Contextual beliefs

Through the course of our lives we slowly build up a particular understanding of the world, and a particular set of beliefs that allows us to navigate that world. This is a process that works pretty well, but it seems like sometimes we have a lot of difficulty passing that wisdom on. I've very rarely had the experience of someone else describing a particular system or belief to me and being able to accept it wholesale. This seems strange, because something that's true should be easy to identify and accept once it's pointed out to you.

For sure, some of this is just plain stubbornness or NIH syndrome: why accept someone else's system when you could figure it out for yourself with the minor disadvantage of time, effort, and opportunity cost? However, I don't think that alone is enough to explain why it's often difficult to pass along beliefs. It seems to me that the issue is one of context: that often our beliefs only make sense against the background of particular situational realities or hidden assumptions, and the belief falls apart when removed from that environment.

This leads to a second, perhaps worse form of failure to pass on beliefs: passing on bad beliefs. I think of this as the problem that shows up when telling someone "just ignore what other people think of you" or "just be yourself". That is very easy to say once you have a well-developed understanding of social rules and the limits of acceptable behaviour. If you actually ignore what other people think of you, you may well end up yelling "I'm bored" in meetings or peeing on the street. And it's probably unwise to just be yourself if your self wants to hump a stranger's leg in public. These beliefs only apply in a particular context.

And sometimes I think that context is widely shared enough that you can say things like "just be yourself" and most people will be able to apply that belief in a way that preserves its wider applicability. But I think the bigger that idea is, the less likely that is to be true. Your standard universal life advice beliefs are going to cut across so many different situations that it would be very difficult to construct one that avoids all contextual pitfalls. However, I think there is a, much harder, way to make universally applicable beliefs: eliminate context.

Science, by and large, tries to follow this process. The goal is to construct universal laws: not just true the few times we tried them, but true everywhere. This process turns out to be extremely difficult. The laws of mechanics, for example, went from only true in everyday situations involving friction and gravity, to only true for reasonable-sized bodies at sublight speed, to true at any speed for very large things or very small things, but not both at the same time. And there have been a lot of physicists working on mechanics for quite a long time. Being exhaustive is exhausting.

Perhaps the best we can do with our own beliefs is just to call out their limitations and recognise the assumptions and context they live in. I would love to see a Theory of Everything for everyday life, but it does not appear one is coming any time soon. Maybe if all the scientists can wrap up physics and move on to pop psychology we're in with a shot. In the mean time I'd be in a much better place to trust the current state of the art for life advice if it was a bit more modest in domain.