Why do people believe true things?
conspicuouscognition.com
conspicuouscognition.com
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
Sometimes, as in physics, bashing them all into line is beyond anyone's ability, for now.
Neither of these things are true. Both are models. As the saying goes, all models are wrong but some are useful.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
It is not clear in the article if barter was considered in past GDP numbers (e.g. "I'll trade you my cow for the wagon you built.") These days everyone works for cash and often pays for services that they could easily do themselves.
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.
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".
> The reason is that nothing is puzzling about poverty. It is humanity's default state. Until very recently, everyone lived in what would now be regarded as shocking poverty. Even the elites—monarchs, aristocrats, and so on—lived in conditions that were appalling relative to the prosperity enjoyed by most people in affluent societies today.
This is what I meant by the author reframing the question to the point where it feels like they completely missed the point. Your definition would be totally compatible with the way I think a child asking "why is there poverty?" is using the word, but I don't see how anyone could argue that "the elites—monarchs, aristocrats, and so on" were completely unable to meet their needs at any point before between the years 1-1500 CE, which the author describes as this:
> The long, flat line that characterises most of human history? That is poverty: crushing, subsistence-level, Malthusian poverty.
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.
The question must touch on the nature of intelligence and conscious experience. How that connects to mathematics (and why even mathematics!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_is_there_anything_at_all%3...
Fun article, reminds me of how much I enjoyed philosophy classes in undergrad
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Is this not plainly obvious even to small children?
It barely existed as a concept in early history.
Poverty in this culture isn't just defined as a lack, but as an unjust experience of relative lack.
And it's loaded with unspoken value judgements - like the common belief that people in poverty shouldn't have an expensive phone, because that's somehow unfair on everyone else.
Why this idea of poverty exists as a concept now, when previously it didn't, is a much more interesting question - and one this piece gets nowhere near addressing, never mind answering.
So this is a very superficial article. You can't ask why people believe true things if you're just going to assume - as the author says no one should, and then does himself - that everyone somehow magically agrees about which truths should be questioned.
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".
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.