Beliefs which cannot be updated aren't useful, but not all beliefs which might reasonably form a "worldview" are un-Bayesian. Maybe a better way to talk about worldviews is to think about beliefs which are highly depended upon; beliefs which, if they were updated, would also cause huge re-updates of lots of beliefs farther down the dependency graph.
Yes.
Beliefs have hierarchy, and some are more top-level than others. One of the most top-level beliefs being:
If you give high weight to 1, then 2 follows and is strengthened, and this naturally guides your search for explanations for mysteries. A top-level belief sends down a massive cascade of priors that can effect how you interpret everything else.
If you hold the negation of 1 and or 2 as top-level beliefs then you look for natural explanations for everything. Arguably the negation of 'goddidit' as a top-level belief was a major boon to science because it tends to align with ockham's razor.
But at the end of the day it's not inherently irrational to hold these top-level beliefs. Francis Crick for instance looked at the origin of life problem and decided an unnatural explanation involving a superintelligence (alien) was actually a better fit.
A worldview comes into play when one jumps to #3 with Miller-Urey because it fits with one's top-level priors. Our brain is built around hierarchical induction, so we always have top-level biases. This isn't really an inherent weakness as there probably is no better (more efficient) way to do it. But it is still something to be aware of.
But at the end of the day it's not inherently irrational to hold these top-level beliefs. Francis Crick for instance...
But, I don't think Crick was talking about a "vast superintelligence". In his paper, he talks about extraterrestrials sending out unmanned long-range spacecraft, not anything requiring what I think he or you would call superintelligence. In fact, he predicted that we would have that technology within "a few decades", though rocket science isn't among his many fields of expertise so I take that with a grain of salt.
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Atheists trying to justify themselves often find themselves asked to replace religion. “If there’s no God, what’s your system of morality?” “How did the Universe begin?” “How do you explain the existence of eyes?” “How do you find meaning in life?” And the poor atheist, after one question too many, is forced to say “I don’t know.” After all, he’s not a philosopher, cosmologist, psychologist, and evolutionary biologist rolled into one. And even they don’t have all the answers.
But the atheist, if he retains his composure, can say, “I don’t know, but so what? There’s still something that doesn’t make sense about what you learned in Sunday school. There’s still something wrong with your religion. The fact that I don’t know everything won’t make the problem go away.”
What I want to emphasize here, even though it may be elementary, is that it can be valuable and accurate to say something’s wrong even when you don’t have a full solution or a replacement.
Consider political radicals. Marxists, libertarians, anarchists, greens, John Birchers. Radicals are diverse in their political theories, but they have one critical commonality: they think something’s wrong with the status quo. And that means, in practice, that different kinds of radicals sometimes sound similar, because they’re the ones who criticize the current practices of the current government and society. And it’s in criticizing that radicals make the strongest arguments, I think. They’re sketchy and vague in designing their utopias, but they have moral and evidentiary force when they say that something’s wrong with the criminal justice system, something’s wrong with the economy, something’s wrong with the legislative process.
Moderates, who are invested in the status quo, tend to simply not notice problems, and to dismiss radicals for not having well-thought-out solutions. But it’s better to know that a problem exists than to not know – regardless of whether you have a solution at the moment.
Most people, confronted with a problem they can’t solve, say “We just have to live with it,” and very rapidly gloss into “It’s not really a problem.” Aging is often painful and debilitating and ends in death. Almost everyone has decided it’s not really a problem – simply because it has no known solution. But we also used to think that senile dementia and toothlessness were “just part of getting old.” I would venture that the tendency, over time, to find life’s cruelties less tolerable and to want to cure more of them, is the most positive feature of civilization. To do that, we need people who strenuously object to what everyone else approaches with resignation.
Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.”
But it is the critic who counts. Just because I can’t solve P=NP doesn’t mean I can’t say the latest attempt at a proof is flawed. Just because I don’t have a comprehensive system of ethics doesn’t mean there’s not something wrong with the Bible’s. Just because I don’t have a plan for a perfect government doesn’t mean there isn’t something wrong with the present one. Just because I can’t make people live longer and healthier lives doesn’t mean that aging isn’t a problem. Just because nobody knows how to end poverty doesn’t mean poverty is okay. We are further from finding solutions if we dismiss the very existence of the problems.
This is why I’m basically sympathetic to speculations about existential risk, and also to various kinds of research associated with aging and mortality. It’s calling attention to unsolved problems. There’s a human bias against acknowledging the existence of problems for which we don’t have solutions; we need incentives in the other direction, encouraging people to identify hard problems. In mathematics, we value a good conjecture or open problem, even if the proof doesn’t come along for decades. This would be a good norm to adopt more broadly – value the critic, value the one who observes a flaw, notices a hard problem, or protests an outrage, even if he doesn’t come with a solution. Fight the urge to accept a bad solution just because it ties up the loose ends.