JQuinton comments on A Voting Puzzle, Some Political Science, and a Nerd Failure Mode - Less Wrong
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Well, the whole point of instrumental rationality is that you need a correct map of reality (ie, to care about the truth) in order to be able to reach your goals whatever they are.
There is a strong signaling issue, appearing to be a conservative Christian can give a lot of political/social benefits in some circles, and it's easier to appear being one when you truly are one, but apart from that, having the belief of conservative Christian leads you to acts that are inefficient for reaching your goals, from rejecting your gay grandson to wasting time in prayer to not going to cryonics because you believe in afterlife.
Having a flawed map of a city means you'll not reach your goal efficiently (but either completely miss it, or use much more time/resources to finally reach it), and that's true whatever your goal is. The same is true with a flawed map of reality and navigating your life.
Even if you do not care about the truth for its own sake (if curiosity and preference for truth aren't in your terminal values), if you're intelligent, you should care about the truth as an instrumental value to reach whatever goal you truly have.
I agree that having a correct map of reality is needed if you care about arriving at some (I hate this word) "materialist" goal, but not everyone can live in a more liberal area of the US/world. Areas where not fitting into the local community creates more burdens than necessary.
For example, when I was in the military, I identified as an atheist pretty openly, barely concealing my contempt for religion. One of my last Enlisted Performance Reports, my supervisor said I would do better if I were a Christian. I wasn't sure if that was a threat, or him implying that I was immoral and thus not quite a fit in the military community, but nevertheless I was penalized (in his eyes) for not being religious.
There's the map of reality, the map of the physical roads and buildings, but there's also the map of human interactions. One can signal consciously, but what I gather is that most people signal unconsciously and then generate a cached version of themselves that eventually becomes the real them (belief in belief and all that). While I might say I had an accurate map of reality when I was in the military, I didn't have, nor did I want to even accept, that there was another map of social situations that would also have helped me reach my goals more efficiently if I had an accurate map of it.