Related to Belief In Belief
Suppose that a neighbor comes to you one day and tells you “There’s a dragon in my garage!” Since all of us have been through this before at some point or another, you may be inclined to save time and ask “Is the dragon by any chance invisible, inaudible, intangible, and does it convert oxygen to carbon dioxide when it breathes?”
The neighbor, however, is a scientific minded fellow and responds “Yes, yes, no, and maybe, I haven’t checked. This is an idea with testable consequences. If I try to touch the dragon it gets out of the way, but it leaves footprints in flour when I sprinkle it on the garage floor, and whenever it gets hungry, it comes out of my garage and eats a nearby animal. It always chooses something weighing over thirty pounds, and you can see the animals get snatched up and mangled to a pulp in its invisible jaws. It’s actually pretty horrible. You may have noticed that there have been fewer dogs around the neighborhood lately.”
This triggers a tremendous number of your skepticism filters, and so the only thing you can think of to say is “I think I’m going to need to see this.”
“Of course,” replies the neighbor, and he sets off across the street, opens the garage door, and is promptly eaten by the invisible dragon.
Tragic though it is, his death provides a useful lesson. He clearly believed that there was an invisible dragon in his garage, and he was willing to stick his neck out and make predictions based on it. However, he hadn’t internalized the idea that there was a dragon in his garage, otherwise he would have stayed the hell away to avoid being eaten. Humans have a fairly general weakness at internalizing beliefs when we don’t have to come face to face with their immediate consequences on a regular basis.
You might believe, for example, that starvation is the single greatest burden on humanity, and that giving money to charities that aid starving children in underdeveloped countries has higher utility than any other use of your surplus funds. You might even be able to make predictions based on that belief. But if you see a shirt you really like that’s on sale, you’re almost certainly not going to think “How many people will go hungry if I buy this who I could have fed?” It’s not a weakness of willpower that causes you to choose the shirt over the starving children, they simply don’t impinge on your consciousness at that level.
When you consider if you really, properly hold a belief, it’s worth asking not only how it controls your anticipations, but whether your actions make sense in light of a gut-level acceptance of its truth. Do you merely expect to see footprints in flour, or do you move out of the house to avoid being eaten?
I suppose that in doing it in the form of a parable (or this parable, anyway,) I erred on the side of being memorable over clear, but that was what I had in mind when I wrote it. A dragon in one's garage is something where it's intuitively obvious that you don't want to go near, once you internalize the fact that it's really there. That's the kind of mistake that we've had millions of years of evolution to prepare us against making. Opening up the garage door to investigate is the sort of behavior that only makes sense when you haven't internalized the idea that there's really something in there that's liable to eat you.
Realistically, the man would probably be terrified if he had seen it eat other animals already, but I threw that in to make the parable flow better. The invisibility and inaudibility probably wouldn't be sufficient in real life given that, but they're stand in qualities for the sort of remove that might prevent one from internalizing a belief.
I upvoted because I immediately understood what you meant; I am humble enough to believe that is a fact about the post and not about my skill at understanding.