Crude Beliefs

Mingey is a medium-sized town in rural Western Australia. It would be all dusty and deserted, but that it finds itself a short drive from a big copper-mine. You can get a nice eggs benedict. You’ll bump into plenty of never-married singles. In 2019, the town was the unlikely site of an international espionage drama; a clandestine cartel was uncovered. They were taking Mingey over. Luckily, one red-blooded local had crude beliefs.

Crude vs Nuanced Beliefs

Okay... I made that up.

Forgive me- I didn’t want to do a ‘Malcolm Gladwell’. I reckon that a made-up example will be plausible enough.

Wise people strive for nuanced beliefs. By ‘crude belief’ I don’t mean anything pejorative. I just mean an unnuanced belief. A crude belief is a generalization, like ‘Zoomers don’t go out much’. It doesn’t bear much scrutiny. Now, here’s the thing: Is that a flaw?

The tale of espionage in Mingey

The Han Chinese have been settling in the ‘Great Southern Land’¹ since the time of your great-great-grandfather, and, by and large, they fitted in well, but not at all well since the new millennium, at least not in Mingey, where we are concerned.

Lester Jameson always thought that it was ‘a C.C.P. plot to take over Aussie’. Folk in the pub humored Mingey’s local dentist. “Tell us your latest conspiracy theory, Lester!”

By an act of fate, an uncle of Mr Jameson died and left him $200,000. He used some of this money to hire one of Australia’s best private investigators.

The investigation hit the bullseye. Far more than corruption, there was nation-state connivance. Agents from the C.C.P. had begun meeting with the richest of Mingey’s Han Chinese community in 2008. They had a plot. They built a brothel, and filmed the business-leaders and councillors using the service. Over a slow-burning plot of 10 years, whether it be by bribery or blackmail, they would take over. To what end? The goal was to open up a new mine run by and for the C.C.P.²

Folk buy Lester beers in the pub minus the patronizing these days.

False Positives and the Immune System

What I’m trying to get at is that any winning organism needs to risk being wrong for the sake of not being slow and dead.

The immune system has an ‘innate response’. This part of the immune system doesn’t learn. It gets triggered quickly by any invader. We suffer allergies because of it. We react badly to some medicines. The innate response makes false positives. The alternative, however, is much worse.

The person with crude beliefs is in some ways a reactionary. He or she will make false positives. A new drug might be deemed a depopulation plot, when in sooth it’s quite helpful.

We scoff at folk like Lester, and they do make mistakes, but they form a crucial part of the winning political state.

Crude beliefs also form part of a winning anti-technocratic individual; hence, having more to do with my blog.

How do crude beliefs form?

Nuanced beliefs usually blossom from crude beliefs. The trick is know which beliefs to leave crude. To refine or not to refine? I have some tips. That’s coming soon, but we need to make clear first why nuanced beliefs are the right path by default but can go badly wrong.

Watching Reality Per Sé with a remote control

The reason is to do with complex systems.

We live in overlapping complex systems. Complex systems are unforeseeable. There are rules, but they change, and members game them too. Imagine trying to play chess and you only know the rules: “Bishops can move diagonally; pawns can move forward one space.” You would lose in minutes.

Nuanced beliefs are anti-reductionist. With nuanced beliefs, one does not try to fiddle with the contrast-settings on the remote-control of reality.

The chess master can become a sap. The complexity is a way-in for nefarious actors. Human brains cannot cope with too much information. If one thinks ‘there are always two sides to the story’— a very reasonable belief— that is an opening for one side to lie.

Crude beliefs help. You might only know about bishops and pawns, but if you do Owen’s Defense,³ you can beat a lot of sophisticated players, at least if they have never met that tactic before.

In summary:

• Nuanced beliefs match complex systems.
• Human brains struggle with the information needed for nuanced beliefs.
• Nefarious actors can exploit a brain overloaded with nuanced beliefs.
• Hence, it is best to have some crude (non-nuanced) beliefs.

Three tips for leaving your crude beliefs crude

So, when should you ‘nuance-up’ and when should you ‘crude-down’? I have three tips. I’ll put them in the form of questions.

1. Is there strong evidence from history and/or anthropology?

I said earlier that the innate immune system doesn’t learn. That’s not strictly true. The innate immune system has learned over a million years.

If your crude belief is backed up with facts and inferences from history and/or anthropology, don’t water it down. History is the best wine. It links us with our ancestors’ beliefs.⁴

2. Are the variables irreducible?

Yes? Best to keep that belief crude.

Galileo set up the model for Science by taking out unneeded variables. When testing motion, he didn’t take heed of the wind.

Some things lend themselves well to variable-reduction. “Eating steak twice a week is good for me.” You can cut down the variables and test it out. Other things are irreducible. Beliefs stemming from these things should stay crude. More information— I mean the kind down rabbit-holes on the Internet— will just put a haze on your brain. The reason is that the experts will treat the case as if it were reducible.

3. Does the government have a vested interest in taking the other side?

Yes? Chances are, your strive to be nuanced will be flooded with disinformation.

You may be choosy with your sources. You may sidestep state-funded propaganda like the BBC or PBS. You may seek out academics ostracized from the ivory towers. It’s hard though. How important is the belief?

Unless you are willing to spend a ton of time and know what you’re doing, it’s safer to stay on the side of crude.

Takeaways

• A crude belief is a generalization which strikes you as true but doesn’t bear a lot of scrutiny.
• A lot of scrutiny is a way-in for nefarious actors.
• It’s part of a survival stratagem to keep some of your beliefs crude.
• A good sign that a belief should stay crude is that it’s backed up by history and/or anthropology, and is gainsaid by your government.