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If your beliefs change all the time, they can't have been held very strongly or justifiably in the first place. Maybe you should stop having beliefs like that.

If your beliefs change all the time, they can't have been held very strongly or justifiably in the first place. Maybe you should stop having beliefs like that. That's direct evidence that you shouldn't be confident in many of your beliefs, given they change so often. A person with stable beliefs, even if they aren't ever challenged, has no such direct evidence to suggest they should be less confident, they can only have the same general blow to confidence as everyone else with arbitrary unchallenged beliefs.

johncolanduoni 10y ago
> A person with stable beliefs, even if they aren't ever challenged, has no such direct evidence to suggest they should be less confident That's like saying someone who comes up with a bunch of scientific hypotheses and never tests them should have more confidence in them than someone who does. Holding on to your beliefs even in the face of evidence/arguments to the contrary is not a sign of having better or more considered beliefs, it's a sign of arrogance. If you truly think that you're never wrong about anything so there is no reason to even look for contrary data, that is especially arrogant.
- riboflava 10y ago
  You cut off the rest of my sentence. It's not that never having your beliefs challenged is good, it's that it's not a strong signal that your beliefs are actually wrong, and so your confidence can't actually diminish much from pointing out this fact, because everyone should already account for this in their confidence factors for beliefs they haven't actively tried challenging. Whereas if you're frequently changing your mind, well, that is a strong signal that your beliefs are frequently wrong, or that you're interpreting evidence poorly, either way that is a signal you should be even less confident in your beliefs than general. If you're frequently testing your beliefs, then it's the results of the tests, not the fact that you're testing, plus your ability to have your beliefs appropriately shifted by the results of the tests, which determine how good your beliefs are. The latter half of that equation is probably the bigger factor for what causes wrong beliefs anyway. Ideally your confidence in the belief should match its actual probability distribution, and shifts should be in correspondence with Bayes' rule. In reality many people will see a known-to-be-uniformly-independently-random binary process output a 'run' of Trues and feel more than 50% sure the next hit has to be False because it's 'due'. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy)

johncolanduoni 10y ago

> A person with stable beliefs, even if they aren't ever challenged, has no such direct evidence to suggest they should be less confident That's like saying someone who comes up with a bunch of scientific hypotheses and never tests them should have more confidence in them than someone who does. Holding on to your beliefs even in the face of evidence/arguments to the contrary is not a sign of having better or more considered beliefs, it's a sign of arrogance. If you truly think that you're never wrong about anything so there is no reason to even look for contrary data, that is especially arrogant.

riboflava 10y ago
You cut off the rest of my sentence. It's not that never having your beliefs challenged is good, it's that it's not a strong signal that your beliefs are actually wrong, and so your confidence can't actually diminish much from pointing out this fact, because everyone should already account for this in their confidence factors for beliefs they haven't actively tried challenging. Whereas if you're frequently changing your mind, well, that is a strong signal that your beliefs are frequently wrong, or that you're interpreting evidence poorly, either way that is a signal you should be even less confident in your beliefs than general. If you're frequently testing your beliefs, then it's the results of the tests, not the fact that you're testing, plus your ability to have your beliefs appropriately shifted by the results of the tests, which determine how good your beliefs are. The latter half of that equation is probably the bigger factor for what causes wrong beliefs anyway. Ideally your confidence in the belief should match its actual probability distribution, and shifts should be in correspondence with Bayes' rule. In reality many people will see a known-to-be-uniformly-independently-random binary process output a 'run' of Trues and feel more than 50% sure the next hit has to be False because it's 'due'. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy)