I don’t know how well you know this person, so my advice may be unnecessary. But your post gives me the impression that you need to be much more careful about speculating on how her mind works. I think that it’s a red flag when you write first that
I can see the pattern in the words coming out of her lips, but I can’t understand the mind behind on an empathic level. I can imagine myself into the shoes of baby-eating aliens and the Lady 3rd Kiritsugu, but I cannot imagine what it is like to be her.
. . . and then proceed to make apparently confident declarations about how her mind works, such as
I now realize that the whole essence of her philosophy was her belief that she had deceived herself, and the possibility that her estimates of other people were actually accurate, threatened the Dark Side Epistemology that she had built around beliefs such as “I benefit from believing people are nicer than they actually are.”
She has taken the old idol off its throne, and replaced it with an explicit worship of the Dark Side Epistemology that was once invented to defend the idol; she worships her own attempt at self-deception. The attempt failed, but she is honestly unaware of this.
As you yourself have observed, we largely understand other people by taking a portion of our own black-box mind, plugging in a few explicit settings (such as beliefs or experiences), letting the model run for a bit, and seeing what pops out. In particular, to understand how another person makes judgments, we collect their evinced beliefs, try to twiddle some dials until our model expresses the same beliefs, and then let it run for a bit. We then try to peer into the model as best we can, getting as good a picture of its inner workings as introspection allows us. We then take this picture as our hypothesis about how the other person thinks.
But the first quote above is strong evidence that your mind works differently from hers in some highly relevant respects. Therefore, you should be highly skeptical that what is going on in her mind resembles what it took to make the model of her in your own mind match her utterances. But you give me the impression that you haven’t been sufficiently skeptical of the match between her mind and your model of it. I think that this has led you astray on several points.
For example, based on what you’ve written, I don’t think that you’re using the right model to understand what was going on in her mind when she said, “I believe that people are nicer than they really are.” You were led to this confusion because she was not using the word “believe” in the way that you, and your model of her, do. You are using “belief” to mean a feature of a model of how the world is. But that, I expect, is not what she meant. Thus, your remarks here --
I tried to explain that if you say, “People are bad,” that means you believe people are bad, and if you say, “I believe people are nice”, that means you believe you believe people are nice. So saying “People are bad and I believe people are nice” means you believe people are bad but you believe you believe people are nice.
-- were irrelevant because they do not apply to the sense of the word “believe” that she was using.
For what it’s worth, in my model of her, when she said “I believe that people are nicer than they really are,” she meant, “When I reflect on my emotional attitude towards people, I see that this attitude is of the sort that, in the absence of its actual cause, could have been caused by a falsely high belief (in your sense) about peoples’ niceness.”
The actual cause for her emotional attitude is perhaps her “religion”. Or perhaps it is something else. Perhaps she has no idea what the actual cause is, or perhaps she thinks she does, but she doesn’t really. But none of this implies that she was attributing to herself the belief that people are nicer than she actually believes them to be (where, here, I’m using “belief” in your sense.)
Her utterance seems analogous to someone who walks out of an optometrist’s office after having his pupils dilated and says, “Because of those drops the optometrist gave me, I believe the sun is brighter than it really is.” If we heard this, we shouldn’t conclude that he believes something contradictory, or that he has incorrect beliefs about his beliefs. His word “belief” in this case probably does not mean “best guess about how things really are.” Rather, it’s a clumsy way to say that some qualities of his experience of the world are as if he had a certain belief (in the sense normally understood). He does not mean to imply that he has any wrong beliefs (in the conventional sense). It would be a mistake to say that his subjective experience of the light is in any way erroneous. After all, it accurately reflects the fact that he had those drops put in his eyes.
Similarly, your interlocutor’s statement that she “believes” that people are nicer than they really are referred to a particular quality of her emotional attitude towards them, not to a belief (in your sense) about how they are. In particular, it didn’t imply any expectation about how they would behave. That, I expect, is why she was initially taken aback when you asked, “So, are you consistently surprised when people undershoot your expectations?” The problem wasn’t, as you appear to think, that she had prevented her own mind from drawing obvious conclusions. The problem was that you (because of her confusing wording) were speaking of her so-called “belief” as though it were a belief in the normal sense, something that should lead to certain expectations about other peoples’ actions. But I expect that it wasn’t any such thing, notwithstanding her unfortunate choice of words.
The mathematician and Fields medalist Vladimir Voevodsky on using automated proof assistants in mathematics:
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From a March 26, 2014 talk. Slides available here.