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RichardKennaway comments on Compartmentalization in epistemic and instrumental rationality - Less Wrong
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This is leaving out the danger that realistic assessments of your ability can be hazardous to your ability to actually perform. People who over-estimate their ability accomplish more than people who realistically estimate it, and Richard Wiseman's luck research shows that believing you're lucky will actually make it so.
I think instrumental rationalists should perhaps follow a modified Tarski litany, "If I live in a universe where believing X gets me Y, and I wish Y, then I wish to believe X". ;-)
Actually, more precisely: "If I live in a universe where anticipating X gets me Y, and I wish Y, then I wish to anticipate X, even if X will not really occur". I can far/symbolically "believe" that life is meaningless and I could be killed at any moment, but if I want to function in life, I'd darn well better not be emotionally anticipating that my life is meaningless now or that I'm actually about to be killed by random chance.
(Edit to add a practical example: a golfer envisions and attempts to anticipate every shot as if it were going to be a hole-in-one, even though most of them will not be... but in the process, achieves a better result than if s/he anticipated performing an average shot. Here, X is the perfect shot, and Y is the improved shot resulting from the visualization. The compartmentalization that must occur for this to work is that the "far" mind must not be allowed to break the golfer's concentration by pointing out that the envisioned shot is a lie, and that one should therefore not be feeling the associated feelings.)
Really? That is, is that what the top golfers report doing, that the mediocre ones don't?
If so, I am surprised. Aiming at a target does not mean believing I'm going to hit it. Aiming at a target means aiming at a target.
My understanding is that top golfers do indeed pre-visualize every strike, though I doubt they visualize or expect holes-in-one. AFAIK, however, they do visualize something better than what they can reasonably expect to get, and performance always lags the visualization to some degree.
What I'm saying is that if you really aim at it, this is functionally equivalent to believing, in that you are performing the same mental prerequisites: i.e., forming a mental image which you are not designating false, and acting as if it is true. That is more or less what "belief" is, at the "near" level of thinking.
To try to be more precise: the "acting as if" here is not acting in anticipation of hitting the target, but acting so as to bring it about - the purpose of envisioning the result (not just the action) is to call on the near system's memory of previous successful shots in order to bring about the physical states (reference levels) that brought about the previous successes.
IOW, the belief anticipation here isn't "I'm going to make this shot, so I should bet a lot of money", it's, "I'm going to have made this shot, therefore I need to stand in thus-and-such way and use these muscles like so while breathing like this" and "I'm going to make this shot, therefore I can be relaxed and not tense up and ruin it by being uncertain".
It looks like a stretch to me, to call this a belief.
I've no experience of high-level golf, but I did at one time shoot on the county small-bore pistol team (before the law changed and the guns went away, but that's even more of a mind-killing topic than politics in general). When I aim at a target with the intention of hitting it, belief that I will or won't doesn't come into the picture. Thinking about what is going to happen is just a distraction.
A month ago I made the longest cycle ride I have ever done. I didn't visualise myself as having completed the ride or anything of that sort. I simply did the work.
Whatever wins, wins, of course, but I find either of the following more likely accounts of what this exercise of "belief" really is:
(1) What it feels like to single-mindedly pursue a goal.
(2) A technique to keep the mind harmlessly occupied and out of the way while the real work happens -- what a coach might tell people to do, to produce that result.
In terms of control theory, a reference signal -- a goal -- is not an imagined perception. It is simply a reference signal.
At which point, we're arguing definitions, because AFAICT the rest of your comment is not arguing that the process consists of something other than "forming a mental image which you are not designating false, and acting as if it is true." You seem to merely be arguing that this process should not be called "belief".
What is relevant, however, is that this is a process of compartmentalizing one's thinking, so as to ignore various facts about the situation. Whether you call this a belief or not isn't relevant to the main point: decompartmentalization can be hazardous to performance.
As far as I can tell, you are not actually disputing that claim. ;-)
You can't call black white and then say that to dispute that is to merely talk about definitions. "Acting as if one believes", if it means anything at all, must mean doing the same acts one would do if one believed. But you explicitly excluded betting on the outcome, a paradigmatic test of belief on LW.
Aiming at a target is not acting as if one were sure to hit the target. Visualising hitting the target is not acting as if one believes one will. These are different things, whatever they are called.
Even if you call it "froobling", it doesn't change my point in any way, so I don't see the relevance of your reply... which is still not disputing my point about compartmentalization.