All else being equal, the most useful explanation is usually correct.
If living in an overwhelmingly Christian-dominated society, the most useful explanation for your existence is that god in heaven created you—but that’s not the correct explanation.
If your utility function heavily weights “achieve high social status”, then I’d agree. In fact, I think this is precisely what most U.S. politicians are doing when professing their religion publicly. You don’t see them actually trying to live simply or give everything they own to the poor.
If your utility function puts more weight on almost anything else, such as building reliable technology, expressing yourself in art, or maintaining internal consistency among your beliefs, then this conclusion does not follow.
I was assuming that things like not being ostracised as a heathen, bot being burned at the stake for witchcraft and finding a mate were things of value. If that is not true, then the original point is still valid, but you might like to make up another example to illustrate it.
Unless they have telepathy or brain scanning technology, people would ostracize, burn, or marry you based on your actions, not your beliefs. After Kim Jong Il’s death, people had to display grief, but they didn’t have to feel grief.
Barring telepathy, brain-scanning tech, or an inability to lie well, I expect that actually believing the zeitgeist of a totalitarian society is of lower utility than just pretending to believe it.
The problem there is that humans are good lie detectors and bad liars. They are built that way: lie detecting is important because our ancestors may have had to deal with the best liars—while they could often get by without being good liars more easily. So: the safest way to make people think that you believe something is often to actually believe it.
If living in an overwhelmingly Christian-dominated society, the most useful explanation for your existence is that god in heaven created you—but that’s not the correct explanation.
If your utility function heavily weights “achieve high social status”, then I’d agree. In fact, I think this is precisely what most U.S. politicians are doing when professing their religion publicly. You don’t see them actually trying to live simply or give everything they own to the poor.
If your utility function puts more weight on almost anything else, such as building reliable technology, expressing yourself in art, or maintaining internal consistency among your beliefs, then this conclusion does not follow.
I was assuming that things like not being ostracised as a heathen, bot being burned at the stake for witchcraft and finding a mate were things of value. If that is not true, then the original point is still valid, but you might like to make up another example to illustrate it.
Unless they have telepathy or brain scanning technology, people would ostracize, burn, or marry you based on your actions, not your beliefs. After Kim Jong Il’s death, people had to display grief, but they didn’t have to feel grief.
Barring telepathy, brain-scanning tech, or an inability to lie well, I expect that actually believing the zeitgeist of a totalitarian society is of lower utility than just pretending to believe it.
The problem there is that humans are good lie detectors and bad liars. They are built that way: lie detecting is important because our ancestors may have had to deal with the best liars—while they could often get by without being good liars more easily. So: the safest way to make people think that you believe something is often to actually believe it.