Was Kavanaugh Guilty?

No, I am not going to answer the question. This post will illustrate and argue for a position that I have argued many times in the past, namely that belief is voluntary. The example is merely particularly good for proving the point. I will also be using a framework something like Bryan Caplan’s in his discussion of rational irrationality:

Two forces lie at the heart of economic models of choice: preferences and prices. A consumer’s preferences determine the shape of his demand curve for oranges; the market price he faces determines where along that demand curve he resides. What makes this insight deep is its generality. Economists use it to analyze everything from having babies to robbing banks.

Irrationality is a glaring exception. Recognizing irrationality is typically equated with rejecting economics. A “logic of the irrational” sounds self-contradictory. This chapter’s central message is that this reaction is premature. Economics can handle irrationality the same way it handles everything: preferences and prices. As I have already pointed out:

  • People have preferences over beliefs: A nationalist enjoys the belief that foreign-made products are overpriced junk; a surgeon takes pride in the belief that he operates well while drunk.
  • False beliefs range in material cost from free to enormous: Acting on his beliefs would lead the nationalist to overpay for inferior goods, and the surgeon to destroy his career.

Snapping these two building blocks together leads to a simple model of irrational conviction. If agents care about both material wealth and irrational beliefs, then as the price of casting reason aside rises, agents consume less irrationality. I might like to hold comforting beliefs across the board, but it costs too much. Living in a Pollyanna dreamworld would stop be from coping with my problems, like that dead tree in my backyard that looks like it is going to fall on my house.

Let us assume that people are considering whether to believe that Brett Kavanaugh was guilty of sexual assault. For ease of visualization, let us suppose that they have utility functions defined over the following outcomes:

(A) Believe Kavanaugh was guilty, and turn out to be right

(B) Believe Kavanaugh was guilty, and turn out to be wrong

(C) Believe Kavanaugh was innocent, and turn out to be right

(D) Believe Kavanaugh was innocent, and turn out to be wrong

(E) Admit that you do not know whether he was guilty or not (this will be presumed to be a true statement, but I will count it as less valuable than a true statement that includes more detail.)

(F) Say something bad about your political enemies

(G) Say something good about your political enemies

(H) Say something bad about your political allies

(I) Say something good about your political allies

Note that options A through E are mutually exclusive, while one or more of options F through I might or might not come together with one of those from A through E.

Let’s suppose there are three people, a right winger who cares a lot about politics and little about truth, a left winger who cares a lot about politics and little about truth, and an independent who does not care about politics and instead cares a lot about truth. Then we posit the following table of utilities:

Right Winger
Left Winger

The columns for the right and left wingers are the same, but the totals will be calculated differently because saying something good about Kavanaugh, for the right winger, is saying something good about an ally, while for the left winger, it is saying something good about an enemy, and there is a similar contrast if something bad is said.

Now there are really only three options we need to consider, namely “Believe Kavanaugh was guilty,” “Believe Kavanaugh was innocent,” and “Admit that you do not know.” In addition, in order to calculate expected utility according to the above table, we need a probability that Kavanaugh was guilty. In order not to offend readers who have already chosen an option, I will assume a probability of 50% that he was guilty, and 50% that he was innocent. Using these assumptions, we can calculate the following ultimate utilities:

Right Winger
Left Winger
Claim Guilt
Claim Innocence
Confess Ignorance

(I won’t go through this calculation in detail; it should be evident that given my simple assumptions of the probability and values, there will be no value for anyone in affirming guilt or innocence as such, but only in admitting ignorance, or in making a political point.) Given these values, obviously the left winger will choose to believe that Kavanaugh was guilty, the right winger will choose to believe that he was innocent, and the independent will admit to being ignorant.

This account obviously makes complete sense of people’s actual positions on the question, and it does that by assuming that people voluntarily choose to believe a position in the same way they choose to do other things. On the other hand, if you assume that belief is an involuntary evaluation of a state of affairs, how could the actual distribution of opinion possibly be explained?

As this is a point I have discussed many times in the past, I won’t try to respond to all possible objections. However, I will bring up two of them. In the example, I had to assume that people calculated using a probability of 50% for Kavanaugh’s guilt or innocence. So it could be objected that their “real” belief is that there is a 50% chance he was guilty, and the statement is simply an external thing.

This initial 50% is something like a prior probability, and corresponds to a general leaning towards or away from a position. As I admitted in discussion with Angra Mainyu, that inclination is largely involuntary. However, first, this is not what we call a “belief” in ordinary usage, since we frequently say that someone has a belief while having some qualms about it. Second, it is not completely immune from voluntary influences. In practice in a situation like this, it will represent something like everything the person knows about the subject and predicate apart from this particular claim. And much of what the person knows will already be in subject/predicate form, and the person will have arrived at it through a similar voluntary process.

Another objection is that at least in the case of something obviously true or obviously false, there cannot possibly be anything voluntary about it. No one can choose to believe that the moon is made of green cheese, for example.

I have responded to this to this in the past by pointing out that most of us also cannot choose to go and kill ourselves, right now, despite the fact that doing so would be voluntary. And in a similar way, there is nothing attractive about believing that the moon is made of green cheese, and so no one can do it. At least two objections will be made to this response:

1) I can’t go kill myself right now, but I know that this is because it would be bad. But I cannot believe that the moon is made of green cheese because it is false, not because it is bad.

2) It does not seem that much harm would be done by choosing to believe this about the moon, and then changing your mind after a few seconds. So if it is voluntary, why not prove it by doing so? Obviously you cannot do so.

Regarding the first point, it is true that believing the moon is made of cheese would be bad because it is false. And in fact, if you find falsity the reason you cannot accept it, how is that not because you regard falsity as really bad? In fact lack of attractiveness is extremely relevant here. If people can believe in Xenu, they would find it equally possible to believe that the moon was made of cheese, if that were the teaching of their religion. In that situation, the falsity of the claim would not be much obstacle at all.

Regarding the second point, there is a problem like Kavka’s Toxin here. Choosing to believe something, roughly speaking, means choosing to treat it as a fact, which implies a certain commitment. Choosing to act like it is true enough to say so, then immediately doing something else, is not choosing to believe it, but rather it is choosing to tell a lie. So just as one cannot intend to drink the toxin without expecting to actually drink it, so one cannot choose to believe something without expecting to continue to believe it for the foreseeable future. This is why one would not wish to accept such a statement about the moon, not only in order to prove something (especially since it would prove nothing; no one would admit that you had succeeded in believing it), but even if someone were to offer a very large incentive, say a million dollars if you managed to believe it. This would amount to offering to pay someone to give up their concern for truth entirely, and permanently.

Additionally, in the case of some very strange claims, it might be true that people do not know how to believe them, in the sense that they do not know what “acting as though this were the case” would even mean. This no more affects the general voluntariness of belief than the fact that some people cannot do backflips affects the fact that such bodily motions are in themselves voluntary.

Common Sense

I have tended to emphasize common sense as a basic source in attempting to philosophize or otherwise understand reality. Let me explain what I mean by the idea of common sense.

The basic idea is that something is common sense when everyone agrees that something is true. If we start with this vague account, something will be more definitively common sense to the degree that it is truer that everyone agrees, and likewise to the degree that it is truer that everyone agrees.

If we consider anything that one might think of as a philosophical view, we will find at least a few people who disagree, at least verbally, with the claim. But we may be able to find some that virtually everyone agrees with. These pertain more to common sense than things that fewer people agree with. Likewise, if we consider everyday claims rather than philosophical ones, we will probably be able to find things that everyone agrees with apart from some very localized contexts. These pertain even more to common sense. Likewise, if everyone has always agreed with something both in the past and present, that pertains more to common sense than something that everyone agrees with in the present, but where some have disagreed in the past.

It will be truer that everyone agrees in various ways: if everyone is very certain of something, that pertains more to common sense than something people are less certain about. If some people express disagreement with a view, but everyone’s revealed preferences or beliefs indicate agreement, that can be said to pertain to common sense to some degree, but not so much as where verbal affirmations and revealed preferences and beliefs are aligned.

Naturally, all of this is a question of vague boundaries: opinions are more or less a matter of common sense. We cannot sort them into two clear categories of “common sense” and “not common sense.” Nonetheless, we would want to base our arguments, as much as possible, on things that are more squarely matters of common sense.

We can raise two questions about this. First, is it even possible? Second, why do it?

One might object that the proposal is impossible. For no one can really reason except from their own opinions. Otherwise, one might be formulating a chain of argument, but it is not one’s own argument or one’s own conclusion. But this objection is easily answered. In the first place, if everyone agrees on something, you probably agree yourself, and so reasoning from common sense will still be reasoning from your own opinions. Second, if you don’t personally agree, since belief is voluntary, you are capable of agreeing if you choose, and you probably should, for reasons which will be explained in answering the second question.

Nonetheless, the objection is a reasonable place to point out one additional qualification. “Everyone agrees with this” is itself a personal point of view that someone holds, and no one is infallible even with respect to this. So you might think that everyone agrees, while in fact they do not. But this simply means that you have no choice but to do the best you can in determining what is or what is not common sense. Of course you can be mistaken about this, as you can about anything.

Why argue from common sense? I will make two points, a practical one and a theoretical one. The practical point is that if your arguments are public, as for example this blog, rather than written down in a private journal, then you presumably want people to read them and to gain from them in some way. The more you begin from common sense, the more profitable your thoughts will be in this respect. More people will be able to gain from your thoughts and arguments if more people agree with the starting points.

There is also a theoretical point. Consider the statement, “The truth of a statement never makes a person more likely to utter it.” If this statement were true, no one could ever utter it on account of its truth, but only for other reasons. So it is not something that a seeker of truth would ever say. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that the falsehood of some statements, on some occasions, makes those statements more likely to be affirmed by some people. Nonetheless, the nature of language demands that people have an overall tendency, most of the time and in most situations, to speak the truth. We would not be able to learn the meaning of a word without it being applied accurately, most of the time, to the thing that it means. In fact, if everyone was always uttering falsehoods, we would simply learn that “is” means “is not,” and that “is not,” means “is,” and the supposed falsehoods would not be false in the language that we would acquire.

It follows that greater agreement that something is true, other things being equal, implies that the thing is more likely to be actually true. Stones have a tendency to fall down: so if we find a great collection of stones, the collection is more likely to be down at the bottom of a cliff rather than perched precisely on the tip of a mountain. Likewise, people have a tendency to utter the truth, so a great collection of agreement suggests something true rather than something false.

Of course, this argument depends on “other things being equal,” which is not always the case. It is possible that most people agree on something, but you are reasonably convinced that they are mistaken, for other reasons. But if this is the case, your arguments should depend on things that they would agree with even more strongly than they agree with the opposite of your conclusion. In other words, it should be based on things which pertain even more to common sense. Suppose it does not: ultimately the very starting point of your argument is something that everyone else agrees is false. This will probably be an evident insanity from the beginning, but let us suppose that you find it reasonable. In this case, Robin Hanson’s result discussed here implies that you must be convinced that you were created in very special circumstances which would guarantee that you would be right, even though no one else was created in these circumstances. There is of course no basis for such a conviction. And our ability to modify our priors, discussed there, implies that the reasonable behavior is to choose to agree with the priors of common sense, if we find our natural priors departing from them, except in cases where the disagreement is caused by agreement with even stronger priors of common sense. Thus for example in this post I gave reasons for disagreeing with our natural prior on the question, “Is this person lying or otherwise deceived?” in some cases. But this was based on mathematical arguments that are even more convincing than that natural prior.

Motivated Reasoning and the Kantian Dichotomy




























Truth and Expectation II

We discussed this topic in a previous post. I noted there that there is likely some relationship with predictive processing. This idea can be refined by distinguishing between conscious thought and what the human brain does on a non-conscious level.

It is not possible to define truth by reference to expectations for reasons given previously. Some statements do not imply specific expectations, and besides, we need the idea of truth to decide whether or not someone’s expectations were correct or not. So there is no way to define truth except the usual way: a statement is true if things are the way the statement says they are, bearing in mind the necessary distinctions involving “way.”

On the conscious level, I would distinguish between thinking about something is true, and wanting to think that it is true. In a discussion with Angra Mainyu, I remarked that insofar as we have an involuntary assessment of things, it would be more appropriate to call that assessment a desire:


Angra was quite surprised by this and responded that “That statement gives me evidence that we’re probably not talking about the same or even similar psychological phenomena – i.e., we’re probably talking past each other.” But if he was talking about anything that anyone at all would characterize as a belief (and he said that he was), he was surely talking about the unshakeable gut sense that something is the case whether or not I want to admit it. So we were, in fact, talking about exactly the same psychological phenomena. I was claiming then, and will claim now, that this gut sense is better characterized as a desire than as a belief. That is, insofar as desire is a tendency to behave in certain ways, it is a desire because it is a tendency to act and think as though this claim is true. But we can, if we want, resist that tendency, just as we can refrain from going to get food when we are hungry. If we do resist, we will refrain from believing what we have a tendency to believe, and if we do not, we will believe what we have a tendency to believe. But the tendency will be there whether or not we follow it.

Now if we feel a tendency to think that something is true, it is quite likely that it seems to us that it would improve our expectations. However, we can also distinguish between desiring to believe something for this reason, or desiring to believe something for other reasons. And although we might not pay attention, it is quite possibly to be consciously aware that you have an inclination to believe something, and also that it is for non-truth related reasons; and thus you would not expect it to improve your expectations.

But this is where it is useful to distinguish between the conscious mind and what the brain is doing on another level. My proposal: you will feel the desire to think that something is true whenever your brain guesses that its predictions, or at least the predictions that are important to it, will become more accurate if you think that the thing is true. We do not need to make any exceptions. This will be the case even when we would say that the statement does not imply any significant expectations, and will be the case even when the belief would have non-truth related motives.

Consider the statement that there are stars outside the visible universe. One distinction we could make even on the conscious level is that this implies various counterfactual predictions: “If you are teleported outside the visible universe, you will see more stars that aren’t currently visible.” Now we might find this objectionable if we were trying to define truth by expectations, since we have no expectation of such an event. But both on conscious and on non-conscious levels, we do need to make counterfactual predictions in order to carry on with our lives, since this is absolutely essential to any kind of planning and action. Now certainly no one can refute me if I assert that you would not see any such stars in the teleportation event. But it is not surprising if my brain guesses that this counterfactual prediction is not very accurate, and thus I feel the desire to say that there are stars there.

Likewise, consider the situation of non-truth related motives. In an earlier discussion of predictive processing, I suggested that the situation where people feel like they have to choose a goal is a result of such an attempt at prediction. Such a choice seems to be impossible, since choice is made in view of a goal, and if you do not have one yet, how can you choose? But there is a pre-existing goal here on the level of the brain: it wants to know what it is going to do. And choosing a goal will serve that pre-existing goal. Once you choose a goal, it will then be easy to know what you are going to do: you are going to do things that promote the goal that you chose. In a similar way, following any desire will improve your brain’s guesses about what you are going to do. It follows that if you have a desire to believe something, actually believing it will improve your brain’s accuracy at least about what it is going to do. This is true but not a fair argument, however, since my proposal is that the brain’s guess of improved accuracy is the cause of your desire to believe something. It is true that if you already have the desire, giving in to it will improve accuracy, as with any desire. But in my theory the improved accuracy had to be implied first, in order to cause the desire.

The answer is that you have many desires for things other than belief, which at the same time give you a motive (not an argument) for believing things. And your brain understands that if you believe the thing, you will be more likely to act on those other desires, and this will minimize uncertainty, and improve the accuracy of its predictions. Consider this discussion of truth in religion. I pointed out there that people confuse two different questions: “what should I do?”, and “what is the world like?” In particular with religious and political loyalties, there can be an intense social pressure towards conformity. And this gives an obvious non-truth related motive to believe the things in question. But in a less obvious way, it means that your brain’s predictions will be more accurate if you believe the thing. Consider the Mormon, and take for granted that the religious doctrines in question are false. Since they are false, does not that mean that if they continue to believe, their predictions will be less accurate?

No, it does not, for several reasons. In the first place the doctrines are in general formulated to avoid such false predictions, at least about everyday life. There might be a false prediction about what will happen when you die, but that is in the future and is anyway disconnected from your everyday life. This is in part why I said “the predictions that are important to it” in my proposal. Second, failure to believe would lead to extremely serious conflicting desires: the person would still have the desire to conform outwardly, but would also have good logical reasons to avoid conformity. And since we don’t know in advance how we will respond to conflicting desires, the brain will not have a good idea of what it would do in that situation. In other words, the Mormon is living a good Mormon life. And their brain is aware that insisting that Mormonism is true is a very good way to make sure that they keep living that life, and therefore continue to behave predictably, rather than falling into a situation of strongly conflicting desires where it would have little idea of what it would do. In this sense, insisting that Mormonism is true, even though it is not, actually improves the brain’s predictive accuracy.


Lies, Religion, and Miscalibrated Priors













































Minimizing Motivated Beliefs



























Blaming the Prophet









  • Is my health the way I want it to be?
  • Is my fitness the way I want it to be?
  • Is my weight the way I want it to be?



  • Is it as tidy as you want it to be?




