Noticing ostensible beliefs you don't seem to act on

A great observation from Julia Galef.

Proposed three-stage model of sophistication in thinking:

1) “X is true” (naive realism)
2) “I think X is true” (recognizing we lack perfect access to reality)
3) “I think I think X is true” (recognizing we lack perfect access to our own minds)

3 is the stage at which you start noticing your capacity for confabulation, noticing that you're using beliefs as identity or signals, noticing ostensible beliefs you don't seem to act on, etc.

I use terminology such as determinism and complexity but it is essentially the same thing.

Stage 2 is fun. How can we discover and know reality? It is not as simple as one might think. Identifying assumptions, defining categories, specifying measures, discovering inconsistencies, etc. All while wrestling with incomplete, patchy, discontinuous, flawed, and simply incorrect data.

Stage 3 is hard work where you are trying to discover errors in your own processes. You have to find clues that you are hiding from yourself. It is a little like that scene in Matrix,

Neo: Whoa, deja vu.
Trinity: What did you just say?
Neo: Nothing, I just had a little deja vu.
Trinity: What did you see?
Cypher: What happened?
Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.
Trinity: How much like it, was it the same cat?
Neo: Might have been, I'm not sure.
Morpheus: Switch, Apoc.
Neo: What is it?
Trinity: Deja vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.

Finding revealed preferences in your own behaviors or responses that are inconsistent with what you think you believe to be true is disconcerting. The longer you live, the more likely you are to notice those inconsistencies. Investigation of the inconsistency can be startlingly revealing.

Some related posts: Complex sentences and compound nouns, Narrower, Deeper, More Experienced - Giga speculation on a byte of evidence, Communication Signal Loss and class segregation, Bourgeois values restoration as a public policy, Intergroup antagonism is thus the inevitable concomitant and counterpart of in-group solidarity, and Vocabulary and abstraction might be the drivers behind affiliative bubbles.