Your feelings have a sphere of usefulness in decision making or else they wouldn’t be there. After you’ve verbalized the belief to be questioned, test how it feels to fully believe it vs how it feels to be convinced that the opposite is true. This will not determine whether the objective truth of the statement but it will certainly give you insight on which choice will be easier to live with.

There is only one universe that can be created with truth; however, it is also impossible to know this universe in a social sense because it depends on people’s perceptions of value, and often people do not control how they think of things or even do not allow their value judgement to be known outside their self. So, again from a social standpoint, the truth only makes things simpler when people have themselves decided to be simple.

This desire for simplicity, and for a reality that is not dependent on random perceptions and judgements as a result of heuristics that are often deliberately (but innocently) manipulated by individuals or organizations in their environment, is one reason to seek truth. Another reason is as a source of moral guidance, in that the overall best strategy in this world is cooperation and it is only a matter of revealing that strategy through attempts to obscure it.

However, the problem with this approach is that when you learn to much you discover that how much deception pervades the world and it seems impossible to prosper, or even survive in this world when you consider that many possible choices are a conflict that can only result in either you suffering and someone else benefiting and the world as a whole becoming worse; or you benefiting and someone else suffering and whether or not the world may benefit, you have already done a selfish action and as a result cannot truthfully see yourself as contributing to the world.

Are you truly being honest with yourself? You may not want to ask yourself who else may be losing out if you are not. Given the limitations of our memory and our ability to compare situations and predict the future, it seems inevitable that there will always be some dishonesty. Does it not?

You count up and find that you have a dozen processes outside yourself that you might rely on. God knows that 4 of those merit trust and indicate A. God also knows that 8 of them are “on the wrong topic” or otherwise untrustworthy. What they indicate is a toss up, 4 for A, 4 for B. Lacking omniscience Hanson has to use his judgment.

You use your judgment to pick one of these twelve processes. If it indicates A your subconscious undermines your confidence in its relevance. Realising that it is on the wrong topic, you switch to a different process. Rinse and repeat.

Eventually you have an external process that tells you to believe B. Your subconscious has lied to you, getting you to judge that you have picked the most trustyworthy and relevant one of the twelve.

When I sit at the Go board I don’t think to myself “Intuition is untrustworthy, I’ll spend my time in the opening reading out end game sequences and then make a crap move.” What is really going on is that my subconscious wants a timid defensive move and it knows that getting me to read out tactical sequences is a good way to get one. So it whispers in my ear about how untrustworthy intuition is. Use “minimal rationality”. Formal analysis is always trustworthy. Then I read out some sequences, under the banner of formal analysis, find a threat to a group and play a timid move to defend it. I play my timid move smugly. My subconscious has lied to me, telling me that my explicit thoughts were on the right topic.

I’ve noticed that there *are* many people that get better at not deceiving themselves, and continue that way. There are *also* people that get better at self-deception.

I don’t know what Robin is incentivized to do.