There's a past-oriented and a future-oriented question you can ask with regard to your beliefs. Past: How did I come to believe what I currently believe? Futu

There's a past-oriented and a future-oriented question you can ask with regard to your beliefs. Past: How did I come to believe what I currently believe? Future: How skeptical should I be about what I currently believe? The past-oriented question is difficult to answer; it's a causal story that may have a number of different factors, and of course it depends on your brain wiring. It seems to me that that the future-oriented question, on the other hand, is much easier to answer: if your beliefs personally benefit or comfort you, then you should be very skeptical of them. This is a natural corollary of “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”