Why be Skeptical About What We Want to Believe?

Because if these primal beliefs do not have any evidence or explanatory power (beyond explaining why we feel a certain way) then they are of limited use (and probably only exist because it helped our ancestors survive to believe in them), but they can be a huge distraction in our quest for the most likely and truthful explanations. Many primal beliefs are so strong that our minds keep veering back towards them. Arguments that start: “It feels right to me that…” or “I choose to believe that…” while applicable to our daily life, should be rejected when it comes to the big questions of life.

The Difference between Practical and Philosophical

Don’t Confuse Philosophical and Practical Definitions

For example, by saying that philosophical free will does not exist, we mean that our actions are fully governed by our genetics, our experiences and our environment. There is no other factor (except for possibly a random component). However free will can be considered to exist in a practical sense because the factors that dictate what we do, while well-defined are so numerous and complex, and their interactions so subtle, that our actions are impossible to predict in practice. In other words it seems to all intents and purposes as if our actions are free.
We can’t say that he picked the chips rather than the salad because a certain sequence of genes combined with a bad salad experience 3 years ago (brought to mind by the weather today) fully dictated his actions; rather it seems as if the choice was entirely free.
This thinking should also be applied to good and evil, love and morality. Philosophically they do not exist, but practically they do. The need to believe in the practical version often makes us want to believe in the philosophical version

Should you Trust Intuition or Science (or Neither)?

What is Intuition?

Our brains, like other neural net systems, are very good at identifying patterns, indeed they are very much pattern recognition systems, rather than systems for gathering, cataloging and logically analyzing hard data.
Intuition is our brain recognizing patterns in the world around us that we have seen previously, and inferring that aspects of those prior experiences will apply to the current situation. For example: for Ian, who has seen a rope bridge collapse, his intuition tells him that the bridge that they are crossing is not safe. For Dora, who has crossed that bridge many times without incident, her intuition says it is safe.
Our intuition can also be evolved, in which case it is based not on our personal experiences, but on those of many generations of our ancestors. For example: in early humans, having a slight hesitancy about swimming in lava increased their survival rate, and over the eons that hesitancy became a strong intuition.
Our pattern recognition is so good that we can intuitively identify complex and subtle patterns that we do not consciously identify or even remember. That is when our intuition seems most impressive: it guides us even when we are unaware of the data that it is accessing, the pattern that it is recognizing, to provide that guidance. So impressive does it seem that we have a tendency to apply it even when we should not.

The key point is that intuition is based on our experiences: if we (or our ancestors) have had plenty of exposure to similar scenarios, then our intuition will be helpful in the situation in question. If we have not then it should not be relied on.

So intuition is really useful for issues that we have extensive experience about, issues for which we have built up a large catalog of patterns that can be mapped onto the current issue. But our intuition is NOT useful for issues that we have not had experience of, in which case it may attempt to map patterns that fit poorly. It is in these cases that our intuitions should be treated with extreme skepticism.

For Example

When radium was discovered it made intuitive sense to the Victorians to add it to toothpaste, sweets and suppositories; after all, it gave off energy (being highly radioactive) and we like to feel full of energy. The results were unpleasant to say the least: one great believer in the beneficial properties of radium-based medicine was the subject of a 1932 Wall Street Journal article that had the headline “The radium water worked fine until his jaw came off” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Byers).

It also made perfect sense to the wisest Greeks, Egyptians, and Mayans to combat disease by removing very large quantities of blood. These doctors were not stupid, they were just hooked by the intuitive appeal of the picture that a disease is something bad in the body so it needs to be physically removed somehow; they were just not skeptical enough about their theories.

What about Science?

Science is a systematic method for using evidence to develop knowledge and understanding. It was developed because our intuition is fallible, and without the right methodology, our analyses and conclusions about the world are distorted by a whole range of mental biases.

Since our intuition can be misleading, in determining what you should believe, it is certainly better to rely on science. We still have to be careful here, though, because:

Nothing in the world is absolutely 100% certain
Science is still governed by ever-fallible humans, with all of the cognitive biases that distort their interpretation of results
We must resist the strong urge to cherry pick only supporting data
Skepticism is the correct default setting

Despite this, science remains the best guide that we have for what to believe (it is the best way to overcome our human biases). There are, though, some precautions that need to be taken:

Demand hard scientific evidence where available
Prefer mainstream science to fringe science (more rigorous peer review)
Consider (but do not rely on) the wisdom of crowds – what is the consensus view of those well-informed (not just interested, and perhaps very vocal, parties) on the subject?
Be particularly skeptical of any concepts that we want to believe (a likely sign of our intuition leading us astray)

Further discussions on precautions that need to be taken when using the scientific approach can be found on the page discussing underlying axioms.

Occam’s Razor

One of the most useful rules of thumb for understanding the world is Occam’s razor, which states that the hypothesis that requires the fewest assumptions, the simplest theory, should be assumed to be correct, all else being equal. It makes sense because the simplest explanation has the fewest degrees of freedom, and so is harder to tinker with to fit the facts (and thus, as long as it explains all of the observations, has the greatest probability of being correct). Of course, simple does not mean correct, but it is a good starting point, and a good basis for a default belief.

Provisional Beliefs

In a world where there are no absolute facts, all of our beliefs are only assumptions, provisional placeholders that are the best available choices, but that might be changed in the future when more, better information emerges. We have to have provisional beliefs (such as that the ground is not going to open up and swallow us with every step) to make any progress in this world, and certainly most of them are pretty reliable (the ground is usually pretty solid), but we should not be 100% certain of any of them.

The Improbable Perfect Window

It is incredibly unlikely that we just now happen to be sitting in that tiny window in history that is bounded on one side by the moment of discovery of the perfect solution (for whatever is being considered: the perfect recipe for happiness, weight loss, realizing your potential, or whatever) and on the other by its universal acceptance (where there is no doubt of its truth). With the strong motivation that we all have to find such solutions, and in this current age of global, instant information transfer, this window would be extremely small. After all, we live in an age where, if the uptake of an idea is unhindered (for instance, medical advances are restricted, quite rightly, by regulatory requirements that prevent, for example, someone testing, on a whim, any wild ideas about curing the common cold through repeated violent blows to the nose), it can spread virally in days. If someone discovered that happiness is instantly achievable by eating avocado, while listening to Mozart and applying firm pressure to both ear lobes, we would all be doing it in a week.

We are bombarded every day by people telling us that, finally, after all of these years, they have solved the mysteries of how we can all be healthy, thin, beautiful, and happy, and how we can all have gleaming white teeth, fragrant breath, stain-free clothes and perfectly behaved children. In each case the claim is that we are in the improbable perfect window where the answer has been found, but not everyone yet knows about it. It is possible that they are correct, but it is vastly more likely that any proposed solution is one of the numerous false claims that certain people are highly motivated (by the desire for fame and profit) to propose, and everyone is highly motivated (through our primal belief architecture) to believe. We have been searching for these solutions for eons, with plausible but false proposals generated continually, so the probability that the correct proposal has just now emerged (so recently that it has not yet been widely accepted) is very, very small. This does not mean that any proposal is definitely incorrect, but it does mean that skepticism is the correct stance.

The catch, of course, is that this thinking could also be applied to the proposals in this website. One advantage that these particular proposals have, though, is that they are not based on primal beliefs, so we do not particularly want to believe them; if they are compelling to the reader, then they will be so on their merits, and are thus more likely to be correct.

Maps of Belief

What we should and should not believe

Explanations

On this page: