his Sunday school training could be summed up in one sentence (delivered with a broad Texas drawl): “Jesus is nice, and he wants us to be nice, too.”
.. The word “orthodox” has come to mean having the correct beliefs.
.. Along with the overt requirement to learn what these beliefs are and agree with them comes a subliminal message: that the appropriate way to relate to Jesus is through a series of beliefs. In fundamentalist Christianity this message tends to get even more accentuated, to the point where faith appears to be a matter of signing on the dotted lines to a set of creedal statements. Belief in Jesus is indistinguishable from belief about him.
.. how do we put on the mind of Christ? How do we see through his eyes? How do we feel through his heart? How do we learn to respond to the world with that same wholeness and healing love? That’s what Christian orthodoxy really is all about. It’s not about right belief; it’s about right practice.
It’s the truth according to Trump. Believe it.
But Trump has something more powerful to him than any evidence, no matter how compelling: He believes. Firmly.
.. But what about all the credible people saying it didn’t happen? “I think the president firmly believes that it did.”
.. The Trump White House is the ultimate faith-based initiative — and The Donald is the deity. Things aren’t true because they can be proven via the scientific method or any other. They are true because Trump believes them to be true.
.. His fabricated claim that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally, causing him to lose the popular vote? “It was a comment that he made on a long-standing belief,”
.. Trump asked listeners to “believe me” seven times in a single speech last month, saying, “I will never, ever disappoint you. Believe me.”
.. The courts may have struck down Trump’s first travel ban, but it’s legal because “we believe” it is.
.. “You said the president believes that there was voter fraud,” Spicer was asked at one news briefing. “I wonder if you believe that?”
Spicer explained that saying so wasn’t “my job” and that Trump “believes what he believes based on the information that he’s provided.”
Crony Beliefs
BELIEFS AS EMPLOYEES
By way of analogy, let’s consider how beliefs in the brain are like employees at a company. This isn’t a perfect analogy, but it’ll get us 70% of the way there.[1]
Employees are hired because they have a job to do, i.e., to help the company accomplish its goals. But employees don’t come for free: they have to earn their keep by being useful. So if an employee does his job well, he’ll be kept around, whereas if he does it poorly — or makes other kinds of trouble, like friction with his coworkers — he’ll have to be let go.
.. If a belief performs poorly — by inaccurately modeling the world, say, and thereby leading us astray — then it needs to be let go.
.. If you’ve ever wanted to believe something, ask yourself where that desire comes from. Hint: it’s not the desire simply to believe what’s true.
In short: Just as money can pervert scientific research, so everyday social incentives have the potential to distort our beliefs.
.. I contend that social incentives are the root of all our biggest thinking errors.
.. A meritocracy experiences no anguish in letting go of a misbelief and adopting a better one, even its opposite. In fact, it’s a pleasure.
.. Going further, crony beliefs actually need to be protected from criticism. It’s not that they’re necessarily false, just that they’re more likely to be false — but either way, they’re unlikely to withstand serious criticism. Thus we should expect our brains to take an overall protective or defensive stance toward our crony beliefs.
.. crony beliefs will typically provide more social value the more confident we seem in them. (If Acme hires the mayor’s nephew, but seems constantly on the verge of firing him, the mayor isn’t going to be happy.)
.. But perhaps the biggest hallmark of epistemic cronyism is exhibiting strong emotions, as when we feel proud of a belief, anguish over changing our minds, or anger at being challenged or criticized.
.. The better — but much more difficult — solution is to attack epistemic cronyism at the root, i.e., in the way others judge us for our beliefs. If we could arrange for our peers to judge us solely for the accuracy of our beliefs, then we’d have no incentive to believe anything but the truth.
.. The beauty of Less Wrong, then, is that it’s not just a textbook: it’s a community. A group of people who have agreed, either tacitly or explicitly, to judge each other for the accuracy of their beliefs — or at least for behaving in ways that correlate with accuracy. And so it’s the norms of the community that incentivize us to think and communicate as rationally as we do.
.. Earlier I argued that other people are the cause of all our epistemic problems. Now I find myself arguing that they’re also our best solution.