Interesting thought, but I fear it’s not practical for the same reason you can’t doublethink.
To evaluate how useful your explanation is, you need an accurate model of the world, in which you’ll “run” your explanation and evaluate its consequences. Consider the belief in UFOs (to change from the usual belief in God). You can’t evaluate how useful that explanation is regardless of whatever it is true or not. If there really are UFOs, the explanation will have a different utility than if there aren’t. So the only way to compute the utility of the belief depends of the probability of UFOs existing. And of many other assumptions. Once you have knowledge required to evaluate how useful having the belief will be, it’s too late. You can’t forget what you know, you can’t doublethink.
Interesting thought, but I fear it’s not practical for the same reason you can’t doublethink.
To evaluate how useful your explanation is, you need an accurate model of the world, in which you’ll “run” your explanation and evaluate its consequences. Consider the belief in UFOs (to change from the usual belief in God). You can’t evaluate how useful that explanation is regardless of whatever it is true or not. If there really are UFOs, the explanation will have a different utility than if there aren’t. So the only way to compute the utility of the belief depends of the probability of UFOs existing. And of many other assumptions. Once you have knowledge required to evaluate how useful having the belief will be, it’s too late. You can’t forget what you know, you can’t doublethink.