Robin Hanson:
"Abstract beliefs have two big causes: vibes and analysis. We vibe beliefs mostly via intuitively feeling out their associations with people, other beliefs, and our personal status. (Music, art, eloquence, and status often influence this a lot.) We analyze such beliefs by more consciously and explicitly comparing our beliefs logically to concrete analysis of relevant data and established theory.
Most people form and change most of their abstract beliefs via vibing. (In far mode.) But there are experts in the world who have learned about specific relevant data and theory, and have learned how to apply those to estimate nearby abstract beliefs. Those calculated abstract beliefs are often at odds with the most popular vibed versions.
Most public talk on abstract beliefs is vibes. You can tell this by comparing how fast, fluid, and vague is such talk, relative to how slowly, carefully, and precisely experts must proceed to figure out the logical implications or data and theory, and to communicate that to other experts.
Most experts allow their expert knowledge to change some of what would otherwise be their vibed beliefs. However, they usually try to minimize the impact of their expert knowledge, which usually only applies to narrow areas, on their network of vibed beliefs, which covers a much wider range of topics. Often they emphasize the limits of their expert tools, and invoke piecemeal “common sense judgments” to protect their vibed beliefs from being changed by expert knowledge.
Most experts only have a few related areas of expertise. But some “polymaths” (like me) work to acquire expertise across a much wider range of topics. They then have more chances for expert knowledge to overturn vibed beliefs. For them there is a conflict not only between their network of vibed beliefs and expert knowledge, but also between expert knowledge in different areas."
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