this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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Shitty Ask Lemmy
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Why on god's green earth would you believe meta-beliefs to be true "by definition"? Historically there have been so many changes to meta-beliefs, from divine inspiration to bayes' law. I have memories of my meta-beliefs changing as a child, and honestly my meta-beliefs even change depending on my mood. So why the heck would I not expect the same to be possible in the future?
As far as I can tell, subjective belief probabilities are a sort of integration over forward propagation through lines of reasoning, world models, and meta-beliefs that occur in one's brain.
This belief finds practical application in stuff like me making sure I eat if my meta-reasoning is cranky (assigning too little value to new information, expecting hostility to be more productive than empathy, etc.).
Though of course I am not super confident in any precise meta-meta-statements because human brains aren't well understood yet by anyone, let alone me.
I suppose you could reduce all that complexity to a single line of reasoning that you try to trust with utmost confidence, but then I would expect you to get akrasia as the rest of your brain sees all the things you are missing and starts ignoring your "certain meta-beliefs".
A belief is a proposition that you think is true. If you think some proposition, meta or otherwise, is not true then it wouldn’t be a belief of yours
Ah, no wonder you're having a epistemological crisis then. It must be hard only being able to do binary (true/false) logic when thinking about your own reasoning. I'm sorry you're going through that.
I understand that intellectually you may have given the possibility that I'm at least partially right about reasoning zero credence. But, like, come oooon. You must remember times in your own life when you learned new ways of reasoning and changed your confidence in your beliefs as a result. So how surprised would you really be if you learned something new about how to reason? Can you really tell yourself you never expect that to happen again? Doesn't it feel more like when you're reading a book and you can't predict what the next page is going to read?
Weighing your beliefs doesn’t guarantee that you’ll never have false beliefs, and you’ll still on some level believe all your beliefs to be true. That doesn’t mean weighing your beliefs is totally worthless and you are still free to do that if you like
Most of my beliefs are false. I assign 50% probability that Mexico City is west of 30⁰ W when I typed "30⁰ W", and now I've thought about it for a minute I'm 99.99% sure^1^. Now I looked it up on Wikipedia and thought some more and I'm at least 99.99999999999% sure^1^.
I knew at the start something like this would happen and that "There 50% probability that Mexico City is west of 30⁰ W" was never true about the world in the way it is true that there is 50% chance a particular potassium-40 atom in my brain will undergo radioactive decay between now and its half life from now.
I was as close to 100% sure as I can get that Mexico City wouldn't objectively have 50% chance of being on one side of that line than the other. I was extremely confident that I was wrong, and yet there I was saying it because it was my best guess.
I really hope you won't leave this conversation still thinking you believe your beliefs to be true, because that's no way to live.
^1^: normalized to the world being real, which I don't know how to sensibly apply probabilities to. Still I would be very surprised if such a charade broke over this, so I expect to consistently experience Mexico City at 99⁰W for longer than I'll remember that it is there.