What does this look like to you?

It is a cave, with stalagmites and stalactites, but, very probably, your first thought was “mouth,” and, also very probably, even knowing that it is a cave, and even knowing that mouths are very rarely brown with orange teeth, it still looks like a remarkably mouthy and fangy cave.

That is because, on the African savanna a hundred thousand years ago it was much better for our ancestors to mistake an innocuous object for something toothy and lethal than vice versa. Those that optimistically saw huge hungry maws and thought “probably nothing to worry about” tended to make a discrete exit from the gene pool, whereas those that pessimistically saw danger everywhere, even when it wasn’t there, did a lot of unnecessary running away, but lived long enough to have children.  In other words, we have evolved a tendency to err on the side of caution.  This is just one example of a more general point: that we have evolved an inherent preference for beliefs that are beneficial to us (from an evolutionary perspective).

Another Example

Along similar lines, the following diagram may not look like much to you.

But if you re-arrange it a bit so that you get the diagram below, then you see a face and nothing else.

Natural selection has wired you up to interpret your sensory information in a very specific way, a way that you do not have control of. You cannot not see the face.

So What?

This would not be a problem if we were as smart as we pretend to be. Sadly, though, we are not very logical and what we call common sense is actually not that common. As a result, when trying to decide what to believe, we tend to over-rely on what feels right, even though what feels right is often driven by natural selection telling us what it would be helpful to believe, not what is correct.
If we can understand which beliefs are made particularly enticing to us because of our evolutionary upbringing (we shall call these our “primal belief preferences,” or “primal beliefs” for short) then we can strip away those distractions, allowing us to have a more meaningful discussion about what we should believe.

Proposal

That people should believe certain things is an unpopular suggestion. It is generally felt that people have to be free to believe what they want, that their beliefs are their business, and others should not interfere.

This might be good guidance if the goal is to ensure that dinner conversations are pleasant, but, when looking at beliefs about life’s big questions, it is possible to say with confidence that some beliefs are genuinely better than others.  As a not-that-controversial example:

Is the Earth flat or round? 

This was once a big question with considerable uncertainty surrounding it, and even when evidence for roundness started to accumulate (as far back as Aristotle), there was resistance to the idea because we experience a flat Earth; it fits our internal model of how everything works.  These days people are, of course, welcome to believe in a flat Earth, but we might not want to put those people in charge of our finances, our children, or the world economy.  It may be that they are right, and the massive amount of supporting evidence could be wrong (perhaps, for instance, we are actually living in a matrix-like virtual world where nothing is as it seems), but the flat-Earth belief is now clearly inferior to the round-Earth view.  We should all believe that the Earth is round because that view (given all of the supporting evidence) is most likely to be true.

This website proposes that, if you first remove the distractions of our primal beliefs, and then gather up the best, most accurate information on Life’s Biggest Questions, we can suggest which beliefs are more likely to be correct than others.  

We can suggest what people should believe, in other words.

To be clear, though, these suggestions are not guaranteed to be right (nothing is certain after all), but currently, they are the rational choice given the evidence that we have today.