I noticed that I was confused by your dragon analogy. 1) Why did this guy believe in this dragon when there was absolutely no evidence that it exists? 2) Why do I find the analogy so satisfying, when its premise is so absurd.
Observation 1) Religious people have evidence:
The thing about religion is that a given religion’s effects on people tend to be predictable. When Christians tell you to accept Jesus into your heart, some of the less effective missionaries talk about heaven, but the better ones talk about positive changes to their emotional states. Often, they will imply that those positive life changes will happen for you if you join, and as a prediction that tends to be a very good one.
As a rationalist, I know the emotional benefits of paying attention when something nice happens, and I recognize that feeling gratitude boosts my altruism. I know I can get high on hypoxia if I ever want to see visions or speak in tongues. I know that spending at least an hour every week building ethical responses into my cached behavior is a good practice for keeping positive people in my life. I recognize the historical edifice of morality that allowed us to build the society we currently live in. This whole suite of tools is built into religion, and the means of achieving the benefits it provides is non-obvious enough that a mystical explanation makes sense. Questioning those beliefs without that additional knowledge means you lose access to the benefits of the beliefs.
Observation 2) We expect people to discard falsifiable parts of their beliefs without discarding all of that belief.
The dragon analogy is nice and uncomplicated. There are no benefits to believing in the dragon, so the person in the analogy can make no predictions with it. I’ve never seen that happen in the real world. Usually religious people have tested their beliefs, and found that the predictions they’ve made come true. The fact that those beliefs can’t predict things in certain areas doesn’t change the fact that they do work in others, and most people don’t expect generality from their beliefs. When that guy says that the dragon is permeable to flour, that isn’t him making an excuse for the lack of a dragon. That’s him indicating a section of reality where he doesn’t use the dragon to inform his decisions. Religious people don’t apply their belief in their dragon in categories where believing has not provided them with positive results. Disproved hypotheses don’t disprove the belief, but rather disprove the belief for that category of experience. And that’s pretty normal. The fact that I don’t know everything, and the fact that I can be right about some things and wrong about others means that I pretty much have to be categorizing my knowledge.
Thinking about this article has lead me to the conclusion that “belief in belief” is more accurately visualized as compartmentalization of belief, that it’s common to everyone, and that it indicates that a belief that I have is providing the right answer for the wrong reasons. I predict that if I train myself to react to predicting that the world will behave strangely in order to not violate my hypothesis by saying out loud “this belief is not fully general” I will find that more often than not that this statement will be correct.
I noticed that I was confused by your dragon analogy. 1) Why did this guy believe in this dragon when there was absolutely no evidence that it exists? 2) Why do I find the analogy so satisfying, when its premise is so absurd.
Observation 1) Religious people have evidence:
The thing about religion is that a given religion’s effects on people tend to be predictable. When Christians tell you to accept Jesus into your heart, some of the less effective missionaries talk about heaven, but the better ones talk about positive changes to their emotional states. Often, they will imply that those positive life changes will happen for you if you join, and as a prediction that tends to be a very good one.
As a rationalist, I know the emotional benefits of paying attention when something nice happens, and I recognize that feeling gratitude boosts my altruism. I know I can get high on hypoxia if I ever want to see visions or speak in tongues. I know that spending at least an hour every week building ethical responses into my cached behavior is a good practice for keeping positive people in my life. I recognize the historical edifice of morality that allowed us to build the society we currently live in. This whole suite of tools is built into religion, and the means of achieving the benefits it provides is non-obvious enough that a mystical explanation makes sense. Questioning those beliefs without that additional knowledge means you lose access to the benefits of the beliefs.
Observation 2) We expect people to discard falsifiable parts of their beliefs without discarding all of that belief.
The dragon analogy is nice and uncomplicated. There are no benefits to believing in the dragon, so the person in the analogy can make no predictions with it. I’ve never seen that happen in the real world. Usually religious people have tested their beliefs, and found that the predictions they’ve made come true. The fact that those beliefs can’t predict things in certain areas doesn’t change the fact that they do work in others, and most people don’t expect generality from their beliefs. When that guy says that the dragon is permeable to flour, that isn’t him making an excuse for the lack of a dragon. That’s him indicating a section of reality where he doesn’t use the dragon to inform his decisions. Religious people don’t apply their belief in their dragon in categories where believing has not provided them with positive results. Disproved hypotheses don’t disprove the belief, but rather disprove the belief for that category of experience. And that’s pretty normal. The fact that I don’t know everything, and the fact that I can be right about some things and wrong about others means that I pretty much have to be categorizing my knowledge.
Thinking about this article has lead me to the conclusion that “belief in belief” is more accurately visualized as compartmentalization of belief, that it’s common to everyone, and that it indicates that a belief that I have is providing the right answer for the wrong reasons. I predict that if I train myself to react to predicting that the world will behave strangely in order to not violate my hypothesis by saying out loud “this belief is not fully general” I will find that more often than not that this statement will be correct.