Good question from Guy Montag yesterday --
I don't disagree with Pascal's Wager because there's a negative opportunity cost(years of religious servitude) involved. I disagree with it because it's doing a dishonesty to myself to pretend like I know something when I just don't have the knowledge to make a judgement call.
So I have a question for you. "Do you think it's better to base your beliefs on what brings you opportunity, or truth? "
I think I'm pretty demonstrably in the very-much-likes-truth camp. We could say that, and that's the end of the story.
But... let's take a look at this word "belief" here. At first glance, it's straightforward enough. Belief. It's what you believe. Should you choose your beliefs based on what's true, or should you be opportunistic in your beliefs?
But if you look a little closer at this word belief, you've actually got two very different classes of things here. There's "assessment of the facts when I've got data" type things, for instance, evaluating whether a political policy that's been tried before in many others places will work.
So, let's say there's a proposed 10% sales tax on luxury goods. Let's say I've got a strong feeling about that one way or the other. Do I argue, "It'll raise no revenue at all and screw up the economy" regardless of the facts if I'm against the tax, or do I argue "It'll raise revenue, improve the nation's outcomes, and not hurt industry at all" if I'm for it to get it passed? Or... do I just look at as many places that implemented luxury taxes as possible, look results of comparable tax policies (sales taxes, tariffs, etc), look at demographic data and purchasing data, and then make my best estimate from there?
The latter. Very much the latter. I try as much as I can to be preferences-agonistic when evaluating facts to make predictions.
That's straightforward enough.
But there's another type of "belief" here when you're talking about being opportunistic or not.
There's questions like, "I wonder if I could play the guitar well? I like music, but I've never done anything musical, so I have no real baseline as to whether I could or not."
In that example, I guess I can look for data -- skills acquisition in the past, does music correlate with other things I've tried?, how difficult is it in general?, and so on. But often times, you really just don't know at the end of it.
In that case, your first crack at an answer isn't a "belief" -- a fixed belief -- but rather, it's a hypothesis.
And if it's very uncertain, I'm always taking the favorable hypothesis to start.
That means, if I don't know better, my default hypothesis will be --
*I can learn that skill.
*This meeting will go well.
*We will get a lot done.
*This is possible.
*There is a better way.
*If I keep training, I'll make breakthroughs.
*When I make mistakes, I can learn from them and adjust.
And so on.
These are hypotheses -- I might be wrong. There's skills and hobbies I've tried to pick up that I was no good at. But with very unclear data, I'll go to work with a belief that things will work well.
I'll also use some conservatism, do a worst-case scenario evaluation if it's important, and I'll budget extra time and attention to combat the known planning failures from over-optimism.
But -- and this might sound strange -- I kind of do that with a different set of thinking patterns than I set the hypothesis itself.
It's almost like a factory where I have a highly motivated foreman that says, "My guys can get this done! It's a big job, but we'll hustle and turn in some record performance!" And then I've got an accountant type in the back doing some contingency planning if/when the motivated foreman makes an error. I used to go all-in and expect pure force of will to carry me through -- I used to use less conservatism and just skip that step -- but it turns out that, while you will win a lot more often if you take the bushido approach, occasionally you'll take quite bad losses. So, I put a set of conservative sanity checks on my optimistic/opportunistic hypotheses.
But I do start with a motivated optimism when I don't know better. I'll very much hew as close as I can to truth if there's truth to be had -- but when there's not, I'm picking the hypothesis that's going to get me motivated and getting into action ASAP.
And your approach to unknown ground, dear reader? Optimism, pessimism, or a question mark?