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Faith

In recent years I’ve slowly changed my thinking on the concept of ‘faith’. Or perhaps I’ve been thinking about attitudes, and just made very narrow use of a very broad word. Here’s the thought:

Someone with a cool mind, an impartial attitude, and some very basic arithmetic can optimize. It’s fashionable to make fun of these people,[^1] but attempting a little cool-thinking and multiplication obviously makes for a good habit, on average. [1]: Ironically, we make fun of these people mostly when they have too much faith in their own ability to optimize with some scant arithmetic.

Of course this calculative thinking has plenty of limitations, especially when trying to reach the high-status of ‘facts’. It has these basic problems:

1. there’s no data for most things, and

2. you have to decide on how much effort you want to put into searching for that data before you know it, and (most importantly)

3. the methods selected to interrogate your data play an unknown, and generally unquantifiable part in the results.

In short, nobody can take purely ‘data driven approach’ to anything, not even Mathematicians.

Now for the faith, let’s assume a perfectly spherical data with a perfectly hot woman. There’s no formula for how well you’ll do on this date. One could, in principle, find enough information to begin to make a prediction, but not in reality.

Faced with a situation without any available information, the calculative method suggests we proceed without belief. But that’s not how people act. To ask someone out means belief in a reasonable possibility of a positive response. And besides the bare fact of someone’s actions, their belief in success or failure will begin to infect their thinking. They can spend their time thinking of awful gaffs, and the possibility of a stutter coming out, or they can think about success, and wonder what kind of films the prospective data has.

Without any guarantees, dates, interviews, and plenty of other things in life tend to go better when we believe in ourselves. So the purely calculative mind should not in fact say that the chances are unknown. Rather, the purely calculative mind asks the purely calculative approach ‘what are my chances?’, and the purely calculative approach responds ‘what do you think your chances are?’, because if you think you will do well, you probably will, and if you think you will do badly, you also, probably, will.

So we have a logical loop. Belief creates probability, and when we ask about probability, probability asks about belief.

Mathematics (the calculative mind will tell you) is unassailable, so when a logical loop starts, people must break first, and resort to belief first, analysis second. Humans face this situation everywhere confidence plays a part. You won’t raise children if you think they’ll be miserable, so to have them is to act on the notion that they will not grow up in a horrifying world. I went to university, while some other children who went to the same crappy, little school, did not, because I believed I could, and that I would do well. None of us had any evidence.

We’re bound, by Sartrean law, to act without information, but also to have a position.

In short: faith.

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And in case it’s unclear, I’m not endorsing firm belief in healing crystals or talking donkeys. And perhaps the word ‘faith’ has more wrong with it than right here. But the loop certainly exists - belief first, which selects the type of analysis after, and further down the road, ‘facts’.