief. Do I have Escher loops in my belief networks ? Well, maybe, I’m far from being a perfect bayesian, but I can’t allow myself to stop here.
My first justification for that thought was : I don’t refer to the same thing in the two parts of the sentence. A bit like “sound” can refer to acoustic vibrations, or to a perception, and if you switch from one to the other into the same sentence, you can make a sentence that seems self-contradicting but is still valid.
People is a vast group. Nice or not is a characteristic of a person. So, to attribute “niceness” to people in general, you’ve to make an aggregate value. There are many ways to make an aggregate value, for example, mean and median. So that sentence could mean something like “I believe the median people to be nicer than the average people” (implying a minority of very un-nice people who drive the average backward, but don’t change the median).
But then I thought “Hey, stop. You’re trying to find excuses here. That’s not really what you meant with that sentence, or you would have said it clearly. Don’t find yourself excuses, just face the fact you were doing knots with your believes.”
So I tried to dig where this knot could came from. And I think I found it, and it’s linked to the first excuse, but not as simple. The problem comes from the fact that I use different algorithms to evaluate the niceness of a single person I’m interacting with (be it a friend/family, or just a passerby asking me “what time is it ?”) and to evaluate the overall nicest of “people” in general.
When I evaluate niceness of people in general, I think about the horrors of history, about the Milgram experiment, about the crimes the news love to report about, the scary statistics about the number of husbands who hit their wives, … And also about the “heroes”, those who did risk their lives to hide unknown Jews during WW2, those who did run in a house of fire to save their neighbor. That gives me a mitigated image of people in general, neither very nice nor very un-nice, able of the best and of the worst.
When I evaluate niceness in one single person interacting with me, I tend more to recall my own interactions with individual persons. And in those, I had a few bad memories (like being assaulted to steal my money and cell phone once) but mostly good memories, be it by luck or by selective memory, most of the interactions with others I can remember were mostly positive. So when I interact with a new individual person, I assume there is a huge chance of that person being “nice”, even if I have a more mitigated view of humans in general.
That probably comes from deeper, evolutionnary psychology reasons : the individual your interact with are your tribe, they are friendly. People in general are other tribes, not so friendly. But I’m not well versed enough into evolutionnary psychology to go further on that line. But anyway that’s, I think, where the contradiction comes from. It may be partly justified by the fact that the median is higher the average, if it really is (which I’ve no factual evidence of, only a vague feeling). But it mostly comes from just using to different algorithms, which should, in a well-calibrated brain, lead to the same result, but which for many reasons (all the biases, imperfect knowledge, …) just don’t.
But if you’d actually meant this you’d have just said “The median people are nicer than the average people”. Saying “I believe the median people to be nicer than the average people” would indicate that you didn’t believe it but did believe you believed it.
I don’t quite agree there. Saying “I believe the median people to be nicer than the average people” indicates that you believe that you believe it but it doesn’t indicate that you don’t actually believe it. You could say it is neutral with respect to whether or not you actually believe it but not that it indicates outright that you don’t.
Indeed, but it does hint that you don’t actually believe it, otherwise you would have said the simpler thing.
I disagree. In general, saying “I believe x” is evidence that you believe x, and therefore cannot be evidence that you do not believe x. I would be interested to see evidence that people usually use “I believe x” in such a way that it can be taken as evidence that one does not believe x.
I believe that people usually use “I believe x” instead of “x” in cases where they want to stress the possibility, however small, that they are wrong. Usual caveats for religious and “I believe in” statements, as well as unrelated senses of ‘believe’, apply.
Yes, that distinction definitely applies to me. Usually when I say “X” it means “I believe X with almost certainty” and when I say “I believe X” indicates that there is some doubt still, maybe a 90% confidence, but not a 99% confidence.
But in that specific case, as Misha said, I didn’t need to actually believe it—it was a belief in belief in my chain of thoughts, an attempt to rationalize the initial mistake, that appeared, with further analysis, to not be the real cause of it. Having this as a real belief or not wouldn’t change the reasoning.
And this is, in fact, part of kilobug’s point.
(while we’re on the subject, the plural of belief is “beliefs”, contrary to all reason)