I think there are useful and harmful beliefs, and also there are true and false beliefs. Similar to how there are big and small apples, and also red and green apples. If you say truth and usefulness are the same quality, that’s a strong claim—can you give some argument for it?
There are three important points on the continua for these properties of beliefs. Useful, useless, harmful for the benefit slider. For the accuracy dimension, there’s true (perfectly predictive of future experiences) to random (not correlated) to false (consistently wrong about future experiences).
Plus a bunch of things incorrectly called “beliefs” that don’t predict anything, so aren’t gradable on these axes.
Conditional beliefs (if X then Y) are just normal predictions, with the same truth and usefulness dimensions. That’s distinct from beliefs about how things should be (often called “values”) - these _also_ have truth (will it actually be good if it happens?) and usefulness (is there a path to there?) dimensions, but they are somewhat different in application.
Normative beliefs only have objective truth conditions if moral realism is true. But the model of an agent trying to realise its normative beliefs is always valid, however subjective they are. Usefulness, and in turn, the can only be defined in terms of goals or values.
I found the concepts of true and false to be quite harmful for rational discourse. People argue about what is true or not all the time without coming to an agreement. So I avoid those terms as much as possible. Usefulness is easier to determine and it is subjective, so there is less urge to argue about it.
Yes, it’s easy to determine that beliefs flattering the king are useful, while beliefs about invisible forces causing the twitching of dead frog legs when struck by a spark are quite useless. But to determine the usefulness of these two beliefs correctly, you need to predict a few centuries ahead. Truth is easier.
I think there are useful and harmful beliefs, and also there are true and false beliefs. Similar to how there are big and small apples, and also red and green apples. If you say truth and usefulness are the same quality, that’s a strong claim—can you give some argument for it?
There are three important points on the continua for these properties of beliefs. Useful, useless, harmful for the benefit slider. For the accuracy dimension, there’s true (perfectly predictive of future experiences) to random (not correlated) to false (consistently wrong about future experiences).
Plus a bunch of things incorrectly called “beliefs” that don’t predict anything, so aren’t gradable on these axes.
There is an important subset of beliefs which predict only if acted on, namely beliefs about how things should be.
Conditional beliefs (if X then Y) are just normal predictions, with the same truth and usefulness dimensions. That’s distinct from beliefs about how things should be (often called “values”) - these _also_ have truth (will it actually be good if it happens?) and usefulness (is there a path to there?) dimensions, but they are somewhat different in application.
Normative beliefs only have objective truth conditions if moral realism is true. But the model of an agent trying to realise its normative beliefs is always valid, however subjective they are. Usefulness, and in turn, the can only be defined in terms of goals or values.
I found the concepts of true and false to be quite harmful for rational discourse. People argue about what is true or not all the time without coming to an agreement. So I avoid those terms as much as possible. Usefulness is easier to determine and it is subjective, so there is less urge to argue about it.
Yes, it’s easy to determine that beliefs flattering the king are useful, while beliefs about invisible forces causing the twitching of dead frog legs when struck by a spark are quite useless. But to determine the usefulness of these two beliefs correctly, you need to predict a few centuries ahead. Truth is easier.
Here’s an argument against: you can mathematically prove an infinite number of truths, most of which are useless.