"It should be shameful to believe things without evidence, embrace whatever simplistic narratives win approval within your tribe, or parrot the identity-defining pieties favoured by your community or subculture."
That sounds great in theory, but how do you apply it in practice? It seems like it would fall prey to all the issues you have pointed out in the "misinformation" debate -- there's no straightforward test to determine whether a given belief is a "simplistic narrative" or "identity-defining piety," versus a belief arrived at by careful thought.
Moreover, none of us has time to reason everything out from first principles and direct evidence. Like it or not, we have to trust other people to explain how most of reality works.
I think the strongest counter to this tendency in humans is a culture that enshrines tolerance for, and engagement with, dissent. Groupthink will always be with us, but often you only need a few people to point out that the Emperor has no clothes. The key is to keep those voices from being silenced, and to lionize those who turn out to be right.
But this will mean putting up with a lot of cranks spouting nonsense, because -- again -- there's no easy test to distinguish the cranks from the free thinkers. A lot of consensus beliefs are correct! It means looking at -- for example -- the anti-vax movement, and saying, "I don't agree with them, but they have the right to have their say."
And then you run into the question of where tolerance for dissent shades into giving a medical degree to someone who believes in four humours and bloodletting...
Great observations here, and particularly this: “Groupthink will always be with us, but often you only need a few people to point out that the Emperor has no clothes. The key is to keep those voices from being silenced.”
"The key is to keep those voices from being silenced." True.
Though news and history show it is too often another matter entirely for groups to EMBRACE rational dissenting views.
My perspective when I was religious, then later substituting that with being a Democrat, was typical tribalism. Now that I am far more informed of human nature, I am agnostic, and a political independent who rarely if ever sees highly rational political candidates, even among independents or minor parties.
Candidates instead mirror humanity's (often willful) ignorance, irrational biases, and common delusions. If they do not, they are at far higher risk of not being elected. Now I see Democrats as substantially irrational, though notably less so than Republicans.
I still see the hyper-majority of Democrats evade, minimize, or distort truth and reason on important topics.
One example being both major U.S.A. parties promoting overpopulation framed as family values. This during anthropogenic climate change, mass water pollution, commonly visible air pollution, warming and rising oceans, the Sixth Great Extinction, nuclear weapons, etc. A major difference is Democrats try to fight most of these effects, though not directly and verbally against a major cause: reproductive sexuality, resulting in overpopulation.
Another example being both major parties voting for deficit budgets year after year, decade after decade, century after century. Resulting in a $37 trillion U.S.A. sovereign debt. As well as (as of June 2024) an estimated $124 trillion, 30-year cash shortfall in Social Security and Medicare.
There are other examples that a hyper-majority of humanity evades, minimizes, or distorts truth, reason, and facts on a massive scale, and utilizes groupthink and tribalism as tools to effect unfortunate goals deriving from such deficiencies.
On social media I commonly see and experience Democrats widely evading, minimizing, distorting, or even attacking and blocking factual arguments and dissenting voices, including mine.
Naturally, if you are in a country other than the U.S.A., just replace Democrats, Republicans, and even most of our minor parties and independents, with similar names in your country. Human nature does not change.
Groups - perhaps especially large groups such as religions, nations and their political parties, and informal groups such as often absurd cultural beliefs about sexuality (e.g.: overpopulation, just above) - are commonly misused by almost all humanity, as a lazy and often destructive heuristic. In place of the time, effort, and cerebral and social discomfort required to exercise intellectual and ethical dissent.
Very large groups, as well as their supporters, strongly tend toward abuse, irrationality, deception, self-deception, ignorance, and mass destruction.
While often uncomfortable to be in an exceedingly small and oppositional minority, the above illuminates why I have great intellectual pride in no longer claiming religious or politicult membership.
Good point. Before we can go anywhere here, we need to distinguish between the milk in the fridge and the three persons in one God examples. The first involves propositional knowledge; there either is or is not milke in the fridge, and I am claiming that there is a high probability that the former is the case. The second belief might also concern propositional knowledge, in which case we have a problem, bit it could also a way of expressing an experience (perspectival or participatory knowledge) that can't be reduced to verifiable or falsifiable propositions. Or as Wittgenstein put it, the statements "I believe that is a German plane" and "I believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost" are moves in different language games. And until we know what language game someone is playing, we can't judge what they're saying.
I probably posted this the first time this essay was posted, but a fruitful (if depressing) line of inquiry would be what online discourse does to supercharge this. Because we can self-select into bubbles far more than when interaction was physically embodied and local.
Thanks for the piece. If society shifted in such a way that accurate beliefs were prized over personally beneficial ones, that would indeed be a good thing.
>But if beliefs respond to social rewards and punishments, we can improve people’s beliefs in the same way we improve human behaviour more generally: by developing and enforcing better social norms.
I’m in. What practical steps should we take to develop and enforce better social norms?
I’ll be interested to see what you have to say about how one goes about setting such norms. I wholly endorse, as one example, fostering this as a social norm: “It should be shameful to believe things without evidence.” Yet it seems almost anyone can come up with “evidence” for his or her point of view. Take, for example, claims of “evidence” that vaccines cause autism, which experts I judge as trustworthy have repeatedly debunked. I don’t have the expertise to prove I am right directly—I must rely on the expertise of others. Others trust different “experts,” like RFK, Jr. and reject the experts I trust. In these circumstances, how do we arrive at a norm about what evidence is and is not and that distinguishes it from unfalsifiable belief?
I'm happy more people pay attention and money at you now, reading your stuff as an early viewer and seeing the growth somehow gives me a psychological boost as well. Idk if it is the sense of justice or the feeling my time wasn't wasted or any other reason, maybe that is for you to find out
"What we need is a 21st-century civilizing process aimed not at people’s behaviours but at the appalling, self-serving, and groupish ways in which they frequently think and reason."
Who is this'we' who needs this civilizing process?
Reason is indeed revolutionary. But the band of committed revolutionaries is small and most of them are deluded about the fact that the broken beliefs of the overwhelming majority of people on plant earth are not the consequence of imperfect rationality but by the absence of reason.
What this who value reason need to start with is first an understanding of the scale of the paradox that the modern world has been built by reason yet most people in this world don't get it and indeed can be inflamed against it.
Do you think maxing out on the AOT or AOT-E scale (as described in the Pennycock et al paper) is desirable? For example - I believe that democracy is good and more countries should be democracies. Call me crazy! Anyway, what is the right level of dogmatism to have about this belief? If I were a Yankee (or a Minnesotan) in King Arthur’s court, I would be pretty confident that I am right and they are basically wrong. I’m sure someone would object to my modernizing suggestions. Is it rational to listen to these complaints, or should you press on, feeling confident that you represent 1500 years of process?
I feel like your proposal to demand people actually think for themselves instead of adopting beliefs for reasons like group affiliation would amount to stigmatising 99% of the human population, possibly more. Also leaving aside the impracticality of enforcing such stigma on the overwhelming majority of people, I’m not sure it would actually produce better results since I think if people actually thought for themselves instead of going by group affiliation, they would often come up with very foolish ideas. Our society has come to its present state through a lengthy and unconscious process of cultural evolution and social learning. If people actually started thinking about how society should be run instead of just adhering to tribal considerations. I expect a lot of proposals for reforming the status quo which would work out disastrously and a lot of people who were incorrectly coming to the right conclusions because social processes ensuring that the people they were irrationally trusting were, in fact for reasons unknown to them. Actually trustworthy would certainly adopt beliefs a lot stupider than what they would have previously believed. Also, realistically, I expect this would turn into a witch hunt with very little correlation between what was supposed to be stigmatised and what actually ended up being stigmatised. There is no social force pushing in the direction of stigmatising adopting beliefs for stupid reasons, but plenty of social forces pushing in the direction of making such a movement stigmatise a lot of unproblematic reasoning.
I love this piece (is why I'm a subscriber) but I can't help not really caring much about what others believe because arguments always seem to go in ever decreasing self-justifying circles. Plus, the effect that Dan has written often about before, which is everyone thinking that everyone else's reasoning is flawed.
"we can improve people’s beliefs in the same way we improve human behaviour more generally: by developing and enforcing better social norms." Who is the "we" who will improve people's beliefs? This is a kind of "belling the cat" problem, or maybe not, maybe it is a who gets to be right kind of problem. Kindness works better than enforcement. A lot of these people who believe crazy things, like the New Apostolic Reform Movement Charismatics are just desperate people who are a paycheque away from disaster. Better distributive economics, and giving these people a helping hand would go a long way.
I think it is reasonable to view beliefs, particularly religious beliefs, as social technology. An effective social technology is resilient, not easily discarded or manipulated. A technology that has truth value is resilient in many environments. It is favorable for a religious belief to reflect a fundamental good.
The Trinity is a fairly nifty theological/philosophical endeavor exploding how a God can be necessarily simple yet intrinsically relational. It's been batted around for two millenia by intellectually deep people. There is a robustness and depth that makes it resilient-- ideas one should take seriously. Second, there is a usefulness to the technology: clearly there are many relational concepts within the god concept. The Trinity moves these concepts in three distinct but necessarily relational concepts/persons in relation within a single God. Now people can sensibly relate to various divergent god concepts without dividing the unity of God. Practical diversity but core unity.
The robustness of the belief supports the practicality as a social technology. The practicality supports the resilience of the idea. I am sure there is an epistemology that defines truth in this manner (but I'm an economist not a philosopher).
It seems utterly utopian to think people will stop believing without evidence. We can move in that direction, but the billions of Muslims and Christians stand in the way of getting even close.
If you are arguing for some piece of evidence, what is it? What evidence do you assume I'm conceiving narrowly? Does this evidence go any distance to convincing you?
"Everybody believes this" in the case of the supernatural is weak - other things that aren't so well known or examined is best treated case by case.
I don't understand how I wasn't clear: I'm saying that other people's beliefs are evidence. Do you actually disagree? I find that hard to believe, that you proceed through life verifying every single thing from first principles.
"It seems utterly utopian to think people will stop believing without evidence."
I can't conceive of a charitable way to understand that statement. Apart from people with severe psychosis, no one believes things without evidence. That's an inaccurate way to think about the differences between how you and those you disagree with understand the world. I don't have any idea what you think qualifies as evidence, but if you categorically exclude social proof, I'd say your model of cognition is flawed and can't explain most normal human interaction.
"We"'ve tried (civilizing process). It doesn't work :-( . Or at least, there's been a very long history of extensive failures with only a few isolated successes.
First issue, as I've said before - how to deal with "Brandolini's law / Bullshit Asymmetry Principle":
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
Who wants to spend their life endlessly dealing with a torrent of right-wing lying? And every professional liar is going to claim to be a persecuted truth-teller, because that's what those liars do as their job, they tell lies for advantage. But if you set up a Ministry of Truth, then capture it and game over.
I've been very disappointed to see the only non-scary general suggestion is typically something along the lines of "bail the ocean with a thimble, and do it politely". That's lunacy.
I was with you until you brought up "should". Beliefs come to people, it's not something that can be directly controlled.
"In fact, a surprising number of people don’t even pretend to base their beliefs on evidence" which is the honest response. Beliefs are something you report about your internal state, "basing on evidence" is not a process.
What you think tracks truth and the process that makes you beleive a thing can mismatch. The reason for your belief is a theory about your internal state, not a direct report.
Labelling all that beliefs is not a belief I support. There are better frames.
This way we can avoid smooshing different routines, habits, ritualistic behaviours together. Most of the beliefs illustrated are mot intentional stances until doubled-down on as an intentional stance under the "belief" framework (as dogma or stupidty).
And even belief began its life to indicate what one 'held dear' (in a feudal system where personal loyalty was the main social ritual of political importance) and not with reference to truth, so the identity stuff outlined here is a good start, but to gain wisdom the process needs to be inverted.
Conflating loyalty with truth (as is not help by analytical philosophy try-hards going on about true justified belief malarkey) helps no one except the narcissists among us, who we then fail to police, because we fail to identify them as a problem, being so concerned about the lies they tell.
"It should be shameful to believe things without evidence, embrace whatever simplistic narratives win approval within your tribe, or parrot the identity-defining pieties favoured by your community or subculture."
That sounds great in theory, but how do you apply it in practice? It seems like it would fall prey to all the issues you have pointed out in the "misinformation" debate -- there's no straightforward test to determine whether a given belief is a "simplistic narrative" or "identity-defining piety," versus a belief arrived at by careful thought.
Moreover, none of us has time to reason everything out from first principles and direct evidence. Like it or not, we have to trust other people to explain how most of reality works.
I think the strongest counter to this tendency in humans is a culture that enshrines tolerance for, and engagement with, dissent. Groupthink will always be with us, but often you only need a few people to point out that the Emperor has no clothes. The key is to keep those voices from being silenced, and to lionize those who turn out to be right.
But this will mean putting up with a lot of cranks spouting nonsense, because -- again -- there's no easy test to distinguish the cranks from the free thinkers. A lot of consensus beliefs are correct! It means looking at -- for example -- the anti-vax movement, and saying, "I don't agree with them, but they have the right to have their say."
And then you run into the question of where tolerance for dissent shades into giving a medical degree to someone who believes in four humours and bloodletting...
Great observations here, and particularly this: “Groupthink will always be with us, but often you only need a few people to point out that the Emperor has no clothes. The key is to keep those voices from being silenced.”
"The key is to keep those voices from being silenced." True.
Though news and history show it is too often another matter entirely for groups to EMBRACE rational dissenting views.
My perspective when I was religious, then later substituting that with being a Democrat, was typical tribalism. Now that I am far more informed of human nature, I am agnostic, and a political independent who rarely if ever sees highly rational political candidates, even among independents or minor parties.
Candidates instead mirror humanity's (often willful) ignorance, irrational biases, and common delusions. If they do not, they are at far higher risk of not being elected. Now I see Democrats as substantially irrational, though notably less so than Republicans.
I still see the hyper-majority of Democrats evade, minimize, or distort truth and reason on important topics.
One example being both major U.S.A. parties promoting overpopulation framed as family values. This during anthropogenic climate change, mass water pollution, commonly visible air pollution, warming and rising oceans, the Sixth Great Extinction, nuclear weapons, etc. A major difference is Democrats try to fight most of these effects, though not directly and verbally against a major cause: reproductive sexuality, resulting in overpopulation.
Another example being both major parties voting for deficit budgets year after year, decade after decade, century after century. Resulting in a $37 trillion U.S.A. sovereign debt. As well as (as of June 2024) an estimated $124 trillion, 30-year cash shortfall in Social Security and Medicare.
There are other examples that a hyper-majority of humanity evades, minimizes, or distorts truth, reason, and facts on a massive scale, and utilizes groupthink and tribalism as tools to effect unfortunate goals deriving from such deficiencies.
On social media I commonly see and experience Democrats widely evading, minimizing, distorting, or even attacking and blocking factual arguments and dissenting voices, including mine.
Naturally, if you are in a country other than the U.S.A., just replace Democrats, Republicans, and even most of our minor parties and independents, with similar names in your country. Human nature does not change.
Groups - perhaps especially large groups such as religions, nations and their political parties, and informal groups such as often absurd cultural beliefs about sexuality (e.g.: overpopulation, just above) - are commonly misused by almost all humanity, as a lazy and often destructive heuristic. In place of the time, effort, and cerebral and social discomfort required to exercise intellectual and ethical dissent.
Very large groups, as well as their supporters, strongly tend toward abuse, irrationality, deception, self-deception, ignorance, and mass destruction.
While often uncomfortable to be in an exceedingly small and oppositional minority, the above illuminates why I have great intellectual pride in no longer claiming religious or politicult membership.
Good point. Before we can go anywhere here, we need to distinguish between the milk in the fridge and the three persons in one God examples. The first involves propositional knowledge; there either is or is not milke in the fridge, and I am claiming that there is a high probability that the former is the case. The second belief might also concern propositional knowledge, in which case we have a problem, bit it could also a way of expressing an experience (perspectival or participatory knowledge) that can't be reduced to verifiable or falsifiable propositions. Or as Wittgenstein put it, the statements "I believe that is a German plane" and "I believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost" are moves in different language games. And until we know what language game someone is playing, we can't judge what they're saying.
I probably posted this the first time this essay was posted, but a fruitful (if depressing) line of inquiry would be what online discourse does to supercharge this. Because we can self-select into bubbles far more than when interaction was physically embodied and local.
Thanks for the piece. If society shifted in such a way that accurate beliefs were prized over personally beneficial ones, that would indeed be a good thing.
>But if beliefs respond to social rewards and punishments, we can improve people’s beliefs in the same way we improve human behaviour more generally: by developing and enforcing better social norms.
I’m in. What practical steps should we take to develop and enforce better social norms?
I’ll be interested to see what you have to say about how one goes about setting such norms. I wholly endorse, as one example, fostering this as a social norm: “It should be shameful to believe things without evidence.” Yet it seems almost anyone can come up with “evidence” for his or her point of view. Take, for example, claims of “evidence” that vaccines cause autism, which experts I judge as trustworthy have repeatedly debunked. I don’t have the expertise to prove I am right directly—I must rely on the expertise of others. Others trust different “experts,” like RFK, Jr. and reject the experts I trust. In these circumstances, how do we arrive at a norm about what evidence is and is not and that distinguishes it from unfalsifiable belief?
I'm happy more people pay attention and money at you now, reading your stuff as an early viewer and seeing the growth somehow gives me a psychological boost as well. Idk if it is the sense of justice or the feeling my time wasn't wasted or any other reason, maybe that is for you to find out
"What we need is a 21st-century civilizing process aimed not at people’s behaviours but at the appalling, self-serving, and groupish ways in which they frequently think and reason."
Who is this'we' who needs this civilizing process?
Reason is indeed revolutionary. But the band of committed revolutionaries is small and most of them are deluded about the fact that the broken beliefs of the overwhelming majority of people on plant earth are not the consequence of imperfect rationality but by the absence of reason.
What this who value reason need to start with is first an understanding of the scale of the paradox that the modern world has been built by reason yet most people in this world don't get it and indeed can be inflamed against it.
Do you think maxing out on the AOT or AOT-E scale (as described in the Pennycock et al paper) is desirable? For example - I believe that democracy is good and more countries should be democracies. Call me crazy! Anyway, what is the right level of dogmatism to have about this belief? If I were a Yankee (or a Minnesotan) in King Arthur’s court, I would be pretty confident that I am right and they are basically wrong. I’m sure someone would object to my modernizing suggestions. Is it rational to listen to these complaints, or should you press on, feeling confident that you represent 1500 years of process?
I feel like your proposal to demand people actually think for themselves instead of adopting beliefs for reasons like group affiliation would amount to stigmatising 99% of the human population, possibly more. Also leaving aside the impracticality of enforcing such stigma on the overwhelming majority of people, I’m not sure it would actually produce better results since I think if people actually thought for themselves instead of going by group affiliation, they would often come up with very foolish ideas. Our society has come to its present state through a lengthy and unconscious process of cultural evolution and social learning. If people actually started thinking about how society should be run instead of just adhering to tribal considerations. I expect a lot of proposals for reforming the status quo which would work out disastrously and a lot of people who were incorrectly coming to the right conclusions because social processes ensuring that the people they were irrationally trusting were, in fact for reasons unknown to them. Actually trustworthy would certainly adopt beliefs a lot stupider than what they would have previously believed. Also, realistically, I expect this would turn into a witch hunt with very little correlation between what was supposed to be stigmatised and what actually ended up being stigmatised. There is no social force pushing in the direction of stigmatising adopting beliefs for stupid reasons, but plenty of social forces pushing in the direction of making such a movement stigmatise a lot of unproblematic reasoning.
I love this piece (is why I'm a subscriber) but I can't help not really caring much about what others believe because arguments always seem to go in ever decreasing self-justifying circles. Plus, the effect that Dan has written often about before, which is everyone thinking that everyone else's reasoning is flawed.
"we can improve people’s beliefs in the same way we improve human behaviour more generally: by developing and enforcing better social norms." Who is the "we" who will improve people's beliefs? This is a kind of "belling the cat" problem, or maybe not, maybe it is a who gets to be right kind of problem. Kindness works better than enforcement. A lot of these people who believe crazy things, like the New Apostolic Reform Movement Charismatics are just desperate people who are a paycheque away from disaster. Better distributive economics, and giving these people a helping hand would go a long way.
I think it is reasonable to view beliefs, particularly religious beliefs, as social technology. An effective social technology is resilient, not easily discarded or manipulated. A technology that has truth value is resilient in many environments. It is favorable for a religious belief to reflect a fundamental good.
The Trinity is a fairly nifty theological/philosophical endeavor exploding how a God can be necessarily simple yet intrinsically relational. It's been batted around for two millenia by intellectually deep people. There is a robustness and depth that makes it resilient-- ideas one should take seriously. Second, there is a usefulness to the technology: clearly there are many relational concepts within the god concept. The Trinity moves these concepts in three distinct but necessarily relational concepts/persons in relation within a single God. Now people can sensibly relate to various divergent god concepts without dividing the unity of God. Practical diversity but core unity.
The robustness of the belief supports the practicality as a social technology. The practicality supports the resilience of the idea. I am sure there is an epistemology that defines truth in this manner (but I'm an economist not a philosopher).
It seems utterly utopian to think people will stop believing without evidence. We can move in that direction, but the billions of Muslims and Christians stand in the way of getting even close.
Speaking as a fellow atheist, it's shallow and harmful to conceive of "evidence" so narrowly.
"Other people believe this thing" is, in fact evidence, and "everyone I grew up with believes this thing" is a heuristic with a winning record.
If you are arguing for some piece of evidence, what is it? What evidence do you assume I'm conceiving narrowly? Does this evidence go any distance to convincing you?
"Everybody believes this" in the case of the supernatural is weak - other things that aren't so well known or examined is best treated case by case.
I don't understand how I wasn't clear: I'm saying that other people's beliefs are evidence. Do you actually disagree? I find that hard to believe, that you proceed through life verifying every single thing from first principles.
"It seems utterly utopian to think people will stop believing without evidence."
I can't conceive of a charitable way to understand that statement. Apart from people with severe psychosis, no one believes things without evidence. That's an inaccurate way to think about the differences between how you and those you disagree with understand the world. I don't have any idea what you think qualifies as evidence, but if you categorically exclude social proof, I'd say your model of cognition is flawed and can't explain most normal human interaction.
As I wrote above:
>>"Everybody believes this" in the case of the supernatural is weak - other things that aren't so well known or examined is best treated case by case.
You are quibbling for no good reason.
"We"'ve tried (civilizing process). It doesn't work :-( . Or at least, there's been a very long history of extensive failures with only a few isolated successes.
First issue, as I've said before - how to deal with "Brandolini's law / Bullshit Asymmetry Principle":
"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it."
Who wants to spend their life endlessly dealing with a torrent of right-wing lying? And every professional liar is going to claim to be a persecuted truth-teller, because that's what those liars do as their job, they tell lies for advantage. But if you set up a Ministry of Truth, then capture it and game over.
I've been very disappointed to see the only non-scary general suggestion is typically something along the lines of "bail the ocean with a thimble, and do it politely". That's lunacy.
I have come to believe that Brandolini's law, to the extent that it's real, is simply a cost we must bear if we want a liberal society.
I was with you until you brought up "should". Beliefs come to people, it's not something that can be directly controlled.
"In fact, a surprising number of people don’t even pretend to base their beliefs on evidence" which is the honest response. Beliefs are something you report about your internal state, "basing on evidence" is not a process.
What you think tracks truth and the process that makes you beleive a thing can mismatch. The reason for your belief is a theory about your internal state, not a direct report.
Labelling all that beliefs is not a belief I support. There are better frames.
This way we can avoid smooshing different routines, habits, ritualistic behaviours together. Most of the beliefs illustrated are mot intentional stances until doubled-down on as an intentional stance under the "belief" framework (as dogma or stupidty).
And even belief began its life to indicate what one 'held dear' (in a feudal system where personal loyalty was the main social ritual of political importance) and not with reference to truth, so the identity stuff outlined here is a good start, but to gain wisdom the process needs to be inverted.
Conflating loyalty with truth (as is not help by analytical philosophy try-hards going on about true justified belief malarkey) helps no one except the narcissists among us, who we then fail to police, because we fail to identify them as a problem, being so concerned about the lies they tell.
Greetings from Duddie's Branch.