Why you should hold your beliefs at arm’s length

by Ian Pollock

http://www.republic.org.uk/

[Today we feature a guest post by long-time Rationally Speaking reader and commenter Ian Pollock. Ian is a graduate engineer from Canada, with philosophical inclinations. He likes arguing a bit too much for his own good (his own words). Ian’s interests are too numerous to list, but many tend to involve the application of rationality to daily life: for example, to akrasia, ethics, diet & exercise; as well as to those age-old existential questions (“Is there any real purpose to my life? How can I be made of mere atoms?”) that tend to come up whenever we’re feeling contemplative (or hypoglycemic). Ian has an abiding love for well-crafted puzzles, both natural and manmade.]

“If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.”

(Paul Graham)

Let’s start with politics.

I know somebody who knows somebody who is a monarchist. No really, that’s what he is. He even introduces himself that way, I’m told: “Hi, I’m Carl (or whatever his name is) the Monarchist.”

Now although I’m certain that Carl is a barrel of laughs on social occasions, I think he’s making a big mistake — not about the Commonwealth monarchy (I’m favorably disposed to it myself for largely aesthetic reasons*), but about what kinds of things belong in a description of “Carl” as a person. Less importantly for most people, but perhaps more importantly for the typical reader of this blog, he is setting himself up for some serious extra cognitive blind spots on a wide range of topics.

There are quite a few problems with Carl’s situation:

To begin with, by thinking of this opinion as a characteristic of his person, he is ensuring that criticisms of that opinion will feel like malicious personal attacks on him. I have experienced this from the inside (in my youth as an armchair Trotskyite), and seen similar tendencies in many true believers I’m acquainted with. Eventually, criticism of the idea comes to have a nasty emotional impact similar to criticism of, say, personal appearance.

Relatedly, by committing to this view in public, Carl is ensuring that changing his mind will be maximally difficult and embarrassing. We change our minds less often than we think, and part of the reason is that, socially speaking, it takes a lot out of us to admit to being wrong.

(As an aside, this has huge implications for effective communication between people who disagree. For example, try to treat both your own beliefs and those of others as external to the person altogether. A simple change of phrasing from “I think you’re incorrect” to “I think this idea is incorrect” may make the difference between defensiveness and honest appraisal. On a personal level, I find it useful to think of beliefs as maps that I take out of an imaginary glove compartment.)

The third reason that Carl is wrong to call himself a monarchist (and why I think people oughtn’t to call themselves liberals, conservatives, libertarians, environmentalists or whatever) is that human brains are very leaky contraptions, and one corollary of this is that initially descriptive ideas tend to drift in the direction of prescriptivity (hence, inter alia, the naturalistic fallacy). Let’s say you notice, as a fact about yourself, that you favor low taxes and a generally small government on ethical and practical grounds. You look in a dictionary and, lo and behold, that is a big part of the definition of “conservative.” Out come the phonemes: “I am a conservative.” Aren’t words great?

What you will probably not notice, however, is that increasingly when you don’t know what you think about some issue yet (say, your country’s stance on foreign affairs), you will take your cue from other self-identified conservatives, as opposed to thinking it through yourself and then describing your conclusion in political terminology. The normative self-definition has staged its coup d’etat. Whatever “conservatives” think, that is going to be your opinion. Of course, when I put it that way, it looks ridiculous. But from the inside, this process feels perfectly rational — like wisely throwing your lot in with a really smart group of people.

The hasty allegiances formed by the drift to normativity have a further drawback, in that they tend to make progress towards specific goals difficult. The political landscape is a skew coordinate system. In other words, you can never move along a single axis without simultaneously moving along others. Want to support the only party that is currently serious about climate change? Well, be my guest, as long as you don’t mind their economic protectionism. Want to combat protectionism by supporting the opposing party? By all means, as long as you’re all right with “family values.” And what, pray tell, does sexual bigotry have to do with free trade economics? Why exactly is that a package deal? Search me. Apparently it’s somehow distantly related to where two varieties of wig-wearing aristocrats sat during the French Revolution.**

To be clear, I am not advocating disengagement from politics. Rather, I suggest we should take a piecemeal approach to political issues, avoiding an excessive focus on their historical relations with each other.

So much for politics. To be fair, at least when you define yourself in political terms, you are making a sort of ethical statement about yourself, which makes some sense in terms of personal identity.

What is even worse is self-definition in terms of empirical matters, or more broadly, propositions about the world that are either true or false (this includes some philosophical questions, though of course the boundary is pretty porous).

Let’s say I have some proper belief about a particular fact question, like “nuclear fusion will be a commercially viable energy source in 30 years or less.” Say I give this proposition subjective odds of 3:1 in favor (75% probability).

There are a lot of things I might want to do with this belief, like invest in technologies for separating deuterium from seawater, or refrain from getting a career in the coal industry. One thing I should NOT want to do is wake up early in the morning on a Sunday and solemnly proclaim the glorious imminence of fusion power. Another thing that I should NOT want to do is wear a t-shirt with a stylized red F on it, and go around calling myself a “fusionist” or some such thing.

Oh yeah. Feel those anvils.

The problem with calling yourself an “atheist” is not that the proposition itself is wrong. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a proposition more overdetermined by philosophical and scientific lines of evidence than this one: that all the creator beings humans have ever dreamt up are laughably improbable (if they even rise to the level of being coherent).

Rather, the problems with such a self-definition are as follows:

(1) You will probably develop “person with a hammer” syndrome, wherein every problem you see looks like a nail, or in this case a jihadi. Realistically, although religious belief is a big problem, it is not anything remotely like the biggest problem. If you flipped a switch and everybody on earth became an atheist, we would still retain most of our problems.

(Arguably, a mass deconversion could actually be a bad or at least neutral thing, if there were no concomitant understanding of rationality in general, or of how ethics, meaning, emotion and subjectivity are supposed to fit into a determined and purely physical universe. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing — just ask the atheists who are now nihilists as well, or the people who think Young’s double-slit experiment proves that We Are All One Consciousness, Man.)

Also, (2) Why do we care? What interesting thing does this tell us about you, other than your stance on one rather silly proposition? What DO you actually believe in, apart from not being a theist?

It would be different if you had said “I’m a rationalist” or “I’m a mysterian” or whatever. These refer to interesting tendencies in philosophical thought — tendencies whose consequences are far-reaching indeed. As an aside, note that although being a rationalist should (I claim) result in very low subjective probabilities for creator beings, the term refers to the process by which such claims are to be considered — it doesn’t hard-code specific claims into its definition. Thank goodness.

(3) In general, it’s bad practice to allow propositions — even very certain ones — into your self-definition. Reasons for this were discussed above: among other things, it makes changing your mind nearly impossible, as well as socially costly. Yes yes, I know you won’t need to change your mind on this question. But are you really so good at judging which propositions are near-certain, and which aren’t? If you say “odds of 99:1 against” on 100 separate occasions, you won’t be wrong more than once or twice... right?

(4) It’s (probably) nothing to be proud of. If you grew up in a truly religious household or community, with unapologetic brainwashing and social seclusion along religious lines, then yes, you should be proud to have found your way through all those obstacles to the truth. If, however (like me) your parents gave you a measure of intellectual freedom, and your society does too, then you should be no more proud of your atheism than a middle-class westerner should be proud of a high-school diploma. Above all, in general, beliefs are for predicting future experiences, not for feeling proud.

Just as a probability distribution is not an accomplishment, a policy preference is not a part of who you are.

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*And anticipate being so disposed for as long as the heir apparent keeps his mouth shut upon succession.

**Sometimes a good test of whether your beliefs are too affected by historical contingency is to imagine explaining them to a martian.