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TheOtherDave comments on Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased) - Less Wrong
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I'm through with truth.
I never had a scientific intuition. In college, I once saw a physics demonstration with a cathode ray tube -- moving a magnet bent the beam of light that showed the path of the electrons. I had never seen electrons before and it occurred to me that I had never really believed in the equations in my physics book; I knew they were the right answers to give on tests, but I wouldn't have expected to see them work.
I'm also missing the ability to estimate. Draw a line on a sheet of paper; put a dot where 75% is. Then check if you got it right. I always get that sort of thing wrong. Arithmetic estimation is even harder. Deciding how to bet in a betting game? Next to impossible.
Whatever mechanism is that matches theory to reality, mine doesn't work very well. Whatever mechanism derives expectations about the world from probability numbers, mine hardly works at all. This is why I actually can double-think. I can see an idea as logical without believing in it.
A literate person cannot look at a sentence without reading it. But a small child, just learning to read, can look at letters on a page without reading, and has to make an extra effort to read them. In the same way, a bad rationalist can see that an idea is true, without believing it. I can read about electromagnetism and still not expect to see the beam in the cathode ray tube bend. I spent ten years or so thinking "Isn't it odd that the best arguments are on the atheist side?" without once wondering whether I should be an atheist.
Should I break down that barrier? I'm not sure. I'd do it if it would allow me to make money, I think. But not if it came at the cost of some kind of screaming Cthulhu horror.
You know what I really wish I had? Team spirit. Absolute group loyalty. Faith. Patriotism. The sense of being in the right. In Hoc Signo Vinces. I have fleeting glimpses of it but it doesn't last. I want it enough that I keep fantasizing about joining the Army because it might work. I always wanted to be a fanatic, and my brain would never do it. But I'm starting to wonder if that's hackable; I'm sure enough sleep deprivation and ritual would do it.
You talk about belief the way popular culture talks about love: as some kind of external influence that overcomes your resistance.
And belief can be like that, sure. But belief can also be the result of doing the necessary work.
I realize that's an uncomfortable idea. But it's also an important one.
Relatedly, my own thoughts on the value of truth: when the environment is very forgiving and even suboptimal choices mostly work out to my benefit, the cost of being incorrect a lot is mostly opportunity cost. That is, things go OK, and even get better sometimes. (Not as much better as they would have gotten had I optimized more, but still: better.)
I've spent most of my life in a forgiving environment, which makes it very easy to adopt the attitude that having accurate beliefs isn't particularly important. I can go through life giving up lots of opportunities, and if I just don't think too much about the improvements I'm giving up I'll still be relatively content. It's emotionally easy to discount possible future benefits.
Even if I do have transient moments of awareness of how much better it can be, I can suppress them by thinking about all the ways it can be worse and how much safer I am right where I am, as though refusing to climb somehow protected me from falling.
The thing is: when the environment is risky and most things cost me, the cost of being incorrect is loss. That is, things don't go OK, and they get worse. And I can't control the environment.
It's emotionally harder to discount possible future losses.
I was always under the impression that a sort of "work" can lead you to emotionally believe things that you already know to be true in principle. I suspect that a lot of practice in actually believing what you know will eventually cause the gap between knowing and believing to disappear. (Sort of the way that practice in reading eventually produces a person who can't look at a sentence without reading it.)
For example, I imagine that if you played some kind of betting game every day and made an effort to be realistic, you would stop expecting that wishing really hard for low-probability events could help you win. Your intuition/subconscious would eventually sync up with what you know to be true.
(nods) That's been my experience.
Similarly: acting on the basis of what I believe, even if my emotions aren't fully aligned with those beliefs (for example, doing things I believe are valuable even if they scare me, or avoiding things I believe are risky even if they feel really enticing), can often cause my emotions to change over time.
But even if my emotions don't change, my beliefs and my behavior still do, and that has effects.
This is particularly relevant for beliefs that are strongly associated with things like group memberships, such as in the atheism example you mention.
I strongly associate this with Eliezer's description of the brain as a cognitive engine, that needs to a certain amount of thermodynamical work to arrive at a certainty level - and that reasoned and logical conclusions that you 'know' fail to produce belief (enough certainty to act on knowledge) because they don't make your brain do enough work.
I imagine that forcing someone to deduce bits of probability math from earlier principles and observations, then have them use it to analyze betting games until they can generalise to concepts like expected value, would be enough work to have them believe probability theory.