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Wilka comments on The Wannabe Rational - Less Wrong
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Uh-oh.
I... I don't think I do want to believe in things due to evidence. Not deep down inside.
When choosing my beliefs, I use a more important criterion than mere truth. I'd rather believe, quite simply, in whatever I need to believe in order to be happiest. I maximize utility, not truth.
I am a huge fan of lesswrong, quoting it almost every day to increasingly annoyed friends and relatives, but I am not putting much of what I read there into practice, I must admit. I read it more for entertainment than enlightenment.
And I take notes, for those rare cases in my life where truth actually is more important to my happiness than social conventions: when I encounter a real-world problem that I actually want to solve. This happens less often than you might think.
Have you ever the experience of learning something true that you would rather not have learned? The only type of examples I can think of here (of the top of my head) would be finding out you had an unfaithful lover, or that you were really adopted. But in both case, it seems like the 'unhappiness' you get from learning it would pass and you'd be happy that you found out in the long wrong.
I've heard people say similar things about losing the belief in God - because it could lead to losing (or at least drifting away from) people you hold close, if their belief in God had been an import thing in their relationship to you.
Yes. Three times, in fact. Two of them are of roughly the same class as that one thing floating around, and the third is of a different class and far worse than the other two (involving life insurance and charity: you'll find it if you look).