{"id":164166,"date":"2025-10-06T08:57:15","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T16:57:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=164166"},"modified":"2025-10-06T09:00:01","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T17:00:01","slug":"david-pinsofs-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=164166","title":{"rendered":"David Pinsof’s Journey"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Pinsof writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

We have two types of beliefs in our heads: regular beliefs (e.g., \u201cThere\u2019s a coffee mug on the table\u201d) and credences (e.g., \u201cEverything happens for a reason\u201d). <\/p>\n

Regular beliefs are involuntary\u2014you have no choice but to believe them. Credences are voluntary: you can \u201cchoose\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Regular beliefs actively guide behavior: if I think the coffee cup is to my right, I\u2019ll reach for it on my right. Credences are inert: if I think Jesus is my homeboy or everything happens for a reason, well\u2026 it\u2019s not really clear what I should do with that information. <\/p>\n

This distinction\u2014between beliefs and credences, or between world models and social signals\u2014gets my vote for being the most important insight in cognitive science in the last two decades…<\/p>\n

And though I\u2019m anti-ideology, anti-partisan, and sympathetic to anarchism, I didn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n

I even believed in values\u2014equality, diversity, honor, authenticity, self-actualization, etc. My goal was to figure out how these sacred values of ours might have evolved\u2014what functions they might serve. My dream was to write a cool academic paper called \u201cAn Evolutionary Theory of Values.\u201d 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…<\/p>\n

I even used to believe in the pursuit of happiness. I wanted to be happy\u2014or 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\u2026 boring. This is it? The pinnacle of human existence? The meaning of life? Meh. <\/p>\n

Then <\/span>I lost my desire to meditate<\/a>. Then the entire <\/span>WEIRD mythology<\/a> of happiness and self-care and self-actualization came crashing down on me. I realized all those things were, themselves, bullshit values\u2014the very things I had been trying to explain. Then I started asking more questions. What about <\/span>suffering<\/a>? What about <\/span>morality<\/a>? What about <\/span>the meaning of life<\/a>? What about my own desire to write about these ideas\u2014<\/span>to be interesting<\/a>? Were these things bullshit too? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. I could hear the theme from <\/span>2001 A Space Odyssey<\/em> playing, as an obelisk emerged before me, inscribed with three words: everything is bullshit.<\/span><\/p>\n

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 <\/span>acid<\/a> that eats through everything. <\/span><\/p>\n

The devastation hasn\u2019t always been fun. It\u2019s 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\u2019t surprise me he could sense it. I\u2019ve had my dark nights of the soul, and I\u2019ve even lost a few status points.<\/p>\n

ChatGPT says: Here\u2019s a critique broken into layers:<\/p>\n

1. The conceptual frame<\/p>\n

Pinsof\u2019s opening move \u2014 contrasting involuntary \u201cbeliefs\u201d with voluntary \u201ccredences\u201d \u2014 is powerful, but oversimplified. Van Leeuwen himself doesn\u2019t say credences are simply \u201cchosen\u201d in the way you choose a sandwich. Credences are socially acquired, often implicit, and sustained by group incentives. People don\u2019t usually sit down and decide, \u201cI\u2019ll believe X\u201d; they find themselves inhabiting X because their environment rewards it. So Pinsof\u2019s dichotomy risks smuggling in a bit of folk-psychology voluntarism even as he criticizes it.<\/p>\n

Similarly, \u201ccredences are inert\u201d is overstated. Credences often drive real-world action \u2014 voting, charitable giving, parenting choices, even violence. People burn witches and storm capitols over \u201cinert\u201d credences. They\u2019re less tightly coupled to immediate motor action than \u201cthe coffee cup is on the table,\u201d but they still shape behavior over time.<\/p>\n

2. The diagnostic cue (\u201ckicking and screaming\u201d beliefs)<\/p>\n

The suggestion that you can gauge the truth of a belief by how involuntary it seems is interesting but shaky.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

There are plenty of false beliefs people feel \u201cdragged into\u201d because of their identity or trauma (\u201cI\u2019ve always felt this was true\u201d).<\/p>\n

Social desirability bias cuts both ways: some people perform \u201cagonized conversion\u201d precisely because they know it looks honest.<\/p>\n

Pinsof acknowledges this can be gamed, but underestimates how easily. In politics, entire \u201cI used to be a liberal but now\u2026\u201d conversion scripts are performed because they persuade.<\/p>\n

As a self-diagnostic tool it\u2019s useful \u2014 \u201cdid I want to believe this?\u201d \u2014 but as a truth cue about others it\u2019s weak.<\/p>\n

3. The autobiographical section<\/p>\n

The essay\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n

\u201cValues can\u2019t evolve because they\u2019re supposed to lie beyond self-interest.\u201d 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 \u201cgenuine\u201d evolutionary basis for values may reflect a definitional choice (\u201cgenuine = beyond any self-interest\u201d) rather than an impossibility.<\/p>\n

Status dynamics. He half-admits that contrarianism itself is a status play (\u201cI surely gained status points\u201d), 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 \u2014 but it undermines his claim that he \u201caspires not to choose\u201d them. You can\u2019t fully separate epistemic moves from status incentives, even in the cynic\u2019s niche.<\/p>\n

Happiness and meditation. He treats his ability to induce happiness as a discovery that happiness is \u201cboring\u201d 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 \u201cmeh\u201d is one data point, not a general argument.<\/p>\n

4. The performative contradiction<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a built-in irony: he presents himself as someone who has been \u201cdragged\u201d into contrarian cynicism, yet writes long, witty, self-aware essays about it for an audience. That\u2019s not a flaw in character but a signal that the \u201cinvoluntary belief\u201d cue is slippery. He\u2019s clearly good at\u2014and enjoys\u2014the performance of radical disenchantment. That enjoyment may bias his conclusions just as much as na\u00efve idealism biases a liberal democrat.<\/p>\n

5. How to strengthen the piece<\/p>\n

Acknowledge counterexamples. Admit that credences can drive costly, even deadly, behavior. Show why you still think the belief\/credence distinction is valuable despite that.<\/p>\n

Clarify voluntariness. Instead of \u201cchoose to believe,\u201d talk about \u201cbeliefs sustained by incentives\u201d versus \u201cbeliefs constrained by sensory reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019re not exempt from the very bias you\u2019re diagnosing.<\/p>\n

Differentiate between \u201cvalues are bullshit\u201d and \u201cvalues are adaptations.\u201d A value can be adaptive and still be \u201cbullshit\u201d in the sense of self-misrepresentation. That would make the argument more nuanced.<\/p>\n

Bottom line<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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 (\u201cvalues must be beyond self-interest\u201d) for empirical discoveries. The best version of this essay would preserve the autobiographical candor but integrate those tensions, making it less a declaration of \u201ceverything is bullshit\u201d and more a self-aware exploration of why we (including the author) are drawn to that claim.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Pinsof writes: We have two types of beliefs in our heads: regular beliefs (e.g., \u201cThere\u2019s a coffee mug on the table\u201d) and credences (e.g., \u201cEverything happens for a reason\u201d). Regular beliefs are involuntary\u2014you have no choice but to believe … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43013],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-david-pinsof"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t