My Failed Situation/Action Belief System

Answer the question: "So what?"

He is going through an ad-hoc ritualistic process of conversion to a new psychological tribe. He is publicly shaming his past self for its folly, which serves as a mild form of hazing. This is the most effective way of changing identity related beliefs that I am aware of.

Agreed, this post doesn't add value on its own. If this is going somewhere, that destination should have been combined with this.

The "so what" is that this style of belief system isn't hinged on Reality. It basically follows the popular beliefs of the environment around. It can detect inconsistencies in popular beliefs but it really doesn't have a way to get more True.

I suppose I didn't actually say this... and I suppose the reason is that I didn't want to list all of the details needed to fill in the gaps between what I have been reading in the sequences and the "Ah ha!" moment that allowed me to see the core problem in a Situation/Action belief system. This is pure laziness on my part. Sorry (but not enough to fix it).

Sure, the functional model of predicting other people's approval is great. The problem with what I did is organize all of the beliefs by situation. These things aren't tied to Reality. They are tied to perceptions. It would be the equivalent of claiming your belief system should be a Map of other people's Maps of the Territory. When none of the people around you are terribly concerned about mapping the territory, your map won't be either.

Building a worldview based on other peoples' approvals results in a worldview with all of the problems of those peoples. It makes a child's life easier because a child doesn't need to understand reality. At least, not the way a non-child does.

I bided my time on this topic for two reasons:

I have noticed that my posts go up in karma very quickly and than drop slowly. This post spiked at +7 and is now at +3. This happened on my last post as well, but the drop coincided with me commenting on the post. I decided to wait longer this time and see if the same pattern happened. It did. My theory is that I generally post in the afternoon and the afternoon readers vote me up. The evening readers then come through and vote me down. I personally wouldn't consider this an experiment, but I guess I cannot deny that it is strange behavior.

Second, I spent significantly less time editing and tuning this post. I have very little invested in this post and don't really care what happens to it. I didn't know how to start this topic or say what I wanted to say without writing at least twice what I did here. As such, I didn't really expect much in the comments. I am about to go through and reply to everything but I doubt the conversation will be that interesting.

FYI, I never posted a comment in Easy Predictor Tests.

I will make the prediction "if this post is some kind of experiment then the rating of this thread will reduce by at least 4 points within one day of the moment MrHen announces it".

I also don't see what this has to do with beliefs. This is about how to act.

The system was defining situation/action pairs as beliefs. As in, "Given X, I should Y." Should, in this case, holds all of the weight of believing in gravity. This wordage is great, but when you start applying the pattern to mundane tasks such as, "I should pour milk after cereal" you can spin off into a world that has nothing to do with Reality. "I should blork" is just as valid because nothing is requesting that these beliefs satisfy some coda of "proper beliefs." If I can convince myself that blorking is going to make me happy, I will firmly believe that I should blork.

This idea of beliefs flies completely against the concepts promoted in The Simple Truth.

The matrix is useful, but they aren't valid predictors. You cannot test them; they only go one way. The predictors are needed to adjust the matrix which produces the question, "Why the matrix?" If the answer is "useful," that's fine, but "useful" doesn't make the best system of beliefs.

I think he is complaining that it doesn't support epistemically rational beliefs which are assumed to be intrinsically valued for ideological reasons. "Doesn't support goal-directed behavior" would seem to be the answer to the next question, "Why should I, for practical purposes, care whether my beliefs match reality?"

Could you give an example of an abstract matrix?

An abstract scenario would be the difference between, "my teacher is yelling at me" and "someone is yelling at me." Further abstractions would include, "someone is upset with me" and "someone has an unfulfilled expectation of me."

It sounds like you were essentially codifying common sense as it applied to situations you encountered frequently, which makes sense from a willpower-conservation point of view because doing things you've planned in advance requires less willpower.

Sure. It doesn't make sense as a belief system.

I think my question is related to the above:

what's wrong with stopping at red lights? I do it, and it keeps me alive.

(It literally just occurred to me that you might have been using 'red lights' as a metaphor for reactions from people you don't like. So that you mean that you've learned to stop or change direction if you get these signals. Was this what you meant?)

What do you mean by human system? I think The Simple Truth provides a much better system for beliefs.