I really hope this post of mine makes it in. I think about “believing in” most days, and often reference it in conversation, and often hear references to it in conversation. I still agree with basically everything I wrote here. (I suspect there are clearer ways to conceptualize it, but I don’t yet have those ways.)
The main point, from my perspective: we humans have to locate good hypotheses, and we have to muster our energy around cool creative projects if we want to do neat stuff, and both of these situations requires picking out ideas worthy of our attention from within a combinatorially large space (letting recombinable pieces somehow “bubble up” when they’re worth our attention). Somehow, this works better if we care what happens, hope for things, allow ourselves to have visions, etc, vs being “objective” in the sense that we can take everything as objects without the quality of our [attention/caring/etc] being affected by what we’re looking at. This somehow calls for a different mental stance from the stance most of us inhabit when attempting [expected value estimates, Bayesian updates, working to “remember that you are not a hypothesis; you are the judge”] A stance that is more active / less passive / less “objective”, and involves more personally-rooting-for, or more “here I stand.” If we want to be good rationality geeks who can see the whole of how the being human thing works, we’ll need models of how “organizing our energies around a vision, and locating/updating a vision worth organizing our energies around” thing can work. I think my “believing in” model (roughly: “believing-ins are like kickstarters”) is helpful for modeling this.
Now that I’m writing this self-review, I’m strongly reminded of the discussions of the usefulness of caring for locating good hypotheses in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (if you have an e-copy and want a relevant passage, try find-word on “value rigidity”), but I missed this connection while writing the OP despite it being among my favorite books.
I really hope this post of mine makes it in. I think about “believing in” most days, and often reference it in conversation, and often hear references to it in conversation. I still agree with basically everything I wrote here. (I suspect there are clearer ways to conceptualize it, but I don’t yet have those ways.)
The main point, from my perspective: we humans have to locate good hypotheses, and we have to muster our energy around cool creative projects if we want to do neat stuff, and both of these situations requires picking out ideas worthy of our attention from within a combinatorially large space (letting recombinable pieces somehow “bubble up” when they’re worth our attention). Somehow, this works better if we care what happens, hope for things, allow ourselves to have visions, etc, vs being “objective” in the sense that we can take everything as objects without the quality of our [attention/caring/etc] being affected by what we’re looking at. This somehow calls for a different mental stance from the stance most of us inhabit when attempting [expected value estimates, Bayesian updates, working to “remember that you are not a hypothesis; you are the judge”] A stance that is more active / less passive / less “objective”, and involves more personally-rooting-for, or more “here I stand.” If we want to be good rationality geeks who can see the whole of how the being human thing works, we’ll need models of how “organizing our energies around a vision, and locating/updating a vision worth organizing our energies around” thing can work. I think my “believing in” model (roughly: “believing-ins are like kickstarters”) is helpful for modeling this.
Tsvi and I talked about some things I think are related in a recent comment thread.
Now that I’m writing this self-review, I’m strongly reminded of the discussions of the usefulness of caring for locating good hypotheses in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (if you have an e-copy and want a relevant passage, try find-word on “value rigidity”), but I missed this connection while writing the OP despite it being among my favorite books.