Holding that beliefs are for true things means that you do not believe things because they are useful, believe things because they sound nice, or believe things because you prefer them to be true. You believe things that are true (or at least that you believe to be true, which is often the best we can get!).
This is maybe a subtle objection, but I disagree with the implicit rejection of utility in favor of truth being set up here. Truth is very attractive to us, and I think this runs deep for reasons that don’t much matter here but on which I’ll just say I think it’s because we’re fundamentally prediction error minimizers (with some homeostatic feedback loops thrown in for survival and reproduction purposes). But if I had to justify why truth is important, I would say it’s because it’s useful. If truth were somehow not causally upstream of making accurate predictions about the world (or maybe that’s just what truth means), I don’t think I would care about it, because making accurate predictions about the world is really useful to getting all the other things I care about done.
Yes, there is a danger that befalls some people when they prize utility too far above truth that biases them in subtle and gross ways that lead them astray and actually work against them by making them less serve their purposes when they’re not looking, but there are similar dangers when people pursue truth at the expense of usefulness, mostly in the form of opportunity costs. I think we all at some point must learn to prize truth over motivated reasoning and preferences, for example, but I also think we must learn to prize the utility of truth over truth itself lest we be enthralled by the Beast of Scrupulosity.
I think this is an important point. There’s a false dichotomy (and a lossy reduction in dimensionality) in “you can believe true things or you can believe useful things”. You can and should strive for useful true beliefs. If you’re not https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Making_beliefs_pay_rent , you likely have some useless beliefs, and it’s _really_ hard to define “true” for beliefs that don’t actually do anything.
You shouldn’t believe falsehoods full stop. Falsehoods are not useful beliefs, as they make incorrect predictions. You ALSO shouldn’t spend a whole lot of effort on truth of beliefs that don’t matter. You should have a LOT of topics where you don’t have strong beliefs.
This is maybe a subtle objection, but I disagree with the implicit rejection of utility in favor of truth being set up here. Truth is very attractive to us, and I think this runs deep for reasons that don’t much matter here but on which I’ll just say I think it’s because we’re fundamentally prediction error minimizers (with some homeostatic feedback loops thrown in for survival and reproduction purposes). But if I had to justify why truth is important, I would say it’s because it’s useful. If truth were somehow not causally upstream of making accurate predictions about the world (or maybe that’s just what truth means), I don’t think I would care about it, because making accurate predictions about the world is really useful to getting all the other things I care about done.
Yes, there is a danger that befalls some people when they prize utility too far above truth that biases them in subtle and gross ways that lead them astray and actually work against them by making them less serve their purposes when they’re not looking, but there are similar dangers when people pursue truth at the expense of usefulness, mostly in the form of opportunity costs. I think we all at some point must learn to prize truth over motivated reasoning and preferences, for example, but I also think we must learn to prize the utility of truth over truth itself lest we be enthralled by the Beast of Scrupulosity.
I think this is an important point. There’s a false dichotomy (and a lossy reduction in dimensionality) in “you can believe true things or you can believe useful things”. You can and should strive for useful true beliefs. If you’re not https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Making_beliefs_pay_rent , you likely have some useless beliefs, and it’s _really_ hard to define “true” for beliefs that don’t actually do anything.
You shouldn’t believe falsehoods full stop. Falsehoods are not useful beliefs, as they make incorrect predictions. You ALSO shouldn’t spend a whole lot of effort on truth of beliefs that don’t matter. You should have a LOT of topics where you don’t have strong beliefs.