Why Do You Believe What You Believe?
Are your reasons rational or emotional?
Why do you believe what you believe, and how is it possible that people have such differing opinions?
The simplest kind of belief is something that you experience directly: this flower is yellow; I have ten toes; there is a corner shop at the end of the street.
Over millions of years, life in its various forms started to draw inferences from the senses, firstly using emotions, and later, using the forebrain and language. The crack of a dry twig might create an emotional inference that you’re being hunted. The movements of the planets might lead you to conclude that the Earth is not the center of the universe.
These inferences are beliefs, and on top of them, you construct further ones. They are like a geodesic dome of struts and joints where the joints on the ground are your direct experience, the struts are inferences, and the joints in the air are beliefs.
Just like a geodesic dome, a collection of beliefs can form a stable belief system that is resistant to change, but this framework may not be the only or the best one. Just like a dome, the same basic facts can support different belief systems.
These beliefs come from various sources:
Senses: you trust your direct experience
Your senses are fundamental, being the raw material for your understanding of the world, but their apparent obviousness may not be correct.
Plato offered an allegory of a cave where men mistook shadows for the real world. Descartes doubted the validity of all of his senses and concluded that only his thoughts were self-evident.
We have come to understand the limited nature of our senses. The light you see with your eyes is only a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum; your skin detects a different portion as heat. You cannot detect the earth’s magnetic field that birds use for navigation. Even the senses that you do have can be wrong, from optical illusions about the length of lines to the unreliability of eyewitnesses. Modern psychology is replete with experiments that demonstrate the inaccuracy of your perceptions.
Culture: You believe what others believe
A society only works because a large majority of people think and act in compatible ways.
Some beliefs are widely taken for granted. Matter consists of atoms. Certain metal discs, paper rectangles, and numbers within a computer are a medium of exchange called money. Everybody drives on the right (or left). Some parts of the body should generally remain clothed. Individuals can own things.
The concept of property — in any situation where scarcity exists — is self-evident… Ryan McMaken
Some beliefs are only held by a segment of society. Politics, religion, and economics are areas where different beliefs may clash.
Everybody needs other people for their very survival. Someone who does not behave to fit in with others threatens the social agreements. In the days of small tribes, they might have been cast out into the wilderness; these days, it is misfits such as artists, revolutionaries, and free thinkers who explore outside the accepted bounds. For this, they are often reviled, shunned, or persecuted. Maybe later their ideas will be recognized and praised.
You act to match your social group in many ways to fit in. Fashion is an excellent example of this; it only exists because many people are prone to copying others. Ripped jeans are acceptable; a ripped suit is not. Ideas are the same way. It is safer to accept the beliefs of your group than to choose different beliefs and be regarded as delusional.
In many circumstances, social connection is actually more helpful to your daily life than understanding the truth of a particular fact or idea. James Clear
Many people are going to say things that are in their best interests. You can trust most when you know the person, when there is a mutual benefit, or when you have a continuing relationship. The messages put out by powerful people through the media may be slanted or untruthful in order to maintain their power.
Experts: You trust someone else’s judgment
Human culture has expanded to include far more knowledge than any one person can understand. (To check on the extent of your mastery, go to a large reference library, choose one book from every shelf and rate your grasp of its contents.) You deal with this by leaning on the expertise of other people and trusting their judgment.
The extent to which you do this may not be obvious. How often do you go against a structural engineer’s recommendations? A nurse? A tax accountant? Most people believe the earth goes around the sun without having taken the astronomical observations necessary to confirm it. You trust experts, people who have the expertise, to crunch the numbers and proclaim the time of sunrise, the phase of the moon, and the height of the tides.
The reason for believing an expert is not their title. Instead, their credibility rests on the data and reasoning behind their claims. Experts are likely to reach conclusions that contradict common sense. To assess the conclusions of an expert, you need to have enough expertise in the field to make sound judgments about them. The more complex the field and the less you know of it, the less you are able to judge that skill. Unless you have an equivalent level of expertise, your judgment is not good enough to counter their conclusions. You should only be doubtful when:
they are not an expert in the subject under discussion, e.g. the famed physicist Fred Tenable says that we should return to the gold standard. Expertise in one field does not carry over to other areas.
they are a minority voice in their field, e.g. very few climatologists deny that human activities are driving global warming. You should use reputation and the consensus conclusions of peers in their field as a basis for trust.
there is no consensus in the field because the current facts point to several different possibilities, e.g. in quantum mechanics, loop quantum gravity and string theory are both proposed.
recently discovered facts are causing an existing theory to be revised, e.g. the discovery of radioactivity and its associated heating properties in 1895 prompted a re-examination of the apparent age of the Earth.
the opinions may have a reasonable variance, e.g. election predictions or best plumbing practices, as opposed to the accuracy of, say, lunar eclipses.
Thinking: You use logic, pattern-matching and probability
The power of rational thought to discern something that is contrary to the senses is the magic ingredient that has created the whole of civilization. Humans have accumulated one unintuitive idea after another and put them to use in controlling the physical world in an innumerable number of ways.
Be careful when attributing your beliefs to thinking. When people say “I think…”, they are mostly regurgitating ideas that they have acquired from school, friends, news, and the culture at large. Few people can take existing facts or beliefs and come up with a new idea. My based-on-nothing opinion is that the average person has six original thoughts in their lifetime.
Feelings: You choose what feels right
The reasons for beliefs given here may produce more than one explanation. When choosing between them, it is tempting to choose one that feels right, rather than the one that is simplest or most probable. How often do you say “I think [something], but it doesn’t feel right”?
The world is so complex that you cannot understand it all by yourself; you rely on other people to explain nearly everything, and of everyone, experts are the best bet for choosing reasoned beliefs.
Other sources of beliefs—your senses, culture, and feelings—are less reliable, so although you may feel strongly about them, beware of letting them take precedence over your understanding.
Beliefs will never have the assuredness of a mathematical proof, but the best explanation is the one that is logically consistent, simplest, and most probable. Sometimes it will contradict your senses or your feelings, and you should be prepared for the discomfort that arises from that dissonance.
The capacity for rational thought is a definitive feature of our species, but it still competes with the emotions when making decisions. When that dichotomy arises, strive to choose the one that distinguishes us as human.
I was comfortable with everything you said until I got to this line:
"experts are the best bet for choosing reasoned beliefs."
I guess I have a lingering penchant to question authority.