Interesting perspective. The difficult part will be that the proposed metrics are of the “more or less” type, rather than “yes or no”. So one must be familiar with multiple beliefs, in order to put the specific one on the scale.
Psychological comfort—each belief implicitly divides people into two groups: those who understand it and those who don’t; the former is better. Knowing the Pythagorean theorem can make you proud of your math skills.
It gets suspicious when a seemingly simple belief explains too much. Knowing the Pythagorean theorem allows you to calculate the longest side of a right-angled triangle, a distance between two points in N-dimensional Euclidean space even for N>3, or allows you to prove that sin²(φ) + cos²(φ) = 1, but that’s it. If it also told you how to dress, what to eat, and which political party to vote for, that would be suspicious.
On the opposite end of the scale, mathematics as a whole claims to explains a lot, it is practically involved in everything, but it is a ton of knowledge that takes years or decades to study properly. It would be suspicious if something similarly powerful could be understood by merely reading a book and hanging out with some group.
(Elephant in the room: what about “rationality”, especially the claim that “P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B)” explains the entire multiverse and beyond? I think it is kinda okay, as long as you remember that you also need specific data to apply the formula to; mere general knowledge won’t help you figure out the details. Also, no one claims that the Bayes Theorem can only be used for good purposes, or that it makes you morally superior.)
Self-Sealing Mechanisms—be careful when the belief is supported by things other than arguments and data; for example by violence (verbal or otherwise). This is also tricky: is it okay to “cancel” a crackpot? I think it is okay to fire crackpots from academic/scientific institutions; those obviously wouldn’t be able to do their job otherwise. But if you start persecuting heretical thoughts expressed by people in their free time, on their blogs, etc., that goes too far.
I sometimes says that “political orientation” is basically “which part of complex reality you decided to ignore”. (That doesn’t mean that if you ignore nothing, you are unable to have opinions or make decisions. But you opinions will be usually be like “this is complicated, in general it is usually better to do X, but there are exceptions, such as Y”. The kind of reasoning that would get you kicked out of any ideological group.)
Interesting perspective. The difficult part will be that the proposed metrics are of the “more or less” type, rather than “yes or no”. So one must be familiar with multiple beliefs, in order to put the specific one on the scale.
Psychological comfort—each belief implicitly divides people into two groups: those who understand it and those who don’t; the former is better. Knowing the Pythagorean theorem can make you proud of your math skills.
It gets suspicious when a seemingly simple belief explains too much. Knowing the Pythagorean theorem allows you to calculate the longest side of a right-angled triangle, a distance between two points in N-dimensional Euclidean space even for N>3, or allows you to prove that sin²(φ) + cos²(φ) = 1, but that’s it. If it also told you how to dress, what to eat, and which political party to vote for, that would be suspicious.
On the opposite end of the scale, mathematics as a whole claims to explains a lot, it is practically involved in everything, but it is a ton of knowledge that takes years or decades to study properly. It would be suspicious if something similarly powerful could be understood by merely reading a book and hanging out with some group.
(Elephant in the room: what about “rationality”, especially the claim that “P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B)” explains the entire multiverse and beyond? I think it is kinda okay, as long as you remember that you also need specific data to apply the formula to; mere general knowledge won’t help you figure out the details. Also, no one claims that the Bayes Theorem can only be used for good purposes, or that it makes you morally superior.)
Self-Sealing Mechanisms—be careful when the belief is supported by things other than arguments and data; for example by violence (verbal or otherwise). This is also tricky: is it okay to “cancel” a crackpot? I think it is okay to fire crackpots from academic/scientific institutions; those obviously wouldn’t be able to do their job otherwise. But if you start persecuting heretical thoughts expressed by people in their free time, on their blogs, etc., that goes too far.
I sometimes says that “political orientation” is basically “which part of complex reality you decided to ignore”. (That doesn’t mean that if you ignore nothing, you are unable to have opinions or make decisions. But you opinions will be usually be like “this is complicated, in general it is usually better to do X, but there are exceptions, such as Y”. The kind of reasoning that would get you kicked out of any ideological group.)