Skeptical and Charitable

It is important to be skeptical. Being skeptical means that you do not accept things on hearsay. You do not accept a statement that contradicts your present beliefs without a demonstration that proves it. To a skeptical person, a proof is necessary. A person who is not sufficiently skeptical will accumulate false beliefs. Carrying a lot of false beliefs leads to contradictions in beliefs. Being used to contradictions makes you less sensitive to them. This makes it harder to notice important contradictions. Not being able to notice important contradictions makes it even harder to be skeptical. So it is a vicious cycle. A bad model of the world makes updating your model of the world harder, so be careful about what you put in yours.

Being charitable means that you are willing to accept a statement that contradicts your current beliefs, if given a demonstration. To a charitable person, a proof is sufficient. A person who is not sufficiently charitable will ignore data that contradicts their beliefs, despite there being good reason to accept the data. Such a person can miss good opportunities. So being charitable is also important.

Notice the two logical statements above:

• If skeptical, then proof is necessary.
• If charitable, then proof is sufficient.

So to a person who is both skeptical and charitable, beliefs are based the proofs that they have seen.

What if every time we were faced with an opportunity to choose to be skeptical, a red screen would flash saying "maybe you shouldn't believe this"? And what if every time we were faced with an opportunity to be charitable, a green screen would flash saying "maybe you should believe this"? In practice, one of the signs may fail to light up. If both signs fail to light up and we just ignore the data, what happens then? What is the default? Skeptical. Skeptical is the default. A person who ignores all data is trivially a skeptic.

Does that mean that if being skeptic is the default, should we make an effort to be more charitable, even if that means accepting some false beliefs? I think not. Having bad beliefs is worse than having no beliefs, because of the vicious cycle effect. Imagine being in a plane that is about to land in Stockholm, Arlanda. The captain says that they have lost the map they have of Arlanda, so instead they will use a map they have of Copenhagen, Kastrup. You would rather they just looked out the window then!

So much for the tradeoff between skepticism and charitability. Let's focus on increasing the total sum of them! How can we do this with limited resources of mental energy? An obvious thing that people don't do enough is "just google it". Especially things that have been believed for a long time, that one picked up on hearsay. Such cached beliefs can make one look very stupid, since it is so easy to look them up these days. Ok, suppose we are on google. Which source do we believe? Answer: the most upstream one. In matters of science, always go to the original article. In matters of politics and such, who to trust about who-said-what? Answer: don't bother with who-said-what.

Is the original article the most upstream source in science? No, the most upstream source is nature herself. Nature is the final arbiter, and I don't mean the journal. Asking nature is quite expensive in general. In programming and mathematics, we are more lucky. We can go through the proof step by step by ourselves, and check that everything is right. In programming, one can implement the algorithm, and check that the output is correct. Just checking the output from examples is worth less than a full proof. However, with a paper proof, there is the problem of self doubt: did I miss something? Currently, I have a higher confidence in the computer carrying out logical operations, than in myself.