Comment by placebo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by placebo | Hacker News Reader

I'd suggest the following method to those who have the courage to remove crony beliefs:

First, ask yourself "Can I clearly articulate and convey my belief, both to myself and to others?"

Continue to the next step only after you can answer the above with definite "Yes".

Next, ask yourself: "What evidence would make me change my mind about this belief?"

If the answer is "practically none" then you have discovered a crony belief.

If the evidence shows up and as a result you just move the goalposts to keep the original belief, then you are still infected...

We all need to model reality to survive. The problems begin when we worship the model instead of the reality it is meant to approximate. Any belief is a model that we are invested in and can have various levels of "staying power". A Zen (or other spiritual practitioner) would tell you that strongest of those and the one we usually are most invested in is the belief of a believer...

The best antidote to crony or otherwise any false beliefs is deciding the benefit of uncovering of what is True is more important than any other benefit.

All the above of course is a belief as well, which I will gladly change given a good counter argument/evidence :)

Some beliefs feel abstract enough that the answer to "what evidence would make me change my mind?" just conjures question marks.

If I believe that "it is good to reduce net human suffering so others can live fulfilling lives" I'm not sure what evidence there is to give to refute. Some beliefs are "it should" rather than "it is" and in those cases it feels like they fail the crony belief sniff test just as a category.

> If I believe that "it is good to reduce net human suffering so others can live fulfilling lives" I'm not sure what evidence there is to give to refute

I think that if an argument is clear, one can always think of counter-evidence or construct at least a hypothetical experiment which can test it.

Ultimately though, my (probably controversial) answer to increasingly abstract ethical questions would be that when the goal is to find what is True then reducing suffering (human or other) as well as other ethical endeavors becomes a necessary by-product.

Beliefs don't have to be arguments though, they don't need to be thoughts you reasoned yourself into.

I saw people in distress -> I thought "that doesn't look fun, I could try to minimize that" -> belief formed.

I struggle to find a devil's advocate position for this let alone any utility in doing so.

See, you've just discovered what the article calls a crony belief.

The answer is that this is not a factual statement about reality. It's a statement about ethics - is this ethical according to your ethical system and beliefs? Ethical beliefs are subjective and always boil down to "I feel this is good".

So this is really a question about what emotions you feel.

It's obviously not a factual statement about reality though, it's a personal belief. At most that belief acts as a target to reach in an eventually-consistent type of manner.

I'm struggling to find the purpose of the article, it seems like beliefs of any nature can occupy the title "crony"?

Ethical arguments are often shorthand that skip the steps of observing humans and their emotions and taking some of them as givens.

An ethical framework does the epistemological work of observing what humans are and how they feel and behave in various situations and forming generalizations that hopefully aren't too wrong.

This is why arguing ethics across ethical frameworks is so frustrating; the semantics aren't compatible enough.

>"it is good to reduce net human suffering so others can live fulfilling lives"

This belief makes you very approachable, more than if you didn't believe it.

I guess to undo that belief you'd have to move to an environment where that wasn't rewarded.

I don't think you're wrong, but my basic values, such as "all citizens should have human rights" would be discovered as "a crony belief". And are you suggesting that I therefor rid myself of it?

First, not all crony beliefs have to be necessarily false :)

But seriously - if you are presented with evidence that when not all citizens have human rights then everyone is more well-off and happier than when all citizens have human rights, and after finding no errors in the data or logic, will you automatically dismiss it or reassess your belief?

If you would reassess your belief then it's not a crony belief. Of course, you might never need to reassess it, but being open to the possibility that it might need rethinking is what keeps it from being a crony belief

> if you are presented with evidence that when not all citizens have human rights then everyone is more well-off and happier

I simply do not believe that anyone would be "more well-off and happier" by themselves being stripped of the protection afforded by their own human rights. This is a contradiction in terms.

Argument against human rights are always targeted at some powerless underclass, such as immigrants or non-citizens, who are felt not worthy of this protection. The person making this argument typically feels that the leopard would surely never eat _their_ privileged face, but would only punish, you know, _those people_.

It depends on what you mean by "human rights". Non Western countries often complain (with some justification) that when Western countries promote "human rights" they are really just promoting Western culture with its emphasis on the needs of the individual over the needs of the group.

> …if you are presented with evidence that when not all citizens have human rights then everyone is more well-off and happier than when all citizens have human rights, and after finding no errors in the data or logic, will you automatically dismiss it or reassess your belief?

Isn't this just a battle of crony beliefs? The crony belief in rights vs the crony belief that people aught to be more well off and happier.

The crony belief that people aught to be more well off and happier should be addressed separately. Claiming it as a true statement is of course problematic (especially "aught to"), but I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this statement which an HN comment is too small to contain ;)

Kidding aside, as I mentioned earlier I suggest the antidote to crony or any other false beliefs is an uncompromising and unrelenting skepticism in every belief. This neti-neti approach can continue until what remains is not a belief anymore, but a recognition of something that is prior to any belief.

agreed, one would need to consider _who_ benefits. If the belief is one of vanity, then it might be worth removing. Believing that all 'citizens have rights' is reasonable and ultimately of benefit to all concerned, so something worth holding onto. At the end of the day, its about flexibility and an openness to see these beliefs for what they really are and to change them as needed.

It indeed is a crony belief. My solution was basically to say to myself "I'll a adopt 'be ethical' as a principle because the alternative is a dangerous path to be on and makes me uneasy".

It's actually very easy to do this.

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