This post is titled "The puzzle of faith and belief". But there appears to be nothing in it that describes something as a puzzle, or describes something that's obviously puzzling, or anything like that. What is the puzzle?
More generally, it's not very clear what the point of this post is. I will go further and say that it appears to be deliberately not very clear what the point is: it feels as if the author is deliberately leaving the actual point unstated. The impression I get, in fact, is that the author suspects that stating the point expli
I have say I didn't find this post particularly useful.
On my first reading, I was having some difficultly understanding what point you were making. You seem to use some words or phrases in highly non-standard ways, I still have no idea what some sentences like "Its fairly easy to make sense on a mid-level" mean. I get the general impression of a post by someone whose first language isn't English, or who didn't proofread their own work, and that makes reading it a chore, not predisposing me to like it. Cleaning the post up and using more simpl...
Shannon, it seems pretty clear from the reaction that either the point you are trying to make is invalid, or you are doing a really poor job making it. If you are absolutely sure it's the latter, consider rewriting the post from scratch in a way that matches your intended audience.
Like gjm, I don't understand what the point of this post is. All is see is playing with words and making them stretch into uncomfortable positions -- something that doesn't seem all that useful.
In the world of science, I can reason by the results. My microwave oven works. What is the chance it would work, if we got physics wrong?
I believe the base rate of "a random machine doing seemingly miraculous things" is pretty low, otherwise we would be surrounded by magical machines built on theories often incompatible with the official physics. And I mean, magical machines that would work as obviously and reliably as my microwave oven does, or as my mobile phone does... not just something supposedly providing some invisble and hard-to-measure e...
men of science tend to over-extrapolate. Ie: that your microwave works means certain things, which are more probable to relate to other certain things. However, you can take these chains of logic out very far to where they become very flimsy
In other words: Physics is highly reliable. You believe in the standard scientific explanation of physics. This creates a feeling of great confidence in "what you believe"... and then you are prone to apply this confidence mistakenly to everything that seems to belong to the literary genre of science. -- Even if the scientific field is not as reliable as physics. Or if you are not an expert in the given field, so regardless of the reliability of the field itself, your understanding of what the field says is unreliable.
I know a few people like this... who have a degree in computer science, are good at maths, have read a few popular science books on physics... which makes them believe they are "experts on science" in general... and then they produce laughable simplifications of psychology, and crackpot theories of evolution. Everything they say follows "logically" from their long and convoluted thought chains. Everything you say, even if it is standard science 101, they dismiss as not sufficiently Popper-approved.
I think that there is quite a lot that is implicit if you are reading this from an open rather than defensive perspective.
One thing that I have noticed - as a general rule - is that, in any debate, no two debaters will ever agree on what is implicit in any argument. Anything that needs to be said, that forms an important part of the desired point, pretty much has to be stated explicitly, or most of the readers will fail to notice it.
Or, to put it another way; I, too, agree that your post would be much improved if you were a lot more explicit about precisely what you meant.
Voted up for "One thing that I have noticed - as a general rule - is that, in any debate, no two debaters will ever agree on what is implicit in any argument.".
You speak of putting your trust in "a guru and a bunch of other people" as if it's somehow utterly opposed to the alternative of independently verifying particle physics. That would be the case if we were limited to science alone, forced to explicitly test each and every hypothesis in a controlled way. No, I have not conducted independent, replicated studies with p < 0.05 that verify that the scientific consensus is a reasonably accurate picture of reality.
But, as a rationalist - looking at all evidence, not just the clean, isolated stuff th...
My conclusion: there might be an interesting and useful post to be written about how epistemic rationality and techniques for coping with ape-brain intersect, and ShannonFriedman might be capable of writing it. Not there yet, though.
tl;dr: No, the subject of the site is wider than that.
Long version: IIRC, EY originally conceived of rationality as comprising two relatively distinct domains: epistemic rationality, the art and science of ensuring the map reflects the territory, and instrumental rationality, the art and science of making decisions and taking actions that constrain the future state of the universe according to one's goals. Around the time of the fork of CFAR off of SIAI-that-was, EY had expanded his conception of rationality to include a third domain: human rationality, the art and science of coping with ape-brain.
In my view, these three domains have core subject matter and interfacial subject matter: the core of epistemic rationality is Bayesian epistemology; the core of instrumental rationality is expected utility optimization; the core of human rationality is Thinking, Fast and Slow and construal level theory. At the interface of epistemic and instrumental rationality sit topics like explore/exploit trade-offs and value-of-information calculations; at the interface of epistemic rationality and human rationality sit topics like belief vs. alief, heuristics and biases, and practical techniques for updating on and responding to new information in ways large and small; at the interface of instrumental rationality and human rationality sit topics like goal factoring/funging and habit formation; and right at the intersection of all three, I would locate techniques like implementing tight feedback loops.
Re the reasons to get out of bed:
I suspect that an average person does not put nearly as much time or effort thinking it through every morning. We are creatures of habit, and if your System 1 decides you should get up, up you get. A typical conscious thought would be like "alarm... silence it... weekday? time to follow the weekday routine... weekend? maybe I can sleep in a little".
Your description of beliefs seems severely skewed toward hedonistic reasoning. Many who even bother thinking about it get up out of duty, or for deontological reasons.
The Puzzle of Faith and Belief
Faith and Belief are different words for talking about the concepts of Perspective and Point of view.
When you use the word Perspective v.s. Faith, you are attaching slightly different connotations to the same concept.
Perspective is a more rationalist way of seeing the different ways of looking at the world. The associations with it are scientific, grounded, and well defined.
Faith is the more intuitive way of seeing the different ways of looking at reality. I’m more include to use the word “reality” than “the world” even in defining it. The word itself is more open/less well defined.
Dictionary definitions from Google for the aspects of these words that I am referring to:
Perspective: a particular attitude toward or way of regarding something; a point of view.
Faith: a strongly held belief or theory.
Belief: something one accepts as true or real; a firmly held opinion or conviction.
Point of View: a particular attitude or way of considering a matter.
Why does all this matter?
It matters because they are more or less all the same thing, everyone is biased, and people tend to nit pick the different versions in order to justify their own biases.
Virtually no one has any solid grounding for their Perspective, Faith, Belief, or Point of View.
There are different ways in which people delude themselves into feeling safe and comfortable in the points of view, beliefs, and perspectives. Its fairly easy to make sense on a mid-level. You can join a consensus reality, where everyone around you has certain things they also agree with, and people who they believe are clearly right, and this feels comforting. But how many people really question the doctrine? How many people verify the origin?
Are you ultimately putting your trust in a guru and a bunch of other people, or have you verified the physics and math yourself?
If you have not verified the physics and math and the origin yourself of something which you are assuming to be true, down to the level of particle physics:
This is faith.
Even if you are a myers-briggs INTP, and you don’t feel that you “strongly” hold beliefs, you are in action every day. You are choosing to do, and to not do things. Whether you hold your beliefs loosely or tightly, everything you do always is impacted by them.
Whether or not you choose to get out of bed in the morning is absolutely a matter of faith. You have faith that your life will be better if you do. There are a number of reasons why:
1. You believe the hunger you feel or eventually will feel from not eating will go away if you go get food and put it in your mouth.
2. You believe that you need to do something in order to maintain the lifestyle in which you will continue to have a bed to sleep on.
3. You believe that taking care of 1 & 2 will ultimately cause your feeling state to be better than if you do not address them, and you desire to not suffer.
4. You likely have much more inspiring beliefs than 1, 2, and 3, but those differ more from person to person and are harder to nail accurately for the majority in a group of many thousands of people.
Again, why does this matter?
It matters because perspective, point of view, faith, and belief, are power.
What I have found working as a business coach and anxiety specialist for seven years is the degree to how powerful these things are. As someone with a rationalist influence, I am the only coach I know who takes and publishes statistics on my clients. While they are not anywhere near as thorough as I would like, the signal is very very strong. While I got a 50% increase for mood as according to moodscope.com in 2013, I’m up to about a 78% increase in 2014. The increase in mood is directly correlated with increase in productivity. I consider this to be a chicken and egg sort of relationship - improving one improves the other, and its hard to say which is cause and which is effect.
How do I get these sorts of results simply by working with the concepts referred to in this post?
Mostly just by eliminating false beliefs, and replacing them with more empowering true beliefs. The deal is, no one is unbiased - whether they are a believer in the biases associated with “point of view” or a believer in biases associated with “faith” is unbiased. Give me 30 minutes of your time, and you will learn things you did not already know.
I am not so charismatic that I can plant beliefs in anyone that they do not see as true. Nor would I want to be. I am simply able to identify the biases people have and reveal them in a way that is generally non-threatening, and I am able to point at many alternative beliefs so that people can choose a new system that is more functional for them.
What I have found most interesting doing this work, is the relationship between willingness to change belief/faith/perspective/point of view on many different levels.
Ie:
The more willing someone is to adopt a new perspective on the topic of the benefits of getting out of bed, the more likely that person is to solve the problem and start getting out of bed at the time they desire.
The more willing that person will be to adopt a new perspective on applying for a job, the more likely they are to apply, and the more likely they are to get the job.
The more willing a person is to adopt a new perspective on applying for a job, the more likely the person is to adopt a new perspective on what jobs they can apply for, and the more likely they are to get their dream job.
The more willing a person is to change perspective to the point of getting out of bed, applying for a job, and specifically applying for and getting their dream job, the more likely they are to genuinely question their Faith in the religious/atheist sense, and the more willing they are to take their questioning to the level of particle and quantum physics.
[edit] Summary:
I frequently hear people of a rationalist mindset, who prefer the biases associated with the terms "Perspective" and "Point of View" dismiss the biases associated with the terms "Faith" and "Belief" as inferior.
I've come to see this particular dismissal bias as "A form of Faith." It is a faith that one can use science to justify their actions, that is not actually grounded in science.
The result of this is that there are a lot of people walking around thinking that they are being rational, when really, they are doing more or less what Viliam_Bur describes in this comment.
I have spent many years now talking in depth to many clients, including hundreds of rationalists. What I've found is that the degree of people's willingness to be open to introspection on this topic, and to realize just how much of their so called "rational" beliefs are actually based on faith, and their willingness to start correcting in order to seek truth more effectively with this understanding, determines their degree of success in being able to update their belief systems in order to get what they want in life.
Once you realize that you are operating a faith based system, then you can optimize it as a faith based system, rather than operating under the false belief that it is grounded in science.
In truth, all of the systems all of us use are a combination of faith and science. We can determine a lot from science, but virtually no one takes it to the level of "grounded," where they really understand how the science works at the core. Even physics Ph.Ds don't know everything, let alone the people who base their beliefs on what the physics Ph.Ds say.
So, if you truly want to be rational, it makes the most sense to realize what the system is that you are actually using, and to optimize it accordingly. Either go to the root of the science, and tune it that way, or tune it as a faith based system, and follow the signal of "what makes the most sense to put my faith into?"
The lowest hanging fruit in tuning your system is actually at the roots, assuming you have the time and energy to really dig into the research, and/or that you have a good guide who you trust. Asking the questions of "Why do I believe what I do?" and "Why do I do what I do?" at a very fundamental level, without the assumption that you already know, is extremely powerful.
The testimonials and statistics I linked above are those I have collected personally showing results of what happens as you do this sort of grounding of your belief systems. The way in which you do it is to start questioning how grounded in science your assumptions actually are, and to release the attachment you have to thinking that you are less wrong because you are science based.
men of science tend to over-extrapolate. Ie: that your microwave works means certain things, which are more probable to relate to other certain things. However, you can take these chains of logic out very far to where they become very flimsy
In other words: Physics is highly reliable. You believe in the standard scientific explanation of physics. This creates a feeling of great confidence in "what you believe"... and then you are prone to apply this confidence mistakenly to everything that seems to belong to the literary genre of science. -- Even if the scientific field is not as reliable as physics. Or if you are not an expert in the given field, so regardless of the reliability of the field itself, your understanding of what the field says is unreliable.
I know a few people like this... who have a degree in computer science, are good at maths, have read a few popular science books on physics... which makes them believe they are "experts on science" in general... and then they produce laughable simplifications of psychology, and crackpot theories of evolution. Everything they say follows "logically" from their long and convoluted thought chains. Everything you say, even if it is standard science 101, they dismiss as not sufficiently Popper-approved.