Beware Directional Drift
If your views get harder to maintain the more you study a topic you should be doubtful of them
We’re all born with a wide range of intuitions. Many of these aren’t immediate but become present pretty quickly based on our experiences. For example, pretty early on I was both an atheist and a utilitarian—the alternative views just seemed pretty crazy to me. Yet we know that many of these views are wrong; the atheist and the theist, the utilitarian and the deontologist, cannot both be right.
One should hold out some possibility that they’re massively mistaken, that they’re hugely deceived in a whole host of ways. That the people who they reject as confused and silly are actually grasping some deep truth, and that one’s own beliefs are drastically mistaken.
One of the best ways to guard against this is by seriously considering alternative views and seeing if you grow more confident in them over time. In other words, take careful note of whether your credence in some view that is very different from your own goes up the more you think about a topic. I think that totalism—the view that says you should maximize total well-being in your procreative decisions—is the right view of population ethics. And it’s easy to see how one could arrive at totalism from this reasoning.
Non-totalism sounds pretty good. But over time, the more one explores population ethics, the more one sees the many desperate contortions required to avoid the results of totalism. The totalists are happy with their share of “bullets” in population ethics—they’re things they already found plausible, while the non-totalists feel that the more they study population ethics, the worse things get, the harder it is to maintain their beliefs.
This is one thing that’s especially attractive about utilitarianism. I—like many utilitarians—don’t find the supposed counterexamples to be unintuitive at all. But the more one studies the topic, the more clear it becomes that those who reject utilitarianism have to accept all sorts of bizarre conclusions that are not initially obvious. One should think there’s some possibility that those who find utilitarianism obvious are right, and then update in favor of utilitarianism based on the fact that those people seem to have the most internally consistent view of ethics, where they don’t feel like their view gets worse the more they study ethics.
This is not an infallible heuristic. I think, for example, that one should believe in the transitivity of the better-than relation—that if A is better than B which is better than C then A must be better than C. But while transitivity is initially obvious, the more one studies the supposed counterexamples, the worse transitivity starts to look.
This was one of the things that made theism look more attractive to me. The most I studied various distinct areas of philosophy—anthropics, philosophy of mind, moral knowledge—the better theism started to look. While I still found the problem of evil hard to deal with—and still do—I felt like I had to sweep new puzzles under the rug, rather than having the powerful explanation afforded by theism.
This is, while not totally decisive, a good sign that things are going wrong. The truth is generally illuminating—if you have the right view, upon learning new things, they’ll make sense, for truth is interconnected. Young earth creationists should be skeptical of their own views, because the more one learns the results of modern sciences, the more one has to explain otherwise plausible things. If the more you learn the more you think “that’s weird, I guess that’s something I’ll think about later,” the bigger of a red flag it is.
This is especially so if there are other smart people who don’t find the need to sweep anything under the rug, who are happy with their explanations of the various phenomena. Whatever one’s view is of infinite ethics, for instance, they’ll have to believe bizarre things. No one feel happy about their view after studying infinite ethics. However, some people do feel happy about their view after studying population ethics and those are the people whose views you should update in favor of.
This can, of course, go too far. Sometimes the reason people get more confident in their views over time is that they’re dogmatic and have trapped priors. So you should be on the lookout for that, and look at whether it’s plausible that their worldview actually does make sense of the things that it does. But if it seems that their view makes more sense the more you think, even if it still intuitively doesn’t seem like the best view, you should take seriously the possibility that your foundational assumptions are deeply mistaken, and take the view extremely seriously.
Being able to acknowledge that there are smart and honest people on every side of a contentious issue is a world-shattering revelation.
I grew up being told that Christians were superstitious hypocrites who didn't understand science or logic.
As time went by I found that many *are* superstitious hypocrites who don't understand science or logic!
But I also found a few who weren't. I also found that I had been misinformed on many of my favourite examples of Christian stupidity, eg Christians didn't burn the library of Alexandria, Galileo was a friend of the Pope and had many of the church on his side, and people didn't generally think the world was flat until Columbus.
Life was so much simpler when everyone who didn't agree with me was either a liar or a fool...
“The truth is generally illuminating—if you have the right view, upon learning new things, they’ll make sense, for truth is interconnected“
Similar quote by Aristoteles: “With the truth, all given facts harmonize; but with what is false, the truth soon hits a wrong note.”
Generally I agree with it. That’s what I like about theism, it helps make sense of how everything is interconnected and makes sense together about human existence. Otherwise you end up all sorts of things under the rug, like consciousness, religious experiences, supernatural claims, anthropics, necessary existence, moral knowledge, meaning in life, and many other things, which seem to be suspiciously favoring theism.