Episode 164: Choosing to Believe

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, David Pizarro, having

[00:00:06] an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics.

[00:00:09] Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and

[00:00:13] knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] I say fucking shit only for one reason.

[00:00:20] People do.

[00:00:21] If you've never fucked shit.

[00:00:24] If you've never shit, fuck.

[00:00:30] The Queen in Oz has spoken.

[00:00:40] Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

[00:00:54] Very good man.

[00:00:55] Good.

[00:00:59] They think deep thoughts, and with no more brains than you have.

[00:01:03] Very good.

[00:01:09] Anybody can have a brain.

[00:01:11] You're a very bad man.

[00:01:14] I'm a very good man.

[00:01:17] Just a very bad wizard.

[00:01:19] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards.

[00:01:21] I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:24] Dave, apparently Apple employs an in-house philosopher to teach at quote unquote, Apple

[00:01:31] University.

[00:01:32] What would you be willing to do for a chance to take his job?

[00:01:37] Who would you be willing to kill?

[00:01:39] I mean, I'd work my way up all the way to Tim Cook.

[00:01:45] When I read about this, like I'm not an envious man.

[00:01:49] I'm not a jealous.

[00:01:52] I fucking hate this guy for having the job that I want.

[00:01:56] No, no, very little jealousy.

[00:01:58] Even though, let's talk about this, even though we just got an email goading me that

[00:02:04] you have a Wikipedia page and I don't.

[00:02:06] Yes.

[00:02:07] This has been the elephant in the room.

[00:02:10] There's not a lot of details on the Wikipedia page.

[00:02:14] I've been not telling you because I didn't want you to.

[00:02:17] Yeah, no.

[00:02:18] So very sweet of you.

[00:02:22] Yeah, so yeah, someone put that up a while ago and feel free to fill in certain details

[00:02:27] and also to create one for Dave.

[00:02:29] Yeah.

[00:02:30] He doesn't feel left out and of course for Very Bad Wizards.

[00:02:33] But to show you how envious, how non-envious I am, two things happen.

[00:02:38] It might be the same person.

[00:02:39] Somebody said, how does it feel like the Tamler has more followers than you on Twitter?

[00:02:44] They didn't even copy you on it.

[00:02:46] They just tweeted it to me.

[00:02:48] Yeah, I don't remember that one.

[00:02:50] And then they've sent that email and my honest reaction was I almost tweeted it back out

[00:02:57] and copied you with like, yeah, Tamler's a better follow.

[00:03:00] I tweeted like 50 things.

[00:03:06] I think I'm a good follow because I don't tweet too often, which is like that's like you've

[00:03:11] necessary condition for me to follow anyone.

[00:03:14] They can't tweet too often.

[00:03:16] The people I do follow that tweet too often, I've muted and I've just forgotten that I follow them.

[00:03:23] Yeah, right.

[00:03:24] Mute is essentially just a passive aggressive unfollow because like when do you go and

[00:03:30] unmute somebody?

[00:03:31] But back to Apple University.

[00:03:34] So yeah, no, I don't know what this so so this is based on.

[00:03:41] I heard it on one of my nerd Apple podcasts and it was a Quartz article that we'll link to that was saying that one of the things

[00:03:51] that's weird about this philosopher's job is that no matter apparently reporters have tried multiple times to get him to do an interview about what he does and Apple won't let him.

[00:04:03] What are they afraid of?

[00:04:05] That's what I don't get.

[00:04:07] Like that will find out that Tim Cook is really into Get Your Cases, I don't know.

[00:04:13] What are they hiding?

[00:04:14] What do you think goes on?

[00:04:15] That's the other thing is so we don't have any idea what goes on and there was this apparently Quartz was this website, right?

[00:04:23] They've been trying to do this for two years.

[00:04:27] So the Apple philosopher right now before you find a way for him to have an accident is Joshua Cohen.

[00:04:35] And he wanted to give an interview but was not permitted to.

[00:04:43] Right, but right.

[00:04:45] He thought he could he was like, oh yeah, sure.

[00:04:47] And then he ran it through Apple PR and they're like, no, you can't.

[00:04:50] And so apparently he's only given a few public talks since he got hired in Apple, but I don't think he publishes.

[00:04:56] And this was the part that really made me jealous that he doesn't have to publish.

[00:05:02] But what does he have to?

[00:05:04] Yeah, I don't know what he does.

[00:05:06] I mean, so Apple University.

[00:05:08] So from I guess this is speculation is that he speaks to employees who can take classes.

[00:05:18] Apparently Apple University is just like an internal basically internal way to get to get some education if you're an employee of Apple.

[00:05:28] He must also help them come up with like internal philosophies like this is what people are expecting.

[00:05:34] But this is what I want to ask you, what the hell would a philosopher have to do?

[00:05:38] Like what what what in God's name is the philosopher helping Apple come up with a philosophy of.

[00:05:44] So I think it's to like make them feel like they can go home and sleep at night and look their families in the eye went even though like what they're doing depends on the labor of seven year old kids that are locked in a basement.

[00:05:59] And so I mean, I don't know like maybe it's that maybe it's that they're trying to figure out how to convince the world that there is a AI existential humanity.

[00:06:11] And so yeah, we got to do well.

[00:06:13] We have to talk about that but for another time another time the great conspiracy.

[00:06:19] But so here though is where I really disagree with the Quartz article that's complaining about not being able to talk to this philosopher.

[00:06:31] The author says that preventing him from engaging with the press.

[00:06:38] It's clear the company doesn't appreciate the fact the value of unrestrained philosophical discussion and it's his philosophy skills or whatever is being used for the good of the company rather than for the value of knowledge in itself.

[00:06:51] And basically they're saying that academics at its heart is about sharing stuff and like this is distorting what an academic should be.

[00:07:00] And I think that's absurd.

[00:07:03] Like it's absurd.

[00:07:04] Which part though because it's true that no university could get away with just not allowing their professors to talk to the press about what they're working on.

[00:07:14] Yeah.

[00:07:15] No, of course, of course not.

[00:07:18] But there are so many like PhDs in in across a wide variety of disciplines, usually the heart sciences and engineering that get hired by companies who do work for those companies.

[00:07:32] And it ends up being the intellectual property of those companies are not allowed to talk about what they're doing.

[00:07:37] It's not a weird thing and it's not violating the spirit in which they got their PhD.

[00:07:43] I think there's something about maybe him being a philosopher that makes this author feel weird about it.

[00:07:48] But I think if anything, we should be championing the fact that a corporation would seek to hire somebody with the skills of a philosopher for whatever they're doing.

[00:07:56] And and I think really importantly that we're pumping out so many PhDs, we have to prepare them for jobs outside of academia.

[00:08:07] And that's the reality of a corporate job. You can't just you have to check with them before you talk to the outside right?

[00:08:13] Yeah, I guess. I mean, I would want to know before I drank the apple Kool-Aid that you are kind of bloated from.

[00:08:21] I would want to know what exactly he does there.

[00:08:24] What he's what he's doing, what his role is what the I'm not even that suspicious because what could a philosopher possibly be doing that would make you know if they had hired a virologist or something.

[00:08:34] You know, and they weren't letting us talk to them. I'd be like, what the fuck?

[00:08:38] If they had hired someone who actually could do anything.

[00:08:41] Yeah.

[00:08:42] That's your point.

[00:08:43] I mean one way to look at it is I feel much better knowing that perhaps my iPhone, the child labor has been justified by a philosopher.

[00:08:52] It's almost like, you know, water that's been blessed is now holy water.

[00:08:56] Like a philosopher who's justified the child labor is making me feel better.

[00:09:01] I think this is ethical. Next. That's his job.

[00:09:07] I championed this and the truth is he's probably getting paid half a million dollars a year.

[00:09:13] Would you want that job?

[00:09:15] I'm kind of just playing it up that I would because I don't know.

[00:09:21] I value the freedom that I have.

[00:09:23] I've certainly like I've worked with corporations before and it's such a different culture.

[00:09:31] Yeah, that it's that it's it's not what I'd want to do full time.

[00:09:36] I mean there is a price at which I listen.

[00:09:39] Let me be absolutely clear.

[00:09:42] We've established that here.

[00:09:44] I'm a whore.

[00:09:46] Yeah.

[00:09:47] Yeah.

[00:09:48] Would you?

[00:09:49] I wouldn't and like I don't even really need to know what he does to say that.

[00:09:56] There's I can't imagine that I would enjoy that in any way shape or form.

[00:10:01] It just sounds like something that like I'm built to hate my life.

[00:10:06] What if you let you keep podcasting for very bad wizards?

[00:10:09] If I could do that and still have that job.

[00:10:13] So and you make like you make like, I don't know,

[00:10:16] $2 million a year, a million dollars a year or something.

[00:10:19] If you do that,

[00:10:20] I would guess maybe $400,000 but whatever.

[00:10:25] Yeah.

[00:10:26] So I would say that I definitely wouldn't do it.

[00:10:30] It's not like really there isn't really enough money.

[00:10:34] Maybe there is if you got up to the point where I could but it's like the George the chemist

[00:10:40] like the Bernard Williams case of George the chemist where he has to work for a chemical weapons factory.

[00:10:46] Right.

[00:10:47] Even though that means abandoning all of his projects.

[00:10:50] That's what it feels like to me mostly.

[00:10:52] Do you know anything about this Cohen guy?

[00:10:57] I thought it was a different guy who I hated.

[00:11:00] I think also named Cohen and I hate him not for good reasons.

[00:11:04] I ran into him when I was on the job market as a grad student and he was just kind of a dick to me as people who are professors tend to be, you know, when grad students are trying to like.

[00:11:20] To ingratiate.

[00:11:21] You're trying to get the task.

[00:11:22] Yeah, exactly.

[00:11:23] But it turns out it's not that guy.

[00:11:25] So I don't know anything about him.

[00:11:29] That's really anti-Semitic of you to just assume that this was the same Cohen.

[00:11:33] Let me ask you this.

[00:11:34] Now we forgot to say what we're talking about today.

[00:11:36] We're talking about a William James article, the will to believe and about belief more generally, belief without evidence, belief with insufficient evidence, whether that's rational or not.

[00:11:52] So with but I wanted to ask you one thing before we get to that.

[00:11:56] You said with all the PhDs were pumping out like we should hopefully have these other job opportunities.

[00:12:03] And that's certainly true.

[00:12:05] But I've noticed in academic Twitter and the academic world in general, this almost obsession with telling students that they shouldn't go into to get a PhD because the job market is so tight because the odds are so stacked against them.

[00:12:25] It's like everybody feels like it's their solemn duty to do that.

[00:12:30] And I'm not in favor of doing that.

[00:12:33] Like I feel like they're adults and our job is to give them the information but also to inspire them if they want to do it, not to freak them out already more than they're freaked out.

[00:12:46] But setting that aside.

[00:12:49] Why is this seem to be particular to academia or is it particular to academia?

[00:12:55] So I know, I know the sentiments that you're talking about that get expressed.

[00:12:59] But I have to say that like I don't see that as a very common, at least in my feed.

[00:13:06] And maybe it's maybe the difference is that in psychology, we need the grad students.

[00:13:15] If anything, I see complaints that we're not treating them well because like we're essentially a pyramid scheme and we should be paying them more because they're working for us and we need them.

[00:13:28] So like I think everybody is has an incentive to accept graduate students and what they're doing is they're fighting against the like knowledge that we're kind of fucking them if we tell all of them that there's going to be jobs.

[00:13:43] We're putting too many out.

[00:13:45] So that's a totally valid sentiment, I think is to fight against the trend to add more PhD programs and pump them out at a rate, especially when it's self serving so that where you know that there's just not enough jobs for them.

[00:14:03] So I get that.

[00:14:05] I still see and maybe it is more philosophy and humanities oriented.

[00:14:10] There is this don't listen to your professors, they're the lucky ones that got the tenure track jobs, just all these horror stories about what people have gone through and they're all true.

[00:14:22] It's just strikes me that that's true of any career.

[00:14:26] Right?

[00:14:27] Yeah, that's actually like to make it as a journalist in today's world is the odds are stacked against you immensely to make it as a full.

[00:14:35] Make it as an entrepreneur.

[00:14:37] I mean, like as everything there is why why is academia and maybe humanities especially taking this on themselves with such fervor?

[00:14:49] I mean, I don't know.

[00:14:52] I suspect that maybe part of it is that like suppose that you want to you have like big ambitions to be a musician.

[00:15:01] Maybe it's it's less zero sum.

[00:15:04] Like you might make it a musician as a musician, the odds are against you but it's not like if there is one person who's a successful musician that lowers your chances.

[00:15:13] But we know exactly how many professorships there are likely to be and and it's in the aggregate.

[00:15:21] I think there's a little bit of guilt.

[00:15:23] But also Twitter has like some yeah exactly but academic Twitter has some real salty bitter people on it just like with everything else.

[00:15:34] Like it's probably not a good reflection.

[00:15:36] In fact, I saw Mickey insolict the other half of two psychologists for beers.

[00:15:41] He drinks.

[00:15:42] He tried.

[00:15:43] He's the one that actually drinks.

[00:15:44] He's the one who actually drinks.

[00:15:45] Yeah.

[00:15:47] I tried to tweet a corrective by saying, you know, I had a great time in grad school.

[00:15:54] I love what I do.

[00:15:55] I love my job.

[00:15:56] I love, you know, as as hard as it might have been sometimes and he got so much pushback from people who wanted him to shut up because as a white ish man.

[00:16:09] Right.

[00:16:10] I love he's he's going to be happy and that thought accusing him of undermining sort of the misery that other people have experienced.

[00:16:20] That's exactly that's exactly what I'm talking about.

[00:16:22] Like you just don't see that in other fields.

[00:16:25] Yeah, it's been bothering me because it does feel like you're almost not allowed to say to try to cheer people on and inspire them.

[00:16:35] And I just don't see that.

[00:16:36] Like, you know, it's not like Martin Scorsese has to constantly remind everyone that the odds were so stacked against him and he was the lucky one.

[00:16:46] And he just at a certain point that just becomes like you're stressing them out and making them more anxious than they already are.

[00:16:54] But yeah, I do think there's a real difference there in that, you know, if you if you're trying to say to be an actor, you might you might fall prey to like all of the.

[00:17:06] Biases that you have a better chance than most other people and that might be fine, but you're you're not under the same illusions that.

[00:17:16] That I think I think it's pretty clear that it's really, really hard to become a successful actor or musician or NBA player or whatever in a way that it's not clear when you're a first year PhD student.

[00:17:31] And that like we're not we're not doing a good job of communicating the reality in the way that the harsh reality is, you know, there's plenty of discussion about how like the odds are stacked against you to be a successful artist.

[00:17:42] I mean, it how much clearer could it be given that it's all anybody talks about that the odds are stacked against you getting a tenure track job in a place that you want to live.

[00:17:53] Then it's good that people are talking about the odds being against you because if they weren't then they wouldn't know.

[00:17:59] Like I don't know why it would be clearer as an actor or a journalist.

[00:18:02] Somebody's trying to break into journalism this amorphous thing that keeps like changing every few years and more and more money just gets sucked out of it if you're a writer.

[00:18:13] I think there are a ton of journalists who are telling young people to like be very wary of going into journalism.

[00:18:21] Yeah, maybe I almost feel like I have to at least try to represent some kind of positivity because people are going into thinking that grad school is just going to be this miserable stress induced 80 hour a week job that will result in nothing but heartbreak.

[00:18:43] Yeah.

[00:18:44] And the truth is that like entry level corporate jobs, you know, my sister was a corporate attorney coming out of law school.

[00:18:57] They just don't have time to complain about it.

[00:19:00] Right, exactly.

[00:19:01] Yeah, I mean so the uncharitable way of reading all of this that I'm this phenomenon is that there is a level of entitlement among academics that there's not among people who actually have to go out in the real world and make their career there.

[00:19:19] I don't think that that's exactly fair.

[00:19:22] If you know the people who are doing it, that's not who that's not what they're about.

[00:19:26] That's not who they are.

[00:19:27] But it is, you know, for some people maybe some kind of possibility.

[00:19:32] Hey, we we went to school for five years and yeah, when we only and we've got paid a stipend but that's it like we deserve a job or something.

[00:19:41] It's like that's not how the world works.

[00:19:43] Yeah.

[00:19:44] I don't.

[00:19:45] I think that there is there's a lot of people are bitter disappointed and a lot of them for good reason, perhaps.

[00:19:56] But so when I say this it's not to undermine that people did have I mean people had miserable times in my graduate program.

[00:20:03] I know that for fact.

[00:20:04] Oh yeah.

[00:20:05] People who were absolutely miserable.

[00:20:07] I just wasn't and you know for for probably a whole variety of reasons that are outside of my control.

[00:20:14] But I always also was just tickled that somebody would pay me any amount of money to get a degree.

[00:20:22] And that's even with all of the, you know, like I had so much stress when I was defending my dissertation on the job market that I broke like I literally broke out in hives.

[00:20:33] Yeah.

[00:20:34] And for like weeks couldn't get rid of those hives I had to go and get like a shot of prednisone to get rid of them.

[00:20:41] And so I know anxiety but but I also just really there's a lot of crying in the shower on the job market.

[00:20:49] Yeah, I and I tend to forget the misery of it but I don't I just don't know that that misery is particularly special compared to any other young person trying to find their way in in a career.

[00:21:03] Yeah, I guess that's the thing.

[00:21:04] It's like you're telling people not to do this and but the implication is then okay they should go do something else.

[00:21:12] Well, what is that?

[00:21:13] What is this career that you think won't have the same sorts of issues that academia has?

[00:21:20] And that's the thing I'm not sure about right.

[00:21:24] So well then they get to complain at the junior prof level and then they get to complain.

[00:21:30] But you know I am all for bringing people in the very beginning, you know when you're doing your orientation or whatever and saying explicitly this is what the job market looks like in our field.

[00:21:44] This how many these how many PhDs there are this how many right and and let go in eyes wide open but don't tell people if they love you know if you love Shakespeare and you want to just be a nerd who studies Shakespeare

[00:21:59] and you get into a PhD funded program to analyze Shakespeare and that's five great years or six years that you might really enjoy.

[00:22:08] And if you have to get like a job in regular corporate America after that because the job market sucks then it might suck but you really could be the case that you love that you got to spend six years studying.

[00:22:22] Right.

[00:22:23] And that's and now I guess the idea being well but what about those six years people talk about opportunity costs and right you could right you could have been making whatever six figures you want to make had you spent those six years working your way up.

[00:22:38] But as long as they go in knowing their chances then I like I think yeah you could have spent six years working at this corporation and making more money now but you wouldn't have gotten that the ability to do you know when else in life can you

[00:22:54] right.

[00:22:55] Grad school is this like wonderful sort of extended adolescence where you it's a time where you can spend really sort of with a flexible schedule doing studying what you want to study and I know this is maybe not true in other disciplines where you know some biology lab you have to get up at seven every morning

[00:23:13] and clean out the beakers or something but but by and large you're studying what you want to study or else you wouldn't be in that right you just wouldn't be doing that.

[00:23:23] Well well we're going to get shit for this I can I can I'm just predicting this right now.

[00:23:29] Shit for this.

[00:23:31] I can just feel the anger on Twitter already hear the emails floating.

[00:23:37] Let's take a break and we'll be right back to talk about William James.

[00:23:52] Welcome back to Very Bad Wizards. This is the time of the show where we like to thank our listeners for all their wonderful forms of support. Thank you for all the emails, the tweets, the discussion.

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[00:26:23] Okay so let's talk about this William James article.

[00:26:28] This is a very interesting essay that is still relevant today in so many different ways and is kind of a classic of epistemology and the epistemology of religious belief.

[00:26:45] So it's a talk that William James gave to the philosophical clubs of Yale and Brown University.

[00:26:53] And he gave it in 1896.

[00:26:57] And the way he introduces it, he takes his audience to be a free thinking crowd that is very scientific and hard-nosed kind of new atheist in their orientation for how they view the world.

[00:27:14] And he says,

[00:27:45] And not make some sort of moral error even if we don't have sufficient evidence to believe that it's true.

[00:27:54] There are a lot of puzzle pieces in this argument.

[00:27:59] One of the distinctions that he makes are between live hypotheses and dead hypotheses.

[00:28:05] And he says that there are a certain class of beliefs or hypotheses that we that are alive to us.

[00:28:14] We're capable of thinking that they are true.

[00:28:19] It's like an actual option epistemologically.

[00:28:22] Yeah and why it's an actual option depends on your personal history, maybe your temperament.

[00:28:30] Culture and time.

[00:28:31] You know, he says it's not a live hypothesis to believe certain Islamic religious beliefs.

[00:28:39] Just because it's not any part of my tradition, there is nothing in me that's drawn to it in any way.

[00:28:47] But he says to an Arab, however, that hypothesis is among the mind's possibilities.

[00:28:52] It is alive.

[00:28:54] There's just certain things I don't know like for us that we we don't know whether they're true,

[00:29:00] or at least capable of believing that they're true.

[00:29:03] And then there's other beliefs that there's no way we could believe they're true.

[00:29:07] So that's one distinction between live and dead hypotheses.

[00:29:11] The second step as I see it is to say among our in the category of our live hypotheses,

[00:29:20] we can choose to adopt to believe them.

[00:29:24] That is a step that we are capable of doing.

[00:29:26] So he takes what is known in epistemology now as a kind of volunteerist approach to belief.

[00:29:34] Volunteerist meaning that you we can choose to believe something.

[00:29:40] Belief is not just something we have no control over.

[00:29:44] And this is where James introduces what will end up being a critical feature of his eventual pragmatism,

[00:29:52] but certainly central to this argument, which is that for him a belief is something that causes action.

[00:30:00] And so if a belief contains within it a tendency to act at all, then it's a live belief like a live option.

[00:30:08] Yeah.

[00:30:10] And that sort of view of the consequences of a belief in terms of action, I think will form the foundation for the pragmatism.

[00:30:23] So at one point he says as a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use.

[00:30:30] Clifford's cosmic emotions find no use for Christian feelings.

[00:30:35] Huxley belabors the bishops because there's no use for sacerdotalism in his scheme of life.

[00:30:45] What he's saying there, and like I don't even know what these things are,

[00:30:49] Cesserdotalism is just having priests.

[00:30:53] Yeah. OK. Newman on the contrary goes over to Romanism because a priestly system is for him an organic need and delight.

[00:31:01] So there is this kind of idea that there is something about our expressive, our emotions and our temperament that will restrict the kinds of beliefs that we're going to be open to

[00:31:16] and therefore can choose to believe and the kinds that are just excluded.

[00:31:22] Right. And by the way, we'll put a link to a free full text PDF.

[00:31:26] He says, when we look at certain facts it seems as if our passion and volitional nature lay at the root of all of our convictions.

[00:31:32] So he really does think that your propensity, your emotional propensities are driving the things that even you would consider as beliefs and eventually driving the beliefs that you pick up.

[00:31:42] Exactly. OK. So that's another piece of the puzzle.

[00:31:45] Let me just add one other puzzle piece and then I think we can at least try to piece together how he makes his argument.

[00:31:52] And that is that there are certain beliefs that we can't be agnostic about.

[00:31:57] We can't suspend judgment on them. Suspending judgment is the same as disbelieving it.

[00:32:04] Right. So in this category he thinks certain moral questions are like this and whether there is moral truth at all is like this.

[00:32:16] You have to take a stand because not taking a stand is also taking a stand.

[00:32:25] Right. He also says like if somebody is proposing marriage, if you say well I don't know if marriage will be a good idea for me.

[00:32:35] I need to wait and get to know you for another few years and then I can believe that we would be a good match for each other.

[00:32:44] He's like well that's at that point it's not going to work.

[00:32:47] You might as well just say I don't believe it because they're going to move on and try to find something.

[00:32:53] You're saying no to the question will you marry me now?

[00:32:56] Yeah, you're saying no to the question.

[00:32:58] Right. And importantly I think he thinks religious belief as he defines it is like this too.

[00:33:05] Because if you suspend judgment then you are denying yourself the good that comes with religious belief.

[00:33:16] One of the ways he defines religious belief is that it's better to believe in the eternal aspects of it for you right now here on earth.

[00:33:29] That's definitional. That's like essential for what counts as religious belief.

[00:33:36] And so if you suspend judgment you are denying yourself the benefit that would come with religious belief being true.

[00:33:44] So that's just the same as being an atheist on this question.

[00:33:49] And that's as close as he gets to Pascal's wagery.

[00:33:52] Yes.

[00:33:53] That's right.

[00:33:54] I just think the part of Pascal's wager that he rejects is the heaven hell like difference in the overwhelming difference between the eternal torments of hell.

[00:34:07] And that part is, you know, the afterlife plays no role in his wager here.

[00:34:13] Right.

[00:34:14] So given that being agnostic about religion you are essentially being an atheist you are denying that it is true and you might be right.

[00:34:23] But you might go on the other side too.

[00:34:27] And where you go on that side, crucially for James isn't a matter of like morality.

[00:34:35] It's not a matter of pure justification.

[00:34:38] It is just a fact about you and your passionate nature and what kinds of hypotheses are alive for you and what kinds of hypotheses.

[00:34:49] The view that he's arguing against we might call now evidentialism.

[00:34:55] Yeah, so I talked with a colleague about this paper yesterday, Luis Olivera.

[00:35:00] He's our epistemologist in the philosophy department and he was explaining to me this view evidentialism that has an old variety and a new variety.

[00:35:12] The old variety is represented in James's article by Clifford, someone named Clifford.

[00:35:19] And according to this view which James is arguing against as almost like a moral stance we should not believe any hypotheses that we don't have sufficient evidence for.

[00:35:31] It insults the progress of science. It insults the progress that we've made human beings in this marvelous quest to discover the truth.

[00:35:43] Yeah, and James makes it clear that what he thinks he really believes that there is no belief that could meet that sort of evidential criteria.

[00:35:59] There's nothing in the really nothing in the world that people agree upon that that is believed because we have sufficient evidence to believe it.

[00:36:09] He thinks that there's always some sort of step of faith in any of our beliefs.

[00:36:14] So I didn't get that from my reading. So where do you find that?

[00:36:20] In section six he says the only truth that skepticism leaves is the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.

[00:36:31] Then he says apart from abstract propositions of comparison such as two and two are the same as four, propositions which tell us nothing by themselves about concrete reality.

[00:36:40] We find no proposition ever regarded by anyone as evidently certain that has not either been called a falsehood or at least had its truth sincerely questioned by someone else.

[00:36:49] But that doesn't mean...

[00:36:50] But he's using that as trying to undermine the evidentialism by saying like look everything still requires some point where you have to give up on evidence.

[00:37:03] Right, but I don't see that as the same thing as saying we don't believe any of our beliefs because we have sufficient evidence for them.

[00:37:12] It just means that at some point somebody had to not have sufficient evidence even just in order to discover what the evidence was for that belief.

[00:37:22] You start out with the hypothesis. Some of them the scientists needs to believe they're true in order to start looking for evidence to devote two years of their life to trying to find out if it's true.

[00:37:35] Yeah, his example of the chemist.

[00:37:38] Yeah, no. I mean, I think that what he is trying to say is even the chemist has to have faith that something is true.

[00:37:45] Right? So he's saying that the belief in something because there is enough evidence for it is just not the way that we actually know things.

[00:37:53] Well, yeah, I just see that as a little different. But let's set that aside.

[00:37:58] Here's the Clifford quote that James cites. And it's just I think it really does like it just like a new atheist 100 years before the belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer.

[00:38:17] Who so would deserve well of his fellows in this matter will guard the purity of his belief with the very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an unworthy object and catch a stain which can never be wiped away.

[00:38:30] If a belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence, even though the belief be true as Clifford on the same page explains, the pleasure is a stolen one.

[00:38:39] It is sinful because it has stolen in defiance of our duty to mankind that duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs as from a pestilence which may shortly master our own body and then spread to the rest of the town.

[00:38:53] It is wrong at always everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

[00:38:59] I mean, take out the kind of flowery rhetoric.

[00:39:03] Couldn't you see like Sam Harris guest next time and Richard Dawkins saying something like that?

[00:39:09] I mean, we don't need to see Sam Harris. I don't even need to go that far.

[00:39:12] I think this is actually way closer to what I believe than what James is saying because you're kind of a new atheist except for that.

[00:39:23] I think that like, should we just state our tendencies here to believe?

[00:39:29] Although we're not done getting through the argument.

[00:39:31] I think that James is wildly off here.

[00:39:35] I think that it relies on a particular strawman view of what evidence is supposed to give rise to belief that he then uses to sort of sneakily say, well, then we could believe in Jesus.

[00:39:51] Yeah, OK. So I completely disagree with that take on it.

[00:39:54] Number one, I don't think he's trying to say we can believe in Jesus or I...

[00:39:59] He very much is saying you can believe in Jesus without violating what the grounds for appropriate derivation of belief.

[00:40:09] Well, I don't think so because the way he defines religious belief first she meaning religion says that the best things are the more eternal things.

[00:40:21] And then the second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe the first affirmation to be true.

[00:40:29] So there's nothing about, you know, a particular...

[00:40:33] No, I don't mean to say James is defending belief in Jesus.

[00:40:38] I'm saying James is defending most religious beliefs that are live hypotheses for us and that would include for a large portion of his audience a belief in Jesus.

[00:40:48] So I'm saying, like...

[00:40:50] OK. What do you think is a strawman given that you said the Clifford view is your own view?

[00:40:56] Well, this the whole argument by James sort of depends on him saying, you know what's really unreasonable to think that you need 100% evidence to believe something to be true.

[00:41:07] So he says, you'll never have full evidence. Nobody can ever get 100% evidence for anything.

[00:41:14] And so because you have to admit that that's the case, then why are you preventing people from believing things without evidence?

[00:41:24] The strawman that I'm referring to is this belief in the dichotomy, this completely dichotomous thing.

[00:41:29] Like you can believe something if you're 100% every piece of evidence that is required to convince you that something is true versus you can't...

[00:41:38] You just like can believe things without evidence.

[00:41:40] So where do you see him attribute to the evidentialist this view that you need 100%?

[00:41:48] I mean, he doesn't explicitly say you need 100%, but this is the way that he's treating...

[00:41:54] Well, I'll see if I can find it because I underlined the relevant passages.

[00:41:59] But he is essentially saying by saying no one ever has enough evidence to believe something for sure.

[00:42:08] Therefore, it's okay to believe something with no evidence.

[00:42:12] And I just don't see that as his argument.

[00:42:15] If I thought that was his argument, then I would also be with you and say that that's not a good argument.

[00:42:23] I do think one kind of issue with evidentialism is vagueness about what counts as sufficient evidence.

[00:42:33] And if you don't have any sense of what counts as sufficient, then if you don't have any clear demarcation point,

[00:42:41] then there's going to be other considerations that will have to play into whether or not you believe something.

[00:42:51] Now, you might think that there are clear cases on both sides where we clearly have sufficient evidence

[00:42:57] or we clearly don't have sufficient evidence.

[00:43:00] But everything in between there, it seems like there's going to be some wiggle room that you can either believe

[00:43:09] or not without knowing for sure whether you have sufficient evidence.

[00:43:15] Right. And it's that.

[00:43:17] I feel like you stated it well that there are these extremes, like no evidence and 100% evidence,

[00:43:23] and then everything else in between.

[00:43:25] When having 90% evidence to believe something, all it means is that you can be a fallibilist about your views.

[00:43:33] You could say, well, look, all of my views are tentative.

[00:43:38] They're beliefs, but they're tentative because I know that there might be new evidence that comes to light that changes our mind.

[00:43:44] So there's a part where he uses a metaphor where he says it is like a general informing soldiers

[00:43:51] that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound.

[00:43:55] He's referring to a particular kind of evidentialism where that he's characterizing as,

[00:44:00] this is in section seven, by the way, that he's characterizing as well.

[00:44:06] Yeah, sure, you could walk around not believing anything until until you have 100% evidence,

[00:44:12] but that will essentially be like walking around not believing anything.

[00:44:15] And that would be like never, right?

[00:44:18] Okay, so I don't read it that part that way.

[00:44:20] So just to back up a step here, that section is introduced with him distinguishing between two twin goals of epistemology.

[00:44:31] The first is discovering truth and the second is avoiding error.

[00:44:36] And he says, these aren't the same goals, right?

[00:44:41] You could avoid error just by never believing anything that would be the best way to avoid errors.

[00:44:47] So that would be the way of maximizing you're not getting into error.

[00:44:53] And then the second thing is to discover truth.

[00:44:55] And he says, and sometimes to discover truth, you have to take some risks.

[00:45:00] You have to believe certain things.

[00:45:02] This is like that, you know, like that chemist.

[00:45:04] Now, that's a step that maybe you could question, but you have to believe certain things on the possibility that they're true.

[00:45:11] And then he says, where you fall on the spectrum of which is more important to you, avoiding error or finding truth.

[00:45:20] That's going to be a matter of temperament and people like Clifford really err on the side or at least are at the extreme end of avoiding error.

[00:45:30] They're terrified of being wrong about something.

[00:45:33] And James says, you can be like that, but you don't have to be like that.

[00:45:38] And if you're too much like that, you are like the general in your, the example you just raised.

[00:45:45] Yeah, I mean, I like I sort of would like for him to have said you could be on the spectrum in the way that you just said it.

[00:45:53] But James doesn't treat it as a spectrum.

[00:45:55] He says, look, you can either choose to be somebody who needs, who is so afraid of being duped that you believe nothing.

[00:46:02] Or you can just say like, look, you there, you don't need all that evidence.

[00:46:07] You can you you're allowed to believe things that don't have enough evidence to qualify.

[00:46:14] And that's the thing where I'm like, you know, there are things that I believe that I just believe until a scientist tells me that I shouldn't believe it anymore.

[00:46:22] And I update it.

[00:46:24] But it's based on like, you know, like 98% belief in science.

[00:46:28] And then there are things like the Leberkans are true that your grandma told you where it's like unless you really present the two options as either or you are leaving out a whole bunch of our life that should be guided by evidence and the weight of evidence.

[00:46:44] So I guess I just don't see the either or here.

[00:46:49] So here's the passage we may regard that the chase for truth as paramount and the avoidance of error as secondary, or we may on the other hand treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, more imperative, not all imperative, but more imperative and let truth takes its chance.

[00:47:09] And what he's saying about Clifford is that he exhorts us to the latter course believe nothing he tells us keep your mind and suspense forever rather than closing it on insufficient evidence and incur the awful risk of believing lies.

[00:47:22] Again, the insufficient evidence doesn't mean not 100% evidence.

[00:47:27] So it could be like you said that there's 98% or there's just a lot of evidence and very little countervailing evidence.

[00:47:35] But that doesn't mean that he's demanding 100%.

[00:47:39] The point here is that someone like Clifford is more scared of believing a falsehood than he is of not believing something that that could be true.

[00:47:53] Right.

[00:47:55] I mean, we're doing a little bit of exegesis here on James.

[00:47:58] I actually read that passage as not at all James saying because throughout James never says anything about the weight of evidence or the subtleties in distinguishing something with a lot of evidence versus something with very little evidence.

[00:48:13] It would be nice if he had because I think I would take his view a bit more seriously.

[00:48:17] But I take that passage that you read to be look, you can make one of two errors the balance with which you use one strategy over another that of believing things without evidence versus not believing something until you have full evidence sufficient.

[00:48:33] That balance.

[00:48:34] Well, sufficient sufficient.

[00:48:36] But he thinks Clifford thinks that that he's saying Clifford is somebody who thinks you need full evidence.

[00:48:42] But he said would be sufficient full.

[00:48:46] It doesn't matter.

[00:48:48] Right.

[00:48:49] Threshold he thinks Clifford's threshold is very high to accept a belief in that he is because of that threshold that he is missing out on the the acquisition of truth for things that don't meet that threshold.

[00:49:05] And he thinks that's one strategy you said a threshold what I'm saying full to mean sufficient here.

[00:49:10] Okay, I'm not saying like 100%.

[00:49:13] Yeah, like that you're that there's enough to convince anybody you might have a mix of those two strategies.

[00:49:20] But neither of those strategies is actually a strategy where you say do I believe something a little more when it's 70% evidence versus 40% evidence?

[00:49:29] You know, there is there's I don't see James ever making that distinction.

[00:49:35] Well, now wait a minute.

[00:49:36] So there's a couple ways to interpret that.

[00:49:41] So you're right that he's not making a distinction like a Bayesian would be.

[00:49:46] Right.

[00:49:47] And and that, you know, that whole thing is not part of this essay that idea where you can talk about belief in terms of probabilities.

[00:49:57] But the person that he's criticizing doesn't think in those terms either.

[00:50:01] He and and the evidentialist doesn't think in those terms.

[00:50:05] I think you're you're right in his is so long as I understand who the enemy that he's quoting this Clifford guy.

[00:50:13] But I think that in doing that, he probably neither Clifford nor James give, I think in enough attention to the fact that it's really different.

[00:50:25] It's very different to believe that the earth is flat than it is to believe, you know, that the next coin flip will be whatever 50% chance of being heads or tails or that the sun will come.

[00:50:37] Like there is just there are levels of evidence that I think not only normatively we would say that we should use but also that we just do use in our everyday life when we're making making decisions about what to believe or not.

[00:50:52] But the earth is flat is what James would say is another way of expressing what you're saying there is that's not a live hypothesis for believe.

[00:51:01] Yeah, I that's why that's one reason I think in that distinction between a live hypothesis and a dead hypothesis he's sneaking something in already because it certainly is a life hypothesis for some people.

[00:51:12] So regardless, because I do think there's a lot of rhetoric and a lot of hyperbole in James that especially if you're not, if you don't find yourself initially intrigued by the argument, it's just going to be annoying.

[00:51:28] So at some point I want to just talk about that writing style just in a historically interesting way.

[00:51:34] I do think though, you know, like the risk aversion.

[00:51:36] I think what he is in the same way that, you know, I've complained about how Americans are too risk averse with personal safety or physical harm.

[00:51:46] He's saying epistemologists like Clifford are too risk averse they're so worried about making a mistake and James is saying look, they're not it's not such an awfully solemn thing to make a mistake.

[00:52:01] I think and I think that you're right. That's that is that is what he's trying to say here.

[00:52:07] And maybe here is where someone like Sam would definitely be aligned with what I believe there is a part where James is saying, you know, when he's saying like you can have one of these two strategies might believe something to be true that isn't, or you could just like have a really high threshold and never believe anything.

[00:52:26] And but what's the danger, you know, like set your threshold a bit lower. What's the what's the problem? And the problem I think is that it introduces a category of beliefs that might have real actual damage.

[00:52:40] Right. And not just to you, but others right right to your children.

[00:52:46] So this is I think a totally legitimate criticism to make of James. He does not speak in terms of the destructive consequences of false beliefs.

[00:52:57] Like he's talking about it as if we're just individuals who are, you know, making personal decisions about, you know, what how we want to view the world.

[00:53:07] Now I actually think that's why it's important that he takes such an abstract personal view of religion here. I take it that the kind of religion that he's talking about wouldn't justify, you know, the an inquisition or blowing up.

[00:53:28] Yeah, it's an interesting where he says, right. Yeah, or when he describes what he means by like beliefs that give rise to good things.

[00:53:36] And that that seems like that's a very hard thing to try to put into practice. There was a part that really was was weirdly prescient.

[00:53:48] Why do so few scientists, quote unquote, even look at the evidence for telepathy so called because they think as a leading biologist now dead once said to me that even if such a thing were true, scientists ought to band together to keep it suppressed and concealed.

[00:54:02] It would undo the uniformity of nature and all sorts of other things without which scientists cannot carry on their pursuits.

[00:54:09] So one, this is close to home because of the the paper on pre cognition that actually brought down social psychology. But I think that is that is I wrote next to it.

[00:54:22] Because if that really were why we did not accept evidence for telepathy, it would be shitty. Right? But but I think what what people say is like this.

[00:54:33] If you were to actually accept evidence, open my mind to evidence of telepathy, it would it would so undo everything we know about the nature of physics and time and causality that it would it seems incredibly improbable.

[00:54:46] So from a Bayesian perspective, say you would say like the chances of that being a true thing so low that it does that that you would need an overwhelming amount of evidence.

[00:54:57] But if you did think it was true and you had that evidence, then you would I like that's a very unfair statement about science to say that they would try to deliberately suppress.

[00:55:11] They don't let anybody know about the superpowers that exist.

[00:55:14] But I mean, I guess we do see examples of this, but it's not it's more for political reasons that they would want to certain things.

[00:55:24] I was part of a committee where a student was presenting evidence looking at implicit bias that white people have toward black faces.

[00:55:36] And across every study that she conducted, there was no evidence of bias using implicit or explicit measures across four studies with like tons of subjects who is highly powered and it was using measures that social psychologists

[00:55:53] have used traditionally to argue for the presence of bias and the reluctance to accept that that might be a finding.

[00:56:02] It really was sort of well, what went wrong in the measurement because obviously that's not true.

[00:56:11] And again, we've made this point before you would think people would be happy that that was exactly I was like, you know, I'm not saying we live in a post race world.

[00:56:20] I'm like, I'm convinced that nasty racism is alive and well.

[00:56:23] But in this particular sample on this particular task, like using our own rules, you didn't find it.

[00:56:29] You didn't find that kind of bias.

[00:56:30] I mean, it's the same. It's such an ironic thing.

[00:56:33] And I get it if evidence comes out that Google is paying women more than men, it's like, oh no, there's something wrong the way you're measuring it or the Native American one that we talked about with the OL way back where the majority of them weren't at all bothered by redskins.

[00:56:50] And it's like, what is the team name and it's like everybody's tearing that apart.

[00:56:54] Supposedly the same people are tearing it apart should welcome that result.

[00:56:58] The world is a better place if it's true.

[00:57:01] But I also get that their point is people will use it as a means to block other attempts at greater justice.

[00:57:14] That's right.

[00:57:15] Okay, but so that's a separate issue not related to this.

[00:57:18] I think that there are those things in James's article and that one bugged me too.

[00:57:25] But it's also not necessary in any way to his argument.

[00:57:28] It is an extra bit of like fuck you to what we would now call the scientific worldview, the absolutist about science that is just not necessary for his argument.

[00:57:44] You know, part of it is that this really depends on what is meant by something being true.

[00:57:50] Because if you do adopt a full blown pragmatist approach to what truth is then this approach doesn't seem so unreasonable.

[00:57:59] I am of the firm opinion that there are things that are true independent of me that that that I might discover or might not.

[00:58:10] But the pragmatist view is really like does does your belief work in whatever way I'm defining work.

[00:58:18] And that's that's sort of like a low bar for truth as we might use the word, at least in science or anybody who's a realist about anything.

[00:58:26] Yeah.

[00:58:27] And I don't think it's one that is explicitly endorsed by James in this article.

[00:58:35] And I also don't think it's one that is required for his argument to have its force.

[00:58:42] But I do think it's tacitly and tacitly believed and it's doing some of the work because his like, well, okay, let me read.

[00:58:53] There's a passage that I think gets at the core of his argument about believing in religious, holding religious beliefs.

[00:59:03] When he's giving the example of he gives an example of somebody who's unwilling to believe that another person likes them and is constantly worried that they don't.

[00:59:14] And that this is he is being prevented from reaping all of the rewards of believing that somebody actually does like them.

[00:59:22] He says what you were saying this is, you know, we're talking about like how an agnostic is is preventing themselves from from accepting the possibility of truth might as well be an atheist.

[00:59:31] He says, I cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth seeking or willfully agreeing to keep my willing nature out of the game.

[00:59:39] I cannot do so for the plane for this plain reason that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truths if those kinds of truths truth were really there would be an irrational rule.

[00:59:51] That for me is the long and short of the formal logic of the situation, no matter what the kinds of truth might materially be.

[00:59:57] And I think that here is close to at least what I was trying to say, which is that he is treating this as as to adopt a stance where you would need a certain kind of evidence to believe something for him is.

[01:00:14] Where he doesn't talk about evidence here right. No, no, no, but he's talking about like having a rule of thinking that would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth.

[01:00:24] He is treating that so he's saying that would be an irrational rule.

[01:00:28] Or again, I like I think that well it would be like a rule that prevented you from seeing true.

[01:00:35] Right. What I'm saying is that he is he's characterizing the belief if you don't allow yourself to believe something like a religious belief with like little to no evidence, then you are you are on the other side completely.

[01:00:50] You are adopting an irrational rule.

[01:00:53] And I think that that this this is false dichotomy that that he's relying on to make his argument where it seems like well yeah if you were like consistently unable to arrive at any belief, it would be irrational.

[01:01:06] But it's not like therefore open yourself to religious beliefs.

[01:01:11] Right.

[01:01:12] Does it make sense?

[01:01:14] So what James is arguing is the strictness of the evidentialist view will make it impossible for people to adopt certain beliefs, some of which are just going to be true.

[01:01:33] Right.

[01:01:34] And then that is an irrational rule.

[01:01:39] Yeah, I mean, so so this is why I'm saying like look Clifford sounds to me just as wrong as James.

[01:01:46] I just think that he's using rhetorically the extremeness of the Clifford argument to argue what I think is another extreme which is to say that it's justified to believe something with such little evidence altogether.

[01:02:01] So right after that he says I confess I do not see how this logic can be escaped, but sad experience makes me fear that some of you may still shrink from radically saying with me in abstract or that we have the right to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will.

[01:02:17] I suspect Harvard that if this is so it is because you've got away from the abstract logical point of view altogether and are thinking perhaps without realizing of some particular religious hypothesis which for you is dead.

[01:02:28] The freedom to book. Yeah, but the freedom that's why I think it's really critical to say what does it mean to have a live or dead hypothesis like he's really making this sort of like claim that it just by by dint of your disposition and your cultural upbringing.

[01:02:47] Hypothesis might be live for you and that might make it justified to believe in the absence of evidence, but then if somebody else has a live hypothesis because of their particular disposition and cultural upbringing.

[01:03:00] And that is completely in conflict.

[01:03:03] Right.

[01:03:04] It is, you know, P and not P right.

[01:03:06] Yeah.

[01:03:07] That that both of those would be justified.

[01:03:09] Yeah.

[01:03:10] So I think, I think what he's saying is for many of us, especially people like us raised in the scientific tradition.

[01:03:21] Me without a particular religious orientation you with a religious an initial religious orientation that you were built against.

[01:03:31] Part of being a live hypothesis for us is that there is some at least some decent evidence for its truth.

[01:03:41] We don't necessarily know how much is sufficient for us to, you know, have to adopt it or maybe we're Bayesian and we come at it that way.

[01:03:51] You know the Nate Silver where we're just going to assign probabilities but that's and that and that for us is a big part of what makes out it's not all of what makes a hypothesis.

[01:04:00] It's a hypothesis alive or dead, but it's part of it.

[01:04:03] It's like a necessary condition that it's not something for which there is absolutely no evidence and probably a lot of people are like that and that's fine.

[01:04:14] Does he actually think that what makes a life hypothesis is some evidence?

[01:04:18] I thought that he was arguing that what's a lot of life.

[01:04:21] No, no, just I'm saying that for us that's what that's part of for us and for a lot of people.

[01:04:26] So you know what's interesting part of like part of me is was surprised when you referred to the evidence that I would have had or anybody raised religious would have had for believing what they do because you know in some deep sense the reason that it stopped being a life hypothesis for me

[01:04:44] was because I was convinced that there is zero evidence for the existence of God right like what I what I consider evidence is just not met at all and and that's why it became a dead hypothesis.

[01:04:56] So here's a question.

[01:04:57] What about for God forbid one of our one of our daughters is has a really serious illness and you know the doctor is saying look there's no really any hope here this is something that you don't recover from.

[01:05:13] And you want to believe and you in fact maybe do believe that they will recover and it's a it is kind of this thing that certainly it's a live hypothesis for you even though there's no evidence as far as you know the doctor is right.

[01:05:34] And but it is really important for you to believe and I mean one way of interpreting what James is saying in a situation like that under those circumstances you have a right to believe to really believe it to believe like that that's going to come true.

[01:05:54] And if it doesn't OK you were wrong but you're not in this kind of situation so concerned with avoiding error. You would much rather believe take the tiniest chance that it's true and believe it right but but so what if I mean I fear that's such an emotionally

[01:06:15] charged situation that it's hard for me to say well like I want to believe that my dad was going to die. But it really you know it is actually I think a good example in that this is something that you know my my aunt was a neonatologist in the neonatal infant care unit and had to all the time have these heartbreaking

[01:06:38] conversations with parents telling them you know your child was born with this particular problem they won't make it six months. Yeah. And and they'd have to make this.

[01:06:49] But of course that's a statistical claim right. It's now might be 99 percent true but rarely will you have any more than that. But the decision to there are consequences to continue to hold out hope.

[01:07:04] Right. You know less charged situation. Yeah like in dumb and dumber when she says there's a million to one chance that you'll that I'll ever be with you. And he says so you're saying I have a chance.

[01:07:15] Yeah. I suppose that he could act as if it's true and it would just you would keep stalking her for sure. Right. But on the flip side and James points this out there are certain beliefs that you have to believe against all odds for them to come true.

[01:07:33] And I think that's why we thought in them the spurs coming back from three goals down to be I acts. They had to believe that they could do it even though the odds were made incredibly stacked against them probably for it to happen and there is certain things like that where you have to believe it to be true just for it to come true.

[01:07:51] And maybe you know there's really no good evidence for it at the time that you adopt it.

[01:07:58] And what is the story about Kanye West that somebody has. I forget who was telling the story but it was like you know he was a no name. He was like he was not anything and he was he took a meeting with like a label a rap label and because he was trying to get signed and he

[01:08:16] got up on the table and was rapping and he started saying like I'm going to be like the best rapper alive. I'm going to sell millions of records. He's just like going off on how good he is and how what an impact he's going to have.

[01:08:30] And of course no one believed it right right just it but he wasn't wrong when you listen to what he was saying like he did become that big right at some point now that might so it might be true for some some you know believe some some self fulfilling prophecies.

[01:08:46] It's certainly not the case for me believing that the spurs were going to win though.

[01:08:53] Right.

[01:08:54] It might be it and I you know it's kind of an empirical question I wonder like it's it's hilariously inappropriate for somebody to say like if that report said to like a super underdog if they said what do you think what do you think your chances are of winning

[01:09:11] if they said like pretty low really I'm going to be honest with you were probably not going to win. I don't know.

[01:09:19] I'm looking 538 but I don't know that that would prevent you from from actually playing hard enough to win maybe maybe but you're right that's this probably Kanye needed to believe that right for it to come true.

[01:09:31] Perhaps yeah I'm willing to yeah except it's possible it's yeah and so I think that's so what what James is saying in that line against Cliff.

[01:09:41] Clifford is you to have a rule that would force Kanye not to believe that even though believing it would have made it true that's got to be an irrational rule.

[01:09:56] Now I don't know like how you define what a rational rule is or a rational rule but I get the point that there is something possibly too strict about a criterion that would prevent something like that from happening.

[01:10:11] Right for some for some things yeah there are other kinds of sort of overconfidence effects that you have no shot but also importantly for some believe like that like if I believe if I really believe that that say some somebody have a crush on if I really believe that they like me and even if it has a positive effect on them eventually liking me it might be not true while I believe it.

[01:10:38] Right so so that's where I think it really matters to have this pragmatist view of truth because I think James would want to say if it ends up working right if your belief ends up making this person like you then it was true and I would want to say well it wasn't true at the time but you're ready to have a causal influence and now it's true.

[01:10:58] Because otherwise you know you could say I they don't know that they like me yet but I'm going to kidnap them put it in my basement and then let's say she gets Stockholm syndrome and like you see I knew it.

[01:11:12] There's something fucked up about that right I was right all along.

[01:11:17] I think we should try to wrap this up soon but this was a completely unintended connection between segment one and segment two.

[01:11:26] I was just going to say yeah I was going to.

[01:11:28] Yeah no I mean the whole I mean I think that this is you know the fact that Tamler is sympathetic to James's view more than I am I think is the underlying factor in some of the differences that we have about our opinions about things like.

[01:11:45] Although we don't have the.

[01:11:47] We don't disagree as much about the as much as a grad student thing but I do think that like and you believe you agree with this to that part of succeeding in grad school is not thinking that you have no shot to get a job.

[01:12:01] No but you know what I was constantly thinking when James was saying giving that example of if you don't believe that someone likes you then you're missing out on reaping the benefits of having a relationship with them.

[01:12:11] I think that actually there are cases in which having fear that you will fail does the better motivation motivational work so like to just give an example my sister who got who was like a straight A student all of her life.

[01:12:28] Yeah she would work herself into a frenzy convincing herself that she was going to get an F on an exam and you know if you're a Bayesian you would say you're fucking crazy.

[01:12:38] There's no way you're going to get an F but that's exactly what would motivate her to stay up all night studying right and and so I think that there are cases in which the you don't need to believe something to be true for in order for it to help.

[01:12:51] Yeah so I mean of course that's sure I don't think James would deny that here's.

[01:12:56] So I think there's a lot that and there's a lot more to talk about I mean I think that a lot of the time that we exclude things we're doing it because they're dead hypotheses to us and not necessarily because you know they don't meet the same evidential standard that we require for our other beliefs.

[01:13:22] If you know what I mean so sometimes I don't I think James might be right that we don't have the same standard of sufficient evidence for all of our beliefs in fact probably there we have wildly different standards and one of the differences then is that some of them are live hypotheses

[01:13:48] and so we choose to believe them or at least we're open to believing them.

[01:13:55] And others are not and the reason they're not is not because there's less evidence but because we there's some other reason there's like religious belief for a long time was like that for me and it still is actually I just don't care enough to want to believe it.

[01:14:15] For some people that's not true right and then there are certain other things where I care deeply and so I would low my and maybe not know that I'm doing this but my standard my evidential standards would go way down and maybe because I want it to be true or maybe because some part of me is drawn to it being true.

[01:14:38] Right so so I think so a couple things one I'm still not I'm still not clear what what James is distinction between live and dead hypotheses.

[01:14:49] But I think you're right that we have different standards of evidence across different beliefs and maybe this approaches something like a pragmatism although not in the deep like not in a deeply justifying way.

[01:15:00] But the reason that I think we have different evidential standards often is because of the cost benefit analysis of being wrong versus right.

[01:15:08] So so I think it's it's OK for probabilistic decisions to have to say you know I only have a one in a you know 10 million chance of winning the lottery but I'm going to play and when I say I'm going to play in some real deep sense I believe that I could win.

[01:15:26] The costs are super low like I have just a dollar for me which is thankfully not a big cost. But for something else like those same odds if the consequences are that I'm going to die right.

[01:15:38] I would say that you're no so I think that descriptively we use different evidentiary standards in some some ways it's completely irrational because we want to believe certain things.

[01:15:49] But in other in other instances it might not be you know the ask your epistemologist friend for me when the weather says that there's 30 percent chance of rain and I take an umbrella.

[01:16:03] Does that mean that I believe it's going to rain. And on James's view is his pragmatic views. Does he think that I believe I'm going to it's going to rain.

[01:16:12] It means you're a pussy.

[01:16:14] I never do.

[01:16:16] No I mean yes the whole idea of probabilistic belief is not addressed in this. You never hear him talk about things that are where you like it's either suspend judgment or all out belief.

[01:16:34] Does the availability of so many other beliefs now with our ability to to have in depth knowledge about almost anything. The live dead hypothesis thing is so critical to this argument that if he's saying that it's it's

[01:16:49] it's spurious whether or not something is you're inclined to believe it like it's a matter of just the accident then that leads to a very pessimistic pessimistic epistemological conclusion.

[01:17:00] Only because you already start from a kind of foundation list epistemological standpoint so I don't think he sees it as pessimistic right. I think he thinks

[01:17:12] that's just life that we are going that certain things are going to be live for us. Now again for this is what I was saying earlier. I think if you are a scientifically oriented person one of those things maybe one of the biggest things of whether a hypothesis is a live or dead

[01:17:31] is the amount of evidence there is in its favor but it's even for us it's it's almost certainly not everything of there's all sorts of things about our background and our temperaments and what we've just read and what you know what age we are whether we've had a kid yet or not had a kid yet

[01:17:52] and those things also influence whether a hypothesis is live or dead for us. So I think that that I realize why I'm sort of a bit of two minds about this this view as stated by James in this article.

[01:18:07] You know James was famously a psychologist and a philosopher at some point he abandoned psychology and just sector philosophy but I think James is being a better psychologist with this than he is being a philosopher so I think that it's actually a

[01:18:21] very nice way of stating how it is that people come to believe what they believe but I don't think he did makes a good case for that being the criteria of what is true or not.

[01:18:32] Right like you don't think it's justifies the stance that

[01:18:37] But it certainly seems right about how people you know come to believe certain things with little evidence.

[01:18:42] But I think the live dead you know just on that point he's only trying to be a psychologist. That's just pure psychology that there are certain things that are that we're open to believing are true and certain things that we're not.

[01:18:57] And a big part of that involves our background temperament passionate nature the meta epistemology underlying all of this I think is a sentimentalist one it's one that's based on

[01:19:12] the emotions. Right yeah yeah and that's where we part ways because you know I'm not willing to go full blown pragmatist about what truth is but but aside from that you know I do like the psychology and I think it's

[01:19:28] an interesting way to think about truth because I don't see the sentimentalist view necessarily being pragmatic.

[01:19:36] Right it is in the same way that I think you could be like an expressivist and meta ethics but not be a pragmatist about ethics but they're very there's a lot of overlap.

[01:19:49] Yeah it's yeah you're right it's a different claim.

[01:19:52] All right well I think there's more to talk about and we stung we've stumbled our way through parts of this.

[01:19:58] And it's worth a read just I really actually am a fan of that old like the writing with such utter confidence inserting phrases in Latin speaking for others.

[01:20:13] Yeah I mean if you're going to compare it to the dry analytic style of contemporary epistemology.

[01:20:21] I mean you would get skewered if you try to write that way now.

[01:20:24] But it is nice.

[01:20:26] And I think it's also it helps to be William James your brother Henry James like you know how to write in this style whereas I think a lot of people if they tried it.

[01:20:36] You could sound like an ass yeah.

[01:20:40] All right all right join us next time on Very Bad Wisps.

[01:21:26] Woodman just a very bad wizard.