Is Belief in Belief a Useful Concept?

It looks to me as if this conflates two distinctions that, a priori, seem like separate things.

• Between voluntarily adopted beliefs on whose basis we choose what to say and do ("basically voluntary"), and ones we simply find ourselves with ("internal estimates of the mind").
• Between beliefs we treat as binary, and beliefs with degrees of certainty that never get to exactly 0 or 1.

I can see why these might turn out to be related -- e.g., because those voluntarily adopted beliefs are adopted explicitly, using language, which tends to encourage propositional reasoning, whereas implicit unconscious beliefs are handled by fuzzy neural-network things inside our hardware. So maybe the two distinctions do go together.

But the names you've adopted for them are based on the binary-versus-qualitative distinction, whereas (I think) what's important about them -- what determines the role they play in our thought and speech and action -- is the voluntary-versus-automatic distinction. (A person could voluntarily decide to act as though the probability of some important proposition is 75%. That would be better treated as what you're calling a "binary belief", no?)

And it seems to me that if we adopt terminology adapted to the distinction that's actually relevant here -- say, "voluntary" versus "automatic" -- we've gone much of the way back to talking about "belief in belief" again. (Not all the way, but I have another point to make about that which I'll put in another comment because it's logically separate.)

You suggest that what distinguishes the beliefs commonly criticized as "belief in belief" from others is that they are voluntarily, explicitly adopted (and that this goes along with treating them in all-or-nothing fashion rather than as having degrees of assent). I think there's a lot of truth in this. But your taxonomy of beliefs seems to be missing a category. You say:

The answer to this is that choosing to believe something is more than choosing to say it to oneself and to others. Rather, it is choosing to conform the whole of one's life to the idea that this is true.

But a large part of the point of talking about "belief in belief" is that some people say they believe things (voluntarily, black-and-white-ly) but don't act in ways fully consistent with believing them. For instance, some (a small minority, and I'm not intending to insinuate e.g. that most religious people are like this) profess to believe that in the very near future the Second Coming of Christ will occur, putting an end to pretty much all the institutions of present-day human society -- but they aren't taking out enormous loans that will come due after the alleged Second Coming, they are still sending their children to school, they still have pensions, etc., etc., etc. Which suggests that maybe they don't really believe that the world as we know it is going to end in a few years, they just think they're supposed to say they do. (Very similar things are sometimes said about singularitarians. Again, I am not claiming that they are correctly said of more than a small minority.)

In other words, the point is that someone who says "The Messiah is coming" is not

in every way acting as though this is true

and indeed this is how we might diagnose that

his internal Bayesian estimate is that [...] the evidence is strongly against this

and declare him a practitioner of "belief in belief". Unknowns, consider the religious people in the second category you mention in your last paragraph. How do you know that they

clearly have an internal estimate which is extremely low: they are virtually certain that their religion is false

if, as you say,

in every way, externally and internally, they act and think as though it were true?

No, I think concepts like "belief in belief" or "belief in self-deception" have more to do with people who are slightly on the autism spectrum having difficulty understanding neurotypical brains than anything else. Yes, I am specifically thinking EY here.

Basically neurotypical brains are way more social. A religion is professed and that means there are statements repeated aloud, in company, basically like a password for gaining social acceptance. When done early enough from childhood and often enough, you learn to repeat them also inward, inside your brain. It becomes part of your inner voice. It also has a certain emotional effect, maybe reassuring, or frightening.

But at no point in the process does truth play much of a role. You don't believe it in the sense you believe things that require immediate action. You just hear this inner voice saying it. And you repeat it aloud for other people.

The best parallel is probably music. Like song lyrics stuck in your ear. Do you really wonder what is the probability that Rick Astley is never gonna give her up? No, it is just a chain of words heard outside from the radio or inside your brain with a certain emotional effect.

People who are slightly autistic tend to think beliefs are private, you really, seriously decide if X is true or false. But for neurotypicals beliefs aren't private and thus they are not really beliefs in this sense, they do not carry a big stamp putting "this is true" on their beliefs, it is passwords, word-memes repeated aloud for a social function and also heard inward. Since they do not require immediate action, they also do not require actually deciding if they are true.

This is why "I believe people are nicer than they actually are" makes perfect sense. It means "I enjoy hearing an inner voice telling me people are nice. I know it is not really true. But I enjoy this tape so I keep playing it. I will also say it aloud so that others can also enjoy hearing it."

Human intelligence evolved as social intelligence. We are far better equipped to win political debates and get elected than to find truth. This is why Newton type truth-finders tend to be slightly autistic, having Asperger, you need to turn off the social in order to be really interested in truth.

I am not sure that it is productive to tell certain people that they do not really believe what they claim to believe

The following two questions are distinct.

• Do some people claim to believe things that they don't "really" believe (whatever exactly we mean by that)?
• Should we tell them so?

The rest of what you say seems mostly to be addressing the first question, so I'm not sure why you framed the issue in terms of the second.

For a multicultural and academically theological perspective I highly recommend reading Karen Armstrong's answer to the question of belief in belief.

I am not sure that it is productive to tell certain people that they do not really believe what they claim to believe, and that they only believe they believe it.

Focusing on "other people" isn't useful. When it comes to life planning it's useful to distinguish beliefs with result in anticipations of results from one's one holds.

I don't see the distinctions that you propose helping with those real world applications.

While it may be unwise to tell others that they're just believing in belief, it may well be a good thing for rationalists to check on about themselves. I think believing in belief doesn't just appear in religious matters, but also in a belief that it's necessary to feel sure of one's beliefs in order to express them forcefully enough for other people to notice.

Questioning other people's motives is sufficiently insulting that I suggest doing it quite cautiously if you're actually trying to change people's minds rather than doing a superiority dance.

However, there are people who promote belief in belief explicitly-- for example, saying that it's a very bad thing to shake other people's religious faith, and I don't see a problem with arguing against that sort of thing.

Translating to your terminology, belief in belief concept states that:

• All beliefs are what you call quasi-bayesian beliefs
• When a person "chooses" to believe something, he/she often ends up believing that he/she has that belief.

And it is way more Occam-Razor-compilant, while explaining the same evidence. "Binary Beliefs" is a clearly redundant category; all of its content can be seen as high-confidence quasi-bayesian beliefs.

As for choosing beliefs: I never chose to believe that the Sun is going to rise tomorrow; in fact, I can't remember a single "choosing to belief" act of mine. You either think that something is true, or not, and it isn't a matter of choice, but of plausibility estimation. One can try to override his belief system, but it's hard, and people usually fail that, ending up with belief in belief, since convincing yourself that you believe in something is easier than convincing yourself that something is actually true -- it requires less overriding.

a person does not notice much harm from believing the Messiah is coming

Say that to the countless martyrs, especially in Roman times, who could have evaded torture and death just by publicly saying "I no longer believe" (even if they continued to believe in secret).