The function of belief—advice appreciated.
Hi Less Wrongers and Less Wrongerettes,
Doing a fortnightly Less Wrong group with some friends, and next session we’re planning to scrutinize belief, hoping to touch on belief in belief, belief as attire etc. but I wanted to start by examining what belief is and the functions of belief. I have a few subtitles:
The function of belief -To anticipate experience
Belief in Belief -
Belief as attire - (the two are pretty closely related)
Free Floating Belief—beliefs that are useless
Correct belief—when beliefs are held for poor reasons, but turn out to be correct, why they are still inaccurate
Making beliefs pay rent—Don’t ask what to believe, ask what to anticipate. Want to finish on this one because I think it’s applicability is limitless.
just wanted some critiques/suggestions. Particuarly concerned with the first one, defining belief and it’s purpose. I need help making the concepts clear and concise.
The more accessible to the layman the better!
I dislike this wording as unnecessarily promoting male-as-unmarked-state.
also it’s just plain clumsy sounding
Also, even if it didn’t use the male-as-default construction, if it instead used male and female terms that were both modified from a base word by approximately equal amounts, it would still promote the silly idea that gender is something that always has to be pointed out every time you refer to people.
The fact that beliefs are supposed to constrain anticipation is pretty central to LW.
You might want to discuss what belief isn’t. Many people use their beliefs for signalling (but if you talk about that, explain what signalling is), but if you do that you get mixed up ideas about what to do. If you don’t actually anticipate what your belief claims, its not a belief. That sort of stuff.
I believe that it is wrong to kill people.
(you might also want to touch on moral beliefs)
I think of such statements as signaling a preference or emotion rather than expressing a proper belief. Alternatively, the belief that it is wrong to kill people could simply mean that you expect to be in a poor emotional state if killing people occurs.
I think having a new category is unnecessary and a confusion, especially focusing on ‘moral beliefs’ that are simply a subset of preferences, or ‘beliefs about my emotional response to a course of events or situation’.