Kaj_Sotala comments on Emotional tools for the beginner rationalist - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think "cares / does not care about having true beliefs" is too coarse: the actual question is, in which domains do people care about true beliefs?
Most people care about having true beliefs when it actually lets them achieve things. Few parents would prefer a false belief that their child is safe, to the true belief that their child is in danger, if the true belief allowed them to get the child out of danger. The issue is just that when we talk about things like evolution or religion, it genuinely does not matter what your beliefs are, or if it does, "false" beliefs often allow you to achieve things better.
Think of beliefs as tools. People will care about having the right tool if they couldn't get the job done otherwise, but if the wrong tool still lets them get something done, they don't care. Except for some weird "rationalist" guys who insist that you should have the right tools for their own sake, because there's a theoretical chance that having the wrong tool for some problem might cause you trouble, perhaps.
If it helps, think of it as physicist/mathematician thing. A physicist might calculate something using a way that's not quite correct and would drive the mathematician up a wall. While the physicist is like, hey, my result and method are good enough to do the job I care about, so so what if I never proved all of my assumptions.
If you want to get people to actually care and think about the truth in more domains, you need to give them habits of thought that do that in one domain, and see if it'd transfer to some other domain. E.g. this is the approach that CFAR settled on:
Similarly Venkat:
People come to consider beliefs true if those beliefs work in giving them rewards. This is similarly the case for meta-beliefs, like "having true beliefs is important" - people come to believe that true beliefs are important if they frequently work for acquiring more accurate beliefs, and this lets them perform better. If you want to make people to adopt that metabelief, come up with habits that explicitly cause them to acquire more true beliefs, and which also help them forward, and get them to adopt those habits.
Here I have a general feeling that any true belief may be useful in the future, and any false belief may be harmful in the future. I feel the world as connected. (As a most obvious example, a belief in supernatural in any area implies a belief in supernatural in general, which in turn influences all areas of life.)
Maybe "the world is connected" is one of the unspoken premises for rationality. If you don't have it, any rationality technique will be merely something you use inside the lab.
(Of course, not everything is equally likely to be useful, so I try to get more info in some areas and ignore other areas. But I would still feel bad about making false beliefs even in the less important areas. If I don't feel certain about my knowledge somewhere, and don't have time to improve the knowledge, I update to "don't know".)