Why do people believe true things?

https://www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/why-do-people-believe-true-things

by Michelangelo11 • 2 years ago

50 56 2 years ago

conspicuouscognition.com

djaouen• 2 years ago

Uhhh, what? Do experience and rationality not count here?

pdonis2• 2 years ago

Do experience and rationality not count here?

Bear in mind that the title question actually has (as the article makes clear) a crucial qualifier: the question is why people believe true things "beyond their immediate material and social environment". In other words, in the domain where experience and rationality obviously work--the immediate material and social environment--it is not surprising that people believe true things, because believing true things in that domain has obvious and immediate survival value. It's when you go beyond that domain, to things which don't have any clear, immediate connection to one's daily life and survival, that believing true things is surprising--because, as the article points out, the default state of almost all humans who have ever lived is the opposite.

ajkjk3• 2 years ago

This is being dense for no reason. 'Why is there poverty? ' means 'Why is there poverty [when there could not be]?', obviously. Same with every other question they pretend to be surprised by an inverse formulation of.

Sakos• 2 years ago

This is unreasonably dismissive of a very interesting article about where our beliefs and our "knowledge" of the world comes from. HN is supposed to be a place where we try to learn more about the world and our understanding of that world. But if an article becomes a tiny bit philosophical, people go all "nuh-uh, don't want to think about this at all".

What is this epistemological laziness?

At a time where even the most basic truths have become deeply polarised, political issues, it's important to be able to think about how we arrive at what we "know". Because it's something we're constantly struggling with, whether consciously or not. And if you're not conscious of this struggle, then you're just allowing yourself to be dragged along with whatever tide "seems" rational to you or "feels right".

empath754• 2 years ago

Anything on Hacker News that requires more than 30 seconds of attention usually starts off with dismissive hot takes.

ajkjk3• 2 years ago

My reply was not that I did not want to think about it! I thought that the article was bad at thinking about it. I like philosophy, but there's still such a thing as bad philosophy and this is, imo, it.

card_zero4• 2 years ago

I wonder if this even is a time where basic truths have become deeply polarised. The article kind of implies "it was ever thus".

mistermann2• 2 years ago

What is this epistemological laziness?

It would be hilarious if this was the answer to the question of why we have poverty. It would not surprise me at all.

Oh, and for your question: it is our culture. Paying no mind to epistemology most of the time (if not considering the very concept hilarious) is what Westerners do.

BriggyDwiggs423• 2 years ago

What are you even trying to say?

trackofalljades• 2 years ago

They're trying to say that they've never studied philosophy, or perhaps even discrete mathematics, and possibly that they don't understand the inherent value in breaking down and very methodically and rationally trying to explain ideas or answer questions that may seem "obvious."

alphazard• 2 years ago

This is actually a piece about social justice.

As it relates to the title: basically the author doesn't understand why altruism was difficult for evolutionary biologists and game theorists to explain, and instead of learning about those fields and the questions they raised then answered, they call for an "explanatory inversion" where their own beliefs are correct by default.

The titular question is maybe only interesting if you've been steeping in post-modernism for too many semesters and are trying to blow some epistemic bubbles to see which way is up. It's worth noticing that a rational mind can believe an unlimited amount of true things without needing to un-believe anything. The same is not true for non-truths. Non-truths conflict with truths and other non-truths.

GavinMcG• 2 years ago

a rational mind can believe an unlimited amount of true things without needing to in-believe anything

Sure, if minds were logic engines pre-loaded with true axioms. But none of us believes only true things from the get-go, so the capability of a mythical “rational mind” doesn’t offer much guidance for humans who need to decide whether or not to discard an existing belief.

BriggyDwiggs423• 2 years ago

Did you finish the article? The author clearly disagrees with the assertion that people are rational actors.

DiggyJohnson• 2 years ago

How could this reply possibly make sense in light of GP’s point? Genuinely what is the connection?

ordu• 2 years ago

basically the author doesn't understand why altruism was difficult for evolutionary biologists and game theorists to explain

The author doesn't say that altruism was easy to explain, what he says is that the very idea to start explaining altruism is not obvious for many.

The titular question is maybe only interesting if you've been steeping in post-modernism for too many semesters and are trying to blow some epistemic bubbles to see which way is up.

Oh no, not only that. I'm very interested in the topic. In explanatory inverted topic and in not inverted: why people believe lies and why people believe truths. Or sometimes I replace "why" with "how" in these questions, because sometimes I'm really baffled at people's ability to ignore evidence, and sometimes I seek rational tools to deal with some problems.

Moreover I totally agree with the premise that people believing bullshit is their default state. Frans de Waal wrote a lot about primates and from that follows the idea that "political thinking" (motivated reasoning, self-aggrandizement, status-seeking, tribalism, and social conformity) is what we got from evolution. Everything else, like rational reasoning, scientific method, calculus are artificial cultural things. You can reason rationally if you learned how to, but even then your rational thoughts will run on a substrate that is evolutionary tuned for self-aggrandizement, status-seeking, tribalism, and social conformity.

But I also like the article because the very idea of the explanatory inversion is new for me and it makes sense. It is possible, that what is new for me is the term to refer to the already known phenomena, but I'm not sure. I need to think more about it.

The author approach makes absolute sense if you want to persuade other people to believe "true" things. You need to stop thinking about why your beliefs are true, and start thinking about why people resist persuasion. BTW I can recommend a book about it: How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion.[1]

It's worth noticing that a rational mind can

There are no rational minds in the Universe. Or at least we don't know any.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/How-Minds-Change-Surprising-Persuasio...

oivey• 2 years ago

Most of the article isn’t even about altruism. It is only an example. The author doesn’t take any particular position. Quoting from near the end:

The truth is not self-evident. Given this, those who claim to know the truth, including misinformation researchers, should have more intellectual humility than they often have.

Might work for you, too.

peterweyand38• 2 years ago

Well. Except for those true things that are contradictory with other true things. Like quantum mechanics and Newtonian physics.

Or any one of the open questions that exist in science of the same sort - this is true in chemistry but not biology, but seems to be true in their own reference frame. This creature wanted to do this versus had a chemical reaction. So are free will and determinism not true because they conflict? What if I observe one or the other? Does that make it more or less true because I'm the observer? Or both or neither?

And not all non- truths conflict with all other non-truths, just some of them. Not to mention the bit about a rational mind believing true things is nonsensical unless you make that your definition of truth. Given an unlimited amount of truths there will be some incredibly large (smaller infinite) subset that conflict.

I just gave two interrelated examples off the top of my head.

card_zero4• 2 years ago

No, it was a fair point, just over-optimistic in regard to absolute truth. We can't be certain that anybody believes, knows, or has even heard of, any true things. However, we're pretty good at collecting together a widely-believed set of ideas where none of those ideas conflict with any of the others so far, at least not in most people's conscious awareness apart from in the minds of a few stray dissidents who may turn out to be brilliant or wackjobs. Once in a while a popular idea is shown to conflict with the rest and we have to revise our sketchy collection of tentative theories, to keep them all in apparent agreement and hence looking true. That's rational.

Sometimes, as in physics, bashing them all into line is beyond anyone's ability, for now.

pdonis2• 2 years ago

Except for those true things that are contradictory with other true things. Like quantum mechanics and Newtonian physics.

Neither of these things are true. Both are models. As the saying goes, all models are wrong but some are useful.

card_zero4• 2 years ago

No it isn't. It's about misinformation. (It starts with "poverty is the default", then discusses default states generally, working round to "misinformation is the default".)

Near the end it makes the proposal that when faced with a lying rogue, although we should robustly defend the value of rationality, we should also allow that the rogue may be a) more correct than we know, b) somewhat honest although wrong, and c) only human. There a hint of "... but I will defend to the death your right to say it."*

This is the final paragraph:

Given this, the real epistemic challenge for the twenty-first century is not to combat misinformation, except insofar as doing this helps us achieve a deeper, more fundamental goal: maintaining and improving our best epistemic norms and institutions, and winning trust in, and conformity to, them.

*I wondered who said this: Wikiquote says it was one Evelyn Beatrice Hall, penname Stephen G. Tallentyre, very loosely paraphrasing Voltaire.

empath754• 2 years ago

This is basically just a reiteration of Hobbes (life in the natural state of man is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short".)

But still, it is interesting to consider that the three phenomena he talks about -- poverty, crime, and ignorance -- are now mostly thought of as aberrations from the norm that needed to be eliminated, when in fact they're the state that the vast, overwhelming majority of humans in history were born, lived and died in.

If you do think of the problems in the reverse way -- how do we _increase wealth_, and _increase cooperation_ and _increase knowledge, they're all become sort of the _same problem_ -- ie: how do we as a society increase the benefits of cooperation with each other? You see the problem of tackling crime not as a problem of devising the correct punishment scheme, but as devising a way such that the benefits of cooperation outweigh the benefits of free riding.

stonethrowaway• 2 years ago

Where can I read more of this Hobbes?

empath754• 2 years ago

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Leviathan

zabzonk3• 2 years ago

wikipedia "hobbes" and "leviathan"

api• 2 years ago

It seems like Hobbes could be restated thermodynamically: the lowest energy highest disorder state is the most likely and therefore the default.

Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short -- those are all low energy high entropy states.

The opposite of solitary is cooperating and connecting and that's provably difficult to achieve (see game theory). Brutish is also a game theoretic "all defect" scenario which is very likely. Cooperation and peace are harder to achieve and require more sophisticated game playing strategies that integrate results over multiple iterations.

Poor, nasty, and short describes low energy high disorder states.

So ultimately the question is how and why do we exceed the bare minimum, because exceeding the bare minimum state required for survival and procreation is pretty much the definition of a great or exceptional society or period of history.

anotherape3• 2 years ago

Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short -- those are all low energy high entropy states.

Solitary is high entropy for early humans. People cannot survive alone (lets say even with mating partner but no tribe equals alone). At least not without training. Tribe ejection is a severe punishment.

Disjoint tribes might be the low entropy?

zabzonk3• 2 years ago

horribly unreadable. i really don't know where to start criticising this, but "why is there poverty?" - really?

empath754• 2 years ago

If you didn't read it why are you commenting on it? We should probably just delete this entire comment section and start over.

zabzonk3• 2 years ago

i did read it, with great difficulty - that does not make it basically unreadable

pinkmuffinere2• 2 years ago

The example question "Why is there poverty" is presented as an example of a childish question. In the limited criticism you provide, I think you're actually agreeing with the author.

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 2 years ago

Because humans were born naked onto a planet with no material wealth until they started creating it for themselves? That, by the way, is the very definition of absolute objective poverty.

Is this not plainly obvious even to small children?

didgetmaster3• 2 years ago

Is anyone else troubled by the historical graph of global GDP? It looks to me like your typical deceptive hockey stick graph specifically design to shock the public.

First, GDP is a total amount, not a per-capita figure. The population has grown dramatically, so even if everyone throughout history was equally wealthy, the graph would still have the same general shape.

Second, even though the scale on the left side is equally divided into $20T increments; going from 0 to $20T is not the same as going from $20T to $40T. Exponential growth is required to achieve the first milestone. A mere doubling gets you to the second one.

amalcon• 2 years ago

If you go to their source, you also see that there are only 3 data points in the first 75% of the graph. This makes sense, since obviously global GDP can only be very roughly estimated in e.g. 1000AD.

It kind of raises the question of whether GDP is even a coherent concept in 1000AD. However, the post-1500 numbers are going to be at least somewhat reliable, and can be inspected at the source:

  1500: 502.98G
  1600: 671.14G (0.29% annualized growth)
  1700: 751.59G (0.11%)
  1820: 1.40T (0.52%)
  1850: 1.85T (0.93%)
  1870: 2.35T (1.2%)
  1900: 4.19T (2.9%)
  (skipping a bunch because it's pretty high res now)
  2000: 68.44 (2.8%)

There are periods of faster and slower growth in those years -- most evidently, growth slowed between 1940 and 1950 for geopolitical reasons -- but that's at least the average.

There is clearly something interesting going on between 1700 and 1900, with the significantly positive second derivative. However, that interesting thing is called the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution fits the article's narrative pretty well, and it's probably safe to assume their readers are aware of it. I don't know why they went this route rather than just pointing to the industrial revolution as evidence.

abdullahkhalids• 2 years ago

In the past, more than today, a lot of material benefits to people were provided via baked in social relations and other ways of life, and not via monetary exchange. For example, paying someone to take care of your kids is not something that happened when extended families lived with each. This was not included in past (or today's gdp). Similarly, if you grow part of your own food, then that's not included in the gdp.

Past estimates of GDP largely only account for monetary exchanges, and not for stuff like the above. So they grossly underestimate how "wealthy" people were. I have seen several recent papers that try to correct for this.

anotherape3• 2 years ago

Yeah also it is a measure of money not wealth.

Daycare increases GDP. Grandma doesn't.

That is probably a small issue but worth mentioning. I am more convinced when people point out potential weaknesses in their argument but few do this.

saghm2• 2 years ago

Agreed, that was the weirdest part of the article for me. Given that the example of "why is there poverty?" was given as coming from a child in school, I think the author also is misunderstanding what the question even was by using a definition of "poverty" that's defined entirely by modern standards and applying it historically. If a child asked that question, telling them "it's the default state because back 1000 years ago even royalty were poor by our standards" doesn't help them understand what they actually wanted to know, which is "why do some people have a less money than others?". This isn't a uniquely modern phenomenon (although the exact distribution over time of course isn't static). Reframing the question based on an academic definition of "poverty" might be technically correct, but it's not helpful in the context it was asked.

Ironically, the author seems quite smug about knowing better, saying "It is a childish question, one which betrays a naive, uninformed understanding of economics and history". It seems more like they betrayed a naive, uninformed understanding of children to so grossly miss the point of what they were actually asking. If their reaction to an intellectually curious child is to dunk on them for not precisely framing their question according to academic definitions of terms, it's not surprising that they think "ignorance and misrepresentations" are the "default state of humanity".

didgetmaster3• 2 years ago

My definition of poverty has been that you do not have enough money to meet the basic needs of yourself and your family if you have one. It is not just because you have less than others.

armada651• 2 years ago

Also just because the GDP is low doesn't mean everyone is living below the poverty line. Even with a low GDP a king can still hoard most of the wealth and live in luxury. It's puzzling why the writer would assume an equal distribution of wealth in the age of kings and aristocrats of all things.

jawns• 2 years ago

If "Why do people believe true things?" tickles your brain, wait until you try "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

Especially once you go beyond the surface-level responses that try to rely on things like particle physics. It is fundamentally a philosophical question, not a science question.

anotherape3• 2 years ago

Would love some references for that to get started.

The question must touch on the nature of intelligence and conscious experience. How that connects to mathematics (and why even mathematics!)

card_zero4• 2 years ago

If you want to look it up on Wikipedia, the relevant page is "Why is there anything at all?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_is_there_anything_at_all%3...

kkfx• 2 years ago

Ancient Greek's have two separate world for "knowledge": doxa and gnosis. Doxa is the practical, notional ability of doing things, gnosis is the understatement of things.

Today schools push doxa and try to their best to avoid gnosis and even speculation about gnosis. They form useful idiots https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef... or Ford-model stereotypical workers, not acculturated citizens.

As a result modern society is practically ignorant as the middle-age societies, only most does not know that because they think knowledge is only doxa.

woopsn• 2 years ago

What more is there to say than philosophy, the social sciences, life sciences, computer science and mathematics, education and journalism schools have said about this already. Modern media culture has been well characterized since the 60s - "we are back in the acoustic space of tribal pre-literate society".

mistermann2• 2 years ago

"Based on our extensive academic knowledge, what actions could be taken to substantially moderate the problems humanity experiences from our shortcomings in this area?" is physically possible to say, but it may not be metaphysically possible (to say, and follow up on).

Xen9• 2 years ago

Humans probably believe in true things because lack of conception of logic would lead to cognitive retardation. It is also possible to say that it is impossible to not to believe in true things, because belief may be a definition of the truth. Finally, truth may not really be related to belief at all very directly: for example Bayesian, quantum, fuzzy logics can have somewhat strange conceptions of truth—modelling quantum phenomena gets even stranger. Yet the most interesting interpretation of truth is not, unlike many of our times would like to have believed (!!!), related to Gödel but Embeddes Agency which models the behaviour of an agent under various environments.

Why do people believe true things?

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