Doubt-impedance matching. To persuade smart people, you have to start from a posture of genuine doubt that matches theirs and work both of you into belief together. Belief is a relationship variable, not an individual one. It is founded on mutual information, not private.

If you don’t level-set on doubt (it looks like “take their temperature and match it”), you’ll either be perceived as delusionally overconfident or even psychotic, or pathologically self-doubting to the point you can’t be trusted in a mutual-belief relationship.

If impedance-mismatched persuasion works, one of you is an idiot. If you’re confident you can tell, it’s you.if you have no idea, it’s still you. Paradoxically the surest sign that you’re probably not the idiot is the sneaking suspicion that you might be.

Individuals can’t really “believe” anything. They can only know, not know, or be in a duckrabbit superposition stare. They may know with uncertainty or ambiguity. They may be wrong. But they can’t “believe”

“Belief” exists between 2+ people. All belief is at least mutual belief.

Here I’m referring to intension (with an s) of the word ‘belief’, as a pointer to a particular mental state with characteristic quality. I’ve only ever experienced it in a relational or group context. I suspect this is true of everybody. It’s different from knowing/not-knowing.

I’d define belief as a mode of I-thou “seeing” or mutuality recognition.

Many people seem to think that their knowledge should induce other-belief if enough words, facts, and arguments flow. See recent @harmonylion1 post for what that basically never works.

No, belief is not an internal state change triggered by sufficiently clever inputs.

You can create certain types of uncontrolled false consciousness state shifts (aka “red pill”) that way in people who are on some sort of cognitive brink, but you can’t create precise beliefs without impedance-matched relational evolution. You have to grow into belief together.

This, but generalized, is the syndrome

A good way to think of it is: every belief is a micro-reality. A little universe or timeline. You live in the intersection of millions of such universes. You might share almost all with me, but if I can’t portal-gun into one, you can’t just go there and yell at me to come over.

One does not yell across universe boundaries. The multiverse doesn’t work that way.

I like multiverse metaphors because it makes it easier to practice systematic doubt. I like a version where there are only possible worlds no actual world. Considering actuality to be an unknowable belief intersection with others means you never quite know where you are.

When you are alone with your thoughts you are maximally doubtful, existing in all possible belief universes consistent with your senses. Like a wave function. Every person you entangle with collapses some shared ones into actual beliefs. The bigger the borg, the more you believe.

Getting to mutual belief states with >1 person gets progressively harder, but if you get there, the states are more powerfully belief-like. This is why cults are like gravity wells. You’re in an entangled deep belief collapse state with a lot of others. Extreme decoherence.

Doubt is the live state, belief is the dead state. The relief of belief is the relief of dying a little, with company. To create belief with another person is to destroy doubt with them, and trap a small part of each of you in the universe of that belief. Multisig horcrux.

Gotta refine this metaphor a bit. A better picture might be: you cannot enter the belief multiverse alone at all. Only in company. Where you exist by yourself is just unfactored phenomenological ground. Any sense of belief you experience alone is either memory or anticipation.

This is why seeing/being seen and “recognition” are such a big deal for humans. It’s shared entry into parts of the extended cinematic beliefverse. You see each other by recognizing that you’re each seeing the same thing. You’re now bound by universes you can only enter together.

Sidebar, this is my elaborate explanation for Trump’s weird inability to “see” martyrs and war veterans. I don’t think it’s a moral failing. It’s a mental disability. You don’t have to be patriotic or altruistic to grok why people might risk their lives in wars for fellow humans.

Whether you’re doing it for your buddy in the foxhole or for a larger egregore of patriotic feeling, you’re risking life for beliefs. Which are things shared with others. Completely not mysterious for a normal human. Trump is like a blind man who can’t parse talk of sight.

This is also why it seems like a Trump has no beliefs. That’s because he doesn’t. He’s never entered the beliefverse. Only pushed buttons without understanding what they mean, because meaning rests on mutuality and belief.

But you can’t say he exists in pure doubt like some idealized spherical philosopher in a vacuum, because to know doubt you have to have experienced, and recovered from, belief. As best as I can reconstruct what it is like to be in his head, it must be a sensory-aesthetic soup.

Knowledge is far less satisfying than belief. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1302123436798435329?s=21

The mathematician in the joke still isn’t living with knowledge alone. He shares the belief-concepts “sheep” and “field” with the other two. It can unravel way more than that.

Obligatory