I saw this bumper sticker on my way home from work today:
Do you believe everything you think?
At first it didn't make any sense and I discounted it as another silly bumper sticker. But thinking about it some more, I realized that the idea is, in fact, quite profound.
Why? First, it implies that there is a hierarchical difference between thinking something is true and believing it to be true; and second, that we shouldn't believe something simply because we think it is true.
Let me give a quick contemporary example to illustrate what I mean by this difference. You may be aware of the term "quantitative easing." Basically, this is when central banks (like the Federal Reserve, the US central bank) print money and then buy stuff with it. The objective is to stimulate investment by lowering the cost of borrowing money and thereby encouraging companies to expand through taking out loans. On the flip side, some economists are afraid that this will cause inflation - which makes sense, because if the amount of stuff to buy hasn't changed but the amount of money in buyers' pockets has gone up, then the price of stuff should rise as buyers outbid each other for the limited stuff available to buy.
Now, let me ask you a question: do you think that quantitative easing will cause inflation? If so, do you just think it will, or do you really believe it will?
Say you answered 'yes' to the first question - you think QE will cause inflation. It wouldn't be very hard to respond if I asked you to justify your answer; you would probably rattle off a simple explanation like the one I just gave: increasing the money supply without increasing the supply of goods will logically lead to an increase in prices.
But if I instead asked you if you really believe QE will cause inflation, and to justify that belief, now I've put you on the spot. Such a simplistic hypothetical cause-and-effect relationship is insufficient to justify such a position. It's as if, when you state that you believe something, you are putting your full weight behind it; you are stepping out from behind your cover, putting yourself directly in the line of fire, and saying, "I fully support this and stand behind it."
It's a very vulnerable action, or should be anyway. At any rate, it's more vulnerable than simply throwing out a plausible cause-effect relationship that seems like it might be true. Saying that you believe something is definitely more than that.
So you would think that, while we may think lots of things are true, we only declare we truly believe a few; and that we have subjected the things we believe to a lot more than a simple scrutiny or basic analysis.
And yet I feel that we often believe things that we haven't ever carefully thought about, as if we have merely inherited them, rather than arriving at them after careful consideration and experience. Far less than requiring more rigorous evaluation for our beliefs than simply thinking about them, we often haven't even carefully thought about the things we believe in! I think some might reply that belief is on another level than mere thought; and I agree! But we shouldn't be thoughtless about the things we believe!
It's a little bit like the scientific method: we start with a hypothesis (which implies, at a minimum, that we have thought about the issue long enough to identify a few of the most important elements and have developed an idea of how they might interact); then we test it out. The second part is crucial - it implies that not only is there logical consistency to the idea (something that many, many beliefs lack), but there is evidence to support it!
And don't get me wrong: I'm not criticizing only the unscientific. Many PhD-trained scientists and researchers hold beliefs that are surprisingly evidence-resistant. For instance, many prominent economists believe that QE will cause inflation with the same degree of confidence today that they did five years ago when the Federal Reserve's QE program began. Let me point out two alarming problems with firmly believing this. First, there was no evidence to support such a belief five years ago - because, quite simply, nothing like quantitative easing had ever been done before. So while it would have been perfectly reasonable to think that QE would cause inflation, it wasn't reasonable to firmly believe that it would. After all, such a belief would have been without any evidence to support it.
Second, after five years, all the evidence strongly suggests that inflation is at dangerously low levels and that the world is in real danger of entering a deflationary spiral (which can be even more ruinous than an inflationary period). So continuing to place at the level of belief something that was probably unjustifiable five years ago, after five years of evidence to the contrary, is still more unreasonable!
And if top-university-trained economists make this mistake, how prevalent must it be among the general population?
Let me close by making a number of sobering suggestions. First, we don't sufficiently scrutinize our beliefs. Second, it is totally ok - noble, even - to simply say "I think this is true" and leave it at that. We rightly admire and respect bold declarations of honest belief; but is a belief honest if you haven't amassed a large body of evidence to support it? And isn't 'reckless' a more appropriate description if you haven't scrutinized the belief from multiple angles and points of view?
It's seems to me that, all too often, faith is merely an excuse for insufficient due diligence in investigating; we too easily delegate the tough job of actually finding out the truth of a matter to someone else. This is dangerous. Let's be honest about what we're truly confident in - and keep those strictly separate from the things we merely have a plausible explanation for.
