“I Believe!”

Essentially, "believing" means you have a mental model whose job is to predict the future accurately (within some domain), and that you are confident in your model's ability to correctly predict the future (within the same domain). While it's impossible to definitively know that your model is correct, believing simply means you're confident enough to behave as though the model is correct. You'll often hear the term "conviction" used as a squishier, more human-centric version of "confidence".

Do you have reservations about this definition of belief? If you do, please consider spending the next few minutes pondering what you think it means to believe something, and why that feels incompatible with my version above. Do it now, rather than reading any more of this rant. Seriously.

OK, if you're still here, I'll assume that you and I are aligned enough to dig a little deeper. The definition of "belief" I outlined above describes a probabilistic learning algorithm. You collect data from the universe, develop a model that explains the things you observe, and start applying that model to make predictions about the parts of the universe you have yet to observe (because of time, space, sensitivity of instruments, etc). The probabilistic part is how often the model predicts correctly vs incorrectly and is (hopefully) correlated with your level of confidence in the model. The important point here is that no model performs perfectly (outside of trivial domains) and that we all have varying levels of confidence in the various things which we believe. Personally, I find it extremely liberating to recognize that I have distinctly different confidence levels for my scattered beliefs. I also find it fascinating when I uncover conflicts in my set of personal beliefs.

Here are some things I believe, with the highest confidence items at the top. To keep the list short, I'll only list a few of the things in which I have particularly high confidence (>98%).

I believe that all dogma is wrong (...he pronounced dogmatically 😉). This isn't to say that all beliefs are wrong, only that every belief falls somewhere between incomplete and counterfactual. Refusing out-of-hand to objectively consider new information is self-defeating.

I believe that incentives matter. We humans universally pursue the things that most reliably deliver what we humans want. We often lie to ourselves and others about what we want, but what we sincerely (and often subconsciously) want determines how we spend our time & energy.

I believe that, when it comes to allocating rewards & privilege, there is only merit and anti-merit. Merit rewards the creation of value. Anti-merit rewards anything else. Sexism, racism, nepotism, collusion, bribery, trade tariffs, and inheritance are all forms of anti-merit. Every form of anti-merit is threatened by any allocation that rewards merit.

I believe that conformance and rebellion are the same sin. In both cases, the individual abdicates their agency to some outside authority. In the rebellious case, the individual simply flips the polarity of the signals coming from the authority.

And speaking of rebellion, I believe that every generation is driven to develop its own identity in a way that contrasts the identity of the previous generation. Each new generation selectively rejects and rebels against aspects of their forebears' collective identity, just like every generation before them did.

Brent

happy 4:20. I love guest writers. I matched Brent’s title with a great song to go along with it. The song is inspired and doesn’t make one thing up about Mormons, it’s all what we believe. I am same Mormon as the house wives with secret lives.