Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased)

PS: See also Scott Aaronson's classic On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality.

"believing you're happy" and "in fact happy" strike me as distinctions without distinction. How are they falsifiable?

What if self-deception helps us be happy? What if just running out and overcoming bias will make us - gasp! - unhappy?

You are aware, I'm sure, of studies that connect depression and freedom from bias, notably overconfidence in one's ability to control outcome.

You've already given one answer: to deliberately choose to believe what our best judgement tells us isn't so would be lunacy. Many people are psychologically able to fool themselves subtly, but fewer are able to deliberately, knowingly fool themselves.

Another answer is that even though depression leads to freedom from some biases and illusions, the converse doesn't seem to apply. Overcoming bias doesn't seem to lead to depression. I don't get the impression that a disproportionate number of people on this list are depressed. In my own experience, losing illusions doesn't make me feel depressed. Even if the illusion promised something desirable, I think what I have usually felt was more like intellectual relief, "So that's why (whatever was promised) never seemed to work."

Depression is specifically linked to reducing overconfidence. People more accurately assess their own abilities (and perhaps others' abilities as well). I'm not aware that it's linked to decreasing other biases.

"How happy is the moron: / He doesn't give a damn. / I wish I were a moron. / -- My God, perhaps I am!"

Or, in other words, wanting to be stupid is itself a form of stupidity.

I'm pleased to say that, through a great deal of study and practice, I have learned how to unlearn things that I know. This is called skepticism. A key to it is the ability to imagine plausible alternatives to whatever is believed. Descartes is famous for developing this idea, although he was constrained by his society from completely embracing it. Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus developed this idea, but their community was persecuted and destroyed by the Christians, too.

Skepticism is not opposed to rationality, but neither does it accept that a rationally derived solution to a problem is necessarily the best solution (unless you define rationality as whatever leads to the best solution, in which case you have to abandon the notion of a rational methodology).

My wife is an ongoing experiment and example for me, because she seems to live her life almost entirely without rationality and critical thinking as I recognize it. She lives instead by pattern matching and by the process of comparing real and anticipated feelings. You feel superior to her. Well, she feels superior to you. Is there a non-biased process that can decide who is right? Sure there is: mutation and natural selection. My wife is the product of billions of years of evolution, as are you. So, it seems to be a tie...

I like being "smart" and "analytical". It's my kind of game. I find symbolic logic fascinating. I write software using my logical mind. I enjoyed reading your wonderful tutorial on Bayesian reasoning, though I already knew the material, having read the Cartoon Guide to Statistics and the works of Tversky and Kahneman, years ago. But not since 1920 or so has it been possible to make a fully rational case for living a fully rational life. To do that you have to base your reasoning on premises, and that leads to the infinite regress problem. You have to map your premises to reality, but you don't have direct access to reality.

I'm not attacking rationality. I love it. But why be biased in favor of it? Why not just do what works for you and leave it at that?

This thing about depressed people being unbiased makes no sense to me. Maybe they're not overconfident, but aren't they underconfident instead? I'd find it pretty surprising if a mental illness was correlated with common sense.

Anyway, perhaps the key to being rational and happy is suppressing not facts, but fear of them. No, you can't have a pony. Get over it.

Tiiba: "makes no sense" and "would be surprising" are very different things, and the former is excessive for the claim about depressed people. The level of confidence that's optimal for making correct predictions about the world could be much lower than the level that's optimal for living a happy life. Do you have some way of knowing that it isn't?

(Let me forestall one argument against by remarking that evolution is not in the business of maximizing our happiness.)

This post strikes me as being pretty arrogant. Actually the whole blog tends in that direction, but this post especially, where the author finally makes clear the dichotomy between the readers of this blog (the uber-rationalists) and everyone else (the stupid).

When your world view causes you to believe that everyone who is not single-mindedly pursuing your worldview is stupid, I think you should treat that as a warning sign of bias. Even if your world view is about overcoming bias.

Um, there are readers of this blog, and there are people who enjoy the "happiness of stupidity" (which is not the same as just having a low IQ; it involves other personality traits as well). I don't think there's much overlap between those two groups. But they are far from being the only two groups in the world, and there is no dichotomy between them.

My understanding is that happiness is a product of biochemistry and neuroanatomy, and doesn't have to inherently correlate with any knowledge, experience, or heuristic.

Does having an explanatory style personality (ie delusional optimism) lead to reduced rates of depression and increased happiness?

http://www.psych.nyu.edu/oettingen/OETTINGEN1995EXPLANATORY.PDF

"Leaving the morality aside, I doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen."

Have you talked to any religious people lately? "Oh, the tornado ripped my neighbors house off the foundations, but we were spared. I guess God was looking out for us!"

Could anyone say that without willfully blinding themselves? Do they really think they are better people than their neighbors, and that God moved the tornado away from their house? Yet you hear stuff like this all the time. And I think they really believe it.

The ability to delude ourselves seems to be one of our main survival traits. Rational people would never take the stupid chances that result in progress. Evolution has favored a species that buys lottery tickets.

Surely, true wisdom would be second-order rationality, choosing when to be rational. ... You can't know the consequences of being biased, until you have already debiased yourself. And then it is too late for self-deception. The other alternative is to choose blindly to remain biased, without any clear idea of the consequences. This is ... willful stupidity.

This isn't quite fair. While it is true that you couldn't know the detailed consequences of being biased, you could make a rational judgment under uncertainty, given what you do know. And it should be possible to for your best judgment in this situation to be that you are better off biased. Of course this mere possibility does not mean that you are in fact better of being biased.

While it is true that you couldn't know the detailed consequences of being biased, you could make a rational judgment under uncertainty, given what you do know.

Yes, but for it to be a rational judgment under uncertainty, you would have to take into account the unknown unknowns, some of which may be Black Swans (where rare events accounts for a significant fraction of the total weight), plus such well-known biases as overconfidence and optimism. Think of all that worrying you'll have to do... maybe you should just relax...

My own life experience suggests that any black box should be assumed to contain a Black Swan. (Or to be precise, a substantial probability of such, rather than probability 1.0.)

State legitimacy is similarly based on such self deception, whether it uses the traditional "'cos God says so" approach, or the more modern, "'cos we won a popularity contest." idea: in neither circumstance is there any real reason why people in general should act as if the state has the right to make laws and manage people, and yet it does, apparently to the general good unless you happen to be a radical libertarian.

Surely this is the same as the happiness case: by having most people in a nation sharing the delusional belief in the legitimacy of the state, the nation as a whole benefits.

Eliezer, we are in essence talking about a value of info calculation. Yes, such a calculated info value rises with rare important things you might know if you had the info. But even so it is not guaranteed that info will be worth the cost. Similarly, it is not guaranteed that our choosing to avoid bias will be worth the costs.

It seems to me simpler to just say that given our purposes we judge better overcoming our biases to in fact be cost-effective on the topics we emphasize here. The strongest argument for that seems to me that we emphasize topics where our evolved judgments about when we can safely be biased are the least likely to be reliable guides to social, as opposed to personal, value.

...you will think to yourself, "And now, I will irrationally believe that I will win the lottery, in order to make myself happy." But we do not have such direct control over our beliefs. You cannot make yourself believe the sky is green by an act of will.

In my experience, this is not true.

My father was a dentist, and when I was 7 he learned hypnosis to use to anesthetise his patients. Of course he practiced on me while he was learning. (As it turned out, he did successful anesthesia with it for a few years before people started spreading stories that hypnosis was dangerous mind-control and he quit.)

With posthypnotic suggestion people can easily believe things that they have no reason to believe, remember things they did not experience, and ignore their senses up to a point. I've done it. It all feels real.

I learned to hypnotise people a little, and I learned how to do it on myself. It certainly can be done. You do have that control over your beliefs, if you're willing to use it.

Which is not to say it's a good idea. IME the main time it's useful to make yourself believe something is when you have nothing to lose by burning your bridges, when you lose everything anyway if the belief is wrong. Then you might as well believe it wholeheartedly.

I've read that interest in hypnosis has something like an eleven year cycle. People start to think there's something interesting there. They start studying it, and get some fascinating results that look some ways powerful. Then as they keep studying they find that all the unexpected things people can do under hypnosis they can also do without hypnosis. And then they start to see that a lot of people are basicly walking around hypnotised a lot of the time. They start to wonder what exactly they're studying, and they quit, and after the subject lies fallow awhile more people get interested and it starts again.

Basicly all it takes for hypnosis is that the person relax and listen uncritically. If they're willing to believe what they're told, they're hypnotised. All the peculiar abilities people sometimes display when told to under hypnosis, are things they could do but normally don't believe they can do. When they give up their scepticism they go ahead and do their best instead of doubting themselves and hesitating. They're willing to believe delusions for somebody they trust, and when the limits of the trust show up or they get emphatic evidence against the delusion, then they rethink.

You really can deceive yourself. You can build false memories and believe them. You can make the sky look a little green, particularly on a cloudy day, and you can build on that until it looks pretty green -- provided the idea of a green sky doesn't offend you too much. If you believe it's impossible you can't see it. If it's "I didn't know that was even possible, I wonder why it's happening now?" then you can.

These are things that anybody can learn to do. But I mostly agree with your arguments that it is not generally a useful skill. If I get a toothache I don't anesthetise it until after I get my dentist appointment, and if I miss the appointment the pain comes back. Pain is your signal that something is going wrong with your body, and in general it's a bad idea to ignore that.

"Evolution has favored a species that buys lottery tickets."

It's (statistically) bad for the individual but good for the species. Although even buying lottery tickets -or the other natural equivalents is probably deoptimized behavior. I imagine there's some bayesian optimized approach for a species and the spectrum of risk taking its members would engage in. In contrast I suspect our species performs functionally rather than optimally.

Forgive me, Master Eliezer, for I have sinned.

I have come to realize that inside my mind is not merely self-delusion, but a full-blown case of doublethink. There are two mutually exclusive statements that I simutaneously hold to be unquestionably true. Here they are:

1) I should not cause suffering to others. 2) Only my own happiness really matters.

I can even explain this doublethink. I am naturally selfish, but society makes me be good. I could try to believe that only I matter, and do good things only for the show, but that strategy doesn't work for most people. Being good is too complex.

This doublethink creates intresting effects. When I read about context insensitivity, I wondered if that's really a bias, or just apathy masquerading as concern. I'd probably give the same amount to save five birds as I would to save Atlantis from sinking. Both are social acts.

I also wonder about coherent extrapolated volition. What will it find when it extrapolates us? That we all want the whole pie? That we would gladly exterminate everyone else if we could get away with it?

"Evolution has favored a species that buys lottery tickets."

It's (statistically) bad for the individual but good for the species.

This is a group selection argument. (If you don't know what that means, it's something that biologists use to scare their children.) Evolution does not operate on species. It operates on individuals. Genes that are statistically bad for individuals drop out of the gene pool no matter what they do for the species.

This is an ancient and thoroughly discredited idea. See George Williams's "Adaptation and Natural Selection."

Eliezer, I mentioned behaviors/biases that are statistically bad for the individual, not genes. Also, I'm interested in your take on the idea that the existence of humans with a range of different biases can be good for other humans, even if it's not optimal from the perspective of the person with the bias.

"When I read about context insensitivity, I wondered if that's really a bias, or just apathy masquerading as concern. I'd probably give the same amount to save five birds as I would to save Atlantis from sinking. Both are social acts."

I want to clarify. I do believe in context insensitivity, but think indifference was also a factor in the donation case.

Genes that are bad for many of the individuals that carry them but that have large jackpots can be selected. As for how you tell whether the occasional large jackpot makes up for the common failure, it takes a long time to tell.

With lotteries you can judge by the house. They're in business to make money, they have wealth that they got from previous lotteries, it makes sense the odds are against you in the longterm. But that reasoning doesn't work in general.

Human beings who see jackpot events happen will sometimes gamble for long times without winning a jackpot. If they didn't they couldn't win. They lose cumulatively while they wait. It takes as long time to find out by trial and error whether they win on average or not, and if they don't try long enough they don't find out what the odds really are.

Eliezer, do you concede that there is no difference between "believing you're happy" and "really being happy"?

HA, I was surprised you stumbled into that one. A good introductory example of how evolution does not optimize at the species but at the gene-level can be found here. It is by Richard Dawkins, who is also known for the term "meme", which is an idea that can be analyzed like a gene. Unless the meme that buying lottery tickets is a good idea is beneficial for those that hold it, we should not expect it to become prevalent even it if benefits the species. You can find other good posts from Razib on "group selection" if you look for them.

Eliezer, do you concede that there is no difference between "believing you're happy" and "really being happy"?

No. There is a difference between believing you love your stepchildren and loving your stepchildren, between believing you're deeply upset about rainforests and being deeply upset about rainforests, and between believing you're happy and being happy.

As soon as you turn happiness into an obligatory sign of spiritual health, a sign of virtue, people will naturally tend to overestimate their happiness.

Falsifiable difference? Put 'em in an fMRI or use other physiological indicators.

Unless the meme that {buying lottery tickets is a good idea} is beneficial for those that hold it, we should not expect it to become prevalent even it if benefits the species.

But it is prevalent. And on average people lose money at it, while the occasionaly winners tend not to do well.

So it's natural to suppose that the meme for buying lottery tickets is a perversion of some other functional meme.

Here's a way that lotteries could be functional after all for people in extended families. If you sacrifice and save and start to build up a little capital, you may be accosted by distant relatives in need who have the right to your assistance, and it all drains away. But when you win the lottery you can go live in some distant place and only share enough to stay in distant good standing. When building up savings is considered immoral, paying 40% on average might not seem so bad for a chance to get some capital anyway.

"Evolution does not operate on species. It operates on individuals. Genes that are statistically bad for individuals drop out of the gene pool no matter what they do for the species."

Imagine a gene that caused 9/10 of the humans who have it to be twice as fertility and attractiveness as the population that did not have it, while 1/10 of the humans who have it can't reproduce at all. This would be a gene that would serve the species (i.e. the portion of the species that had it), even though it would harm some individuals. Notice that the inability of the 10% to procreate would not harm the prospects of such a gene for the species as a whole. Soon, the whole of the species would have this gene.

Isn't there some theorizing that suggests that homosexuality may be an example of something like this? Perhaps the phenomenon of homosexuality is linked to some wonderful benefit that increases the viability of heterosexuals. Otherwise, wouldn't homosexuals have been "selected out" long ago?

Imagine a gene that caused 9/10 of the humans who have it to be twice as fertility and attractiveness as the population that did not have it, while 1/10 of the humans who have it can't reproduce at all.

this is means that the allele (genetic variant) increase fitness by a factor of 1.8. this is not a "species level" benefit in anything but a tautological way. higher levels of selection or dynamic processes are only interesting if they can not be reduced down to a lower level. e.g., you can increase the fitness of the group by simply increasing the fitness of individuals which compose the group. this increases the fitness of the group, but it is easily reduced toward increasing the fitness of individuals. in other cases you can not decompose the group fitness to individuals and so there is grounds for saying that the excess fitness which is gained by having a group, or evaluating a group, is something that is "for the good of the group."

to use a sports analogy, if you brought together an all-star team you'd get a better team, not because of the team dynamics but because the individual players are so much better. in contrast, ther are teams which are very good because of group dynamics where utility players can specialize in their roles and synergistically perform far better than they might as individuals.

This is an ancient and thoroughly discredited idea. See George Williams's "Adaptation and Natural Selection."

i am generally skeptical of group selectionist arguments, but we are probably on the cusp of a renaissance in this area. it will be spearheaded by e.o. wilson, who has always been a "believer," but who now believes that group selection (or at least multi-level selection) has the empirical and analytical firepower to make a comeback. i am cautiously skeptical, but in the interests of honesty i think that "ancient and thoroughly discredited" is probably a better description for group selection circa 1995 than 2007. most evolutionary biologists are probably pretty skeptical of group selectionist arguments, but in large part it is because the models presented (which tend to avoid the pitfalls of the earlier arguments) are hard to test and seem analytically intractable beyond the simplest formulations.

Imagine a gene that caused 9/10 of the humans who have it to be twice as fertility and attractiveness as the population that did not have it, while 1/10 of the humans who have it can't reproduce at all.

btw. you don't have to imagine. sickle cell is like this. a proportion of the population gets increased benefit from having the gene, and a proportion gets decreased benefit, in the ratio of heterozygotes (those who carry one sickle cell allele and one normal) and homozogytes (those who carry two alleles), i.e., 2pq:q^2. that's not species selection, it's standard balancing selection upon one gene.

What's wrong with group selection? All you need is for the benefit to the individual of being in a group in which trait X is sufficiently common to be sufficiently bigger than the benefit of not having trait X in the individual... or am I confused?

You know, self-deception has attracted some inquiry already.

Doug, what's wrong with group selection is mostly that selection at the individual level works so much faster. If something's harmful to individuals, it's likely to have been wiped out by individual-level selection before it gets the chance to help the group.

It's possible to concoct scenarios where group-level effects win. For instance: some allele has no effect at all when heterozygous, but when homozygous it causes its bearer to become astonishingly altruistic. By the time there's much incidence of homozygosity in any given community, the chances are that the allele is (heterozygously) quite common, and then it's possible that the individual's altruism does more net good than harm to bearers of the allele. This is kin selection rather than group selection really, but on a different scale from the usual.

Or: some allele has a very slight deleterious effect on individual fitness in general-- slight enough that it typically takes, say, 100 generations before natural selection becomes visible over genetic drift. If it then has some group-level effect that prevents rare but group-destroying incidents (say, once every 100 generations someone without it will go nuts and kill everyone around them) then it could be selected for on balance simply because groups where it doesn't happen to get fixed in the population tend to die. Note that making this work is rather dependent on group size.

But it's pretty hard to concoct such scenarios that are actually plausible, and pretty hard to argue that anything in the real world looks much like them.

Doug S, G has given a good explanation (except possibly the last sentence which is debatable.) I'll explain again: Selection happens when genes increase in frequency compared to other genes. Since genes always happen inside individuals, a gene that causes its individuals to leave fewer offspring in the population will be selected against, regardless of what it does for the population as a whole.

A gene that results in good stuff for the population but that doesn't result in its own carriers increasing more than others won't increase in the population even though all the individuals in the population would be better off.

You can get by this a little by assuming a population split into breeding groups with limited outbreeding, where a gene that improves the group enough can take over in a small group, and then when the group gets bigger it splits and both groups increase compared to other groups, etc. But too much outbreeding would stop it. Something like this may happen in rats and fruit flies etc, too soon to be sure.

There could be specific genetic mechanisms that provide a system to to create group selection. Diploidy is a peculiar genetic mechanism, as are sexuality and dominance. There could be others that are less obvious, that benefit the populations that let them operate, and group selection is one of the things they might promote. But that's entirely speculative at this point.

James Bach, if something has a frequency above 1% and has high fitness costs to those that hold it, it is probably pathogenic rather than genetic. You can find more on that from Greg Cochran at the bottom of this page.

You know, back in the old days, before I jumped on the Lesswrong train, I would say I willed myself into believing in God. Because whether he existed or not didn't change empirical conclusions: the world could have been created five minutes ago, intelligent design could have happened etc. etc.

But doing that made me angst and feel uneasy and there was something nagging at me. You know, those beliefs hurt, but it hurt even harder to get them out. I fought every inch for them. But when I lost, it was a relief, it felt like I had won.

As far as I can tell, the weakness of the article is that it assumes one is deciding for oneself. One could decide to help others become irrational (on some issues) if you rationally decide it is best for them.

As far as I can tell, the weakness of the article is that it assumes one is deciding for oneself. One could decide to help others become irrational (on some issues) if you rationally decide it is best for them.

I'm through with truth.

I never had a scientific intuition. In college, I once saw a physics demonstration with a cathode ray tube -- moving a magnet bent the beam of light that showed the path of the electrons. I had never seen electrons before and it occurred to me that I had never really believed in the equations in my physics book; I knew they were the right answers to give on tests, but I wouldn't have expected to see them work.

I'm also missing the ability to estimate. Draw a line on a sheet of paper; put a dot where 75% is. Then check if you got it right. I always get that sort of thing wrong. Arithmetic estimation is even harder. Deciding how to bet in a betting game? Next to impossible.

Whatever mechanism is that matches theory to reality, mine doesn't work very well. Whatever mechanism derives expectations about the world from probability numbers, mine hardly works at all. This is why I actually can double-think. I can see an idea as logical without believing in it.

A literate person cannot look at a sentence without reading it. But a small child, just learning to read, can look at letters on a page without reading, and has to make an extra effort to read them. In the same way, a bad rationalist can see that an idea is true, without believing it. I can read about electromagnetism and still not expect to see the beam in the cathode ray tube bend. I spent ten years or so thinking "Isn't it odd that the best arguments are on the atheist side?" without once wondering whether I should be an atheist.

Should I break down that barrier? I'm not sure. I'd do it if it would allow me to make money, I think. But not if it came at the cost of some kind of screaming Cthulhu horror.

You know what I really wish I had? Team spirit. Absolute group loyalty. Faith. Patriotism. The sense of being in the right. In Hoc Signo Vinces. I have fleeting glimpses of it but it doesn't last. I want it enough that I keep fantasizing about joining the Army because it might work. I always wanted to be a fanatic, and my brain would never do it. But I'm starting to wonder if that's hackable; I'm sure enough sleep deprivation and ritual would do it.

Overestimating my driving skills is obviously bad. But how about this scenario of the possibility of happiness destroyed by the truth?

Suppose, on the final day of exams, on the last exam, you think you’ve done poorly. In fact, you only got 1 in 10 questions completely right. On the other 9, you hope you’d get at least a bit of partial credit. On the other hand, all 4 of your friends (in the class of 50) think they’ve done poorly. Maybe there will be a curve? In fact, if the final exam curve is good enough, you might even get an A for the course.

The grade goes online at 6 PM. It’s already there, and it won’t change.

So what do you do? This is the last grade of the semester, and no more exams to study for. A bad grade will make you unhappy for the rest of the evening (you wanted to go to that party, right? You won’t have much fun thinking about that grade). A good grade will make you happy, but so what? Happiness comes with diminishing marginal returns (and for me it’s more like a binary value, happy or not). You have a higher expected utility for tonight if you don’t check your grade. And you’re not any worse off checking the grade tomorrow.

Should you destroy all that expected utility by the truth? (For reference, the truth is a that you got a C-, which is BAD).

My “solution” to this problem (probably irrational?) is in the spirit of “The other way is closed.” I look.

To maximize utility, I shouldn’t look at the grade until tomorrow morning. Some people don’t. I haven’t, once, and it didn’t bother me too much that I haven’t. And after bad grades, the outcome was usually pretty much as expected. So I know my utility function. That’s not the reason.

This is like the two-box decision of Newcomb’s problem. Rationally (according to Eliezer) you would pick one box. I’m not rational. I pick two. What’s there, is already there.

I. JUST. CAN’T. NOT. LOOK.

This is the peculiar blindness of rationalists. Everywhere you look, you can see people denying reality, and yet rationalists talk like it can't be done.

Winston, after being tortured, eventually could see 5 fingers where there were only 4. Most people are much more malleable than that. They already had a preference for believing what they're told to believe. You can see it everywhere you look.

Even if you ignore the daily evidence of your senses, just as a matter of the evolutionary pressure of centuries of ideological terror and executions, shouldn't we expect independents minds to have gone the way of the dodo?

Is it impossible for us to change our spots? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe we just aren't rational enough yet, still fetishistically clinging to our mania for epistemic rationality, ignoring the tradeoffs we make to instrumental rationality, which is where the rubber meets the road.

Second order rationality implies...

No it doesn't. As long as one includes instrumental rationality in the mix, it implies nothing of the sort. Instrumental rationality is what achieves your values. If you're really committed to winning, not just toeing the line on epistemic rationality, you can and will probably change. Your mind can calculate a lot more than what you can bat around in your head self consciously.

Winston's heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O'Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O'Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the thought that defeated him.

That isn't the thought that defeats me, nor is it the thought that defeats Orwell. The horror is that Double Think may win, and may already be winning.

I find it grotesque, but the universes seems blithely unconcerned about my preferences.

Quite the contrary: Alcohol.

Since this is the featured article thingy of today I'm commenting, maybe someone will see this and want to engage this argument or agree and make sure that the smart guys in lab coats see it.

By the time you realize you have a choice, there is no choice. You cannot unsee what you see. The other way is closed.

For now. But once we control neuroscience really well, this entire can of worms gets opened up again. Perhaps Brave New World would be a more appropriate dystopia to reference than 1984, because in that world they actually DO believe what the government wants them to, because they're so well controlled by the sleep hypnosis and conditioning they receive.

So we'll need a different and better solution eventually. And, also, this solution needs to deal with infinite regress too.

"You might even believe you were happy and self-deceived; but you would not in fact be happy and self-deceived."

As far as I've got this happiness thing figured out, you're it when you believe you are, and you're not when you believe you're not. There is, in fact, not necessarily a correlation between how happy a person should be, and how happy they feel. Feelings don't have to correspond to reality. One can consciously choose to no longer be bothered by something and just be happy instead. For me at least, with a little effort, it works. And it can be validated just as easily, just by stating that my sole utility function is to be happy. The human brain is a lotus-eater machine.

The 30-year-old me who was terrified of death would have given belief in an afterlife as an exception to this. The 45-year-old me is a member of cryonics provider Alcor.

Well, when you have "Homosexuals in the Basement", and the Nazi officer rings at your door, you had better make yourself believe you don't have them. What is, precisely, the difference between this deep-immersion roleplay, and genuine self-delusion, for all practical purposes? This is not a rhethorical question.

Leaving the morality aside, I doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen. Second-order rationality implies that at some point, you will think to yourself, "And now, I will irrationally believe that I will win the lottery, in order to make myself happy." But we do not have such direct control over our beliefs.

We routinely generate a swath of irrational beliefs, spawned e.g. by deep seated biological biases such as "That girl I just met, she is so special, I will love and cherish her forever and ever." You notice a belief like that makes you happy, then you only do a cursory examination of some worst case boundaries. If you then judge the belief to be mostly harmless, you just do not look at it any closer.

Changing a belief consciously means reflecting on it. Stop the reflecting, and you stop the updating (and keep the happiness).

Counterargument

This immediately brings to mind the old adage about it being better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. I'd imagine, from the pig's point of view, that the loftiest height of piggy happiness was not terribly dissimilar from the baseline level of piggy contentment, so equating "happiness" to "contentment" would not be an inexcusable breach of piggy logic. Indeed, we humans pretty much have to infer this state of affairs when considering animal wellbeing ("appearance of sociobiological contentment approximates happiness"), as we don't yet possess any means of engaging animals in philosophical conversation on the subject.

Yet it seems that those who would have us believe that "blissful ignorance" is a good thing as an absolute are confusing contentment with happiness unnecessarily. Happiness registers more as a positive, aspirational value within the context of the human experience range; contentment seems more a negative, absence-of-dissatisfaction value that indicates only that things aren't going poorly. Doublethink and willful ignorance do not seem to be able to positively provide qualia that contribute to happiness; they can only obscure knowledge of things that are actually going poorly, thus creating a false sense of contentment.

That's my general counterpoint whenever people speak positively of the "happiness" created by things like religion and opiates. Nothing is being added; your knowledge of reality is being obscured. It's difficult to see how that approach could be considered a mature option.

I had the happiness of stupidity once. While younger I edged into the valley and recoiled. I believe I even made a conscious choice and enforced it through various means. It was a good time over about two years, and it was unsustainable. I made the mistake of continuing to gain knowledge about human nature, I kept my curiosity and my fascination with how things worked and thus was my ignorance doomed. I dipped deep into the valley and eventually found this place, where I (hopefully) hit critical mass of bootstrap.

If I had stayed in that bubble of wilful ignorance I would probably be happier, but long term I think my current path will overtake it. It's better this way, I couldn't have stayed in that state without maiming my own curiosity and growth.

Isn't love a "happiness of stupidity" to some degree? It defies rationality, and the odds of it lasting aren't good statistically. Should you believe in it, then?

While you can't fool your logical brain, if you want to have a false belief to make you happy, you don't need to anyway. The brain is compartmentalized and often doesn't update what you feel intuitively true, or what you base your actions on, just because you learned a fact. This sentence: "You can't know the consequences of being biased, until you have already debiased yourself" strikes me as most hard to believe. Reading about a bias and considering its consequences, esp. in an academic mindframe does NOT debias you. That requires applying it to your life and reasoning, recognizing when you are biased, sometimes even training and conditioning to change how you think. If after learning about a bias, I rationally decided that I want to keep it, I would just shelve it in my memory as academic trivia irrelevant to daily life, and I would stay just as biased as before in regards to what I do and how I feel.

The happiness of stupidity is not closed to me. By the time I've made 1 rational decision (by whatever metric one wants to use) I'll have made 100 irrational ones. Stupidity and irrationality is built into the very way I operate.

I am primarily composed stupid and irrational beliefs and I am continually creating more.

You don't choose to be irrational, that's the default position.

Rationality is a limited precious resource that you use to diagnose and fix problems within the irrational milieu of systems and subsystems that make up your mind.

Second order rationality would then seem to be more about avoiding wasting precious resources on things I will receive no gain and instead focus on using rationality to fix things that actually need fixing. If I spend 1 hour of rational thinking doing philosophy I'll feel a lot better than if I spend 1 hour questioning the intentions of my SO.