We have two types of beliefs in our heads: regular beliefs (e.g., “There’s a coffee mug on the table”) and credences (e.g., “Everything happens for a reason”).
Regular beliefs are involuntary—you have no choice but to believe them. Credences are voluntary: you can “choose” to believe them, in the same way Phillips, Craig, and Dean choose to believe that god is good and in control, even when his face is hard to see.
Regular beliefs actively guide behavior: if I think the coffee cup is to my right, I’ll reach for it on my right. Credences are inert: if I think Jesus is my homeboy or everything happens for a reason, well… it’s not really clear what I should do with that information.
This distinction—between beliefs and credences, or between world models and social signals—gets my vote for being the most important insight in cognitive science in the last two decades…
And though I’m anti-ideology, anti-partisan, and sympathetic to anarchism, I didn’t always hold these views. I used to be a good, wholesome, liberal democrat who believed in hope and change and political progress. I chose to study political psychology for my PhD, instead of other topics, because I wanted to understand the people who disagreed with me. My goal was to change their hearts and minds by showing them the light of reason.
I even believed in values—equality, diversity, honor, authenticity, self-actualization, etc. My goal was to figure out how these sacred values of ours might have evolved—what functions they might serve. My dream was to write a cool academic paper called “An Evolutionary Theory of Values.” So I tried and tried to come up with a workable theory, and I failed and failed. I repeatedly came up with dumb theories and quickly realized why they were dumb. It felt like banging my head against a wall. At some point, it dawned on me that I was pursuing an impossible goal. Genuine values and Darwinism were incompatible. You cannot explain the former in terms of the latter. Genuine values are supposed to lie beyond self-interest, nepotism, and alliances, while being costly to their adherents, thereby ruling out the only possible ways they could have been favored by natural selection. So I realized our values must be bullshit, and set out to come up with an evolutionary theory of why we pretend to have these bullshit values…
I even used to believe in the pursuit of happiness. I wanted to be happy—or I thought I did. Then I started meditating (kind of obsessively), got weirdly good at it, to the point where I could make myself happy at will, and then I realized that happiness was just kind of… boring. This is it? The pinnacle of human existence? The meaning of life? Meh.
Then I lost my desire to meditate. Then the entire WEIRD mythology of happiness and self-care and self-actualization came crashing down on me. I realized all those things were, themselves, bullshit values—the very things I had been trying to explain. Then I started asking more questions. What about suffering? What about morality? What about the meaning of life? What about my own desire to write about these ideas—to be interesting? Were these things bullshit too? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. I could hear the theme from 2001 A Space Odyssey playing, as an obelisk emerged before me, inscribed with three words: everything is bullshit.
So I shattered my ideology, debunked my values, and destroyed my pursuit of happiness, by learning about them. Insight can be destructive. As Darwin knew all too well, a powerful explanation can be like an acid that eats through everything.
The devastation hasn’t always been fun. It’s been pretty alienating to believe this stuff at times. It occasionally makes me sad, too. A close friend of mine said he could detect an undercurrent of lost innocence in my writing, and it doesn’t surprise me he could sense it. I’ve had my dark nights of the soul, and I’ve even lost a few status points.
ChatGPT says: Here’s a critique broken into layers:
1. The conceptual frame
Pinsof’s opening move — contrasting involuntary “beliefs” with voluntary “credences” — is powerful, but oversimplified. Van Leeuwen himself doesn’t say credences are simply “chosen” in the way you choose a sandwich. Credences are socially acquired, often implicit, and sustained by group incentives. People don’t usually sit down and decide, “I’ll believe X”; they find themselves inhabiting X because their environment rewards it. So Pinsof’s dichotomy risks smuggling in a bit of folk-psychology voluntarism even as he criticizes it.
Similarly, “credences are inert” is overstated. Credences often drive real-world action — voting, charitable giving, parenting choices, even violence. People burn witches and storm capitols over “inert” credences. They’re less tightly coupled to immediate motor action than “the coffee cup is on the table,” but they still shape behavior over time.
2. The diagnostic cue (“kicking and screaming” beliefs)
The suggestion that you can gauge the truth of a belief by how involuntary it seems is interesting but shaky.
There are plenty of true beliefs people adopt eagerly (e.g., learning about germ theory, or discovering your partner is cheating and instantly believing it).
There are plenty of false beliefs people feel “dragged into” because of their identity or trauma (“I’ve always felt this was true”).
Social desirability bias cuts both ways: some people perform “agonized conversion” precisely because they know it looks honest.
Pinsof acknowledges this can be gamed, but underestimates how easily. In politics, entire “I used to be a liberal but now…” conversion scripts are performed because they persuade.
As a self-diagnostic tool it’s useful — “did I want to believe this?” — but as a truth cue about others it’s weak.
3. The autobiographical section
The essay’s strongest writing is the confession of how his beliefs shifted. It illustrates the acid effect of Darwinian thinking on sacred values. But it also contains some unexamined assumptions:
“Values can’t evolve because they’re supposed to lie beyond self-interest.” This is a false dichotomy. A value can feel disinterested yet be an adaptation for alliance-building. Game theory and cultural evolution models show how costly signals can spread if they solve coordination problems or confer group-level advantages. His failure to find a “genuine” evolutionary basis for values may reflect a definitional choice (“genuine = beyond any self-interest”) rather than an impossibility.
Status dynamics. He half-admits that contrarianism itself is a status play (“I surely gained status points”), but he treats that as a minor footnote. In reality, the pose of being the one who sees through bullshit is itself a high-prestige niche. This is not to say his beliefs are insincere — but it undermines his claim that he “aspires not to choose” them. You can’t fully separate epistemic moves from status incentives, even in the cynic’s niche.
Happiness and meditation. He treats his ability to induce happiness as a discovery that happiness is “boring” and thus a bullshit value. Another reading is that the pursuit of happiness is a cultural narrative, but the capacity for happiness still matters as a motivational signal (exactly the question you raised earlier). His “meh” is one data point, not a general argument.
4. The performative contradiction
There’s a built-in irony: he presents himself as someone who has been “dragged” into contrarian cynicism, yet writes long, witty, self-aware essays about it for an audience. That’s not a flaw in character but a signal that the “involuntary belief” cue is slippery. He’s clearly good at—and enjoys—the performance of radical disenchantment. That enjoyment may bias his conclusions just as much as naïve idealism biases a liberal democrat.
5. How to strengthen the piece
Acknowledge counterexamples. Admit that credences can drive costly, even deadly, behavior. Show why you still think the belief/credence distinction is valuable despite that.
Clarify voluntariness. Instead of “choose to believe,” talk about “beliefs sustained by incentives” versus “beliefs constrained by sensory reality.”
Apply the cue to yourself harder. The most compelling section is when he admits contrarianism may have lured him. Expand on that. Show the reader you’re not exempt from the very bias you’re diagnosing.
Differentiate between “values are bullshit” and “values are adaptations.” A value can be adaptive and still be “bullshit” in the sense of self-misrepresentation. That would make the argument more nuanced.
Bottom line
It’s an engaging, lucid essay that dramatizes a genuinely important cognitive-science insight (belief vs. credence). But it overstates the voluntariness and inertness of credences, underplays the status incentives in his own stance, and mistakes definitional moves (“values must be beyond self-interest”) for empirical discoveries. The best version of this essay would preserve the autobiographical candor but integrate those tensions, making it less a declaration of “everything is bullshit” and more a self-aware exploration of why we (including the author) are drawn to that claim.
