Discussion
I'm starting to think that this thing we call "belief" simply doesn't exist. What does it even mean to "believe" that the thing you're working on has a >10% chance of destroying humanity within a decade?
We're just animals that make up complicated justifications for doing whatever the fuck we want.
I think there's a feedback loop there: if, at some point, we start to realize our behavior doesn't correspond with our professed beliefs, we will probably start changing either our behavior or our professed beliefs.
Of course, this is Psych 101: cognitive dissonance. But it's a pretty rare phenomenon, especially in a society like ours where people wear beliefs like t-shirts or bumper stickers. When your professed beliefs are catchy but vacuous sound bites, cognitive dissonance just isn't gonna happen. Which is why our society encourages constructing our identities this way.
I mean, look at "blue" voters in the US: they pretend they support immigration and immigrants, but they ignore the fact that their party is just as hostile to immigration as the other one. Trump still hasn't surpassed Obama's deportation numbers.
So we're just a bunch of animals pretending at morality for the sake of being able to form a society. But the society we've formed is garbage and is wrecking the planet. It surprises us that we're doing nothing about that because of the aforementioned self-delusion.
First step if we want to change that is to stop deluding ourselves.
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So a "belief" is really just a story we've made up about ourselves to tell others. It's this thing we insert into our identity because it makes us feel good or because we think it somehow justifies our actions.
I don't think human behavior is just random. But I do think we don't have access to its actual drivers. If we did, changing our own behavior would be a lot easier. But we're horrible at it. And our behavior typically doesn't change much even when our professed beliefs change. I don't behave *that* much differently today than at the peak of my unfortunate libertarian phase.