Self-deception

[ciphergoth]

Is self-deception always bad? Are there any beliefs so dear to you that, in a world where they weren't true, you would prefer to go on believing them?

Update: very interesting answers so far, I hope I get to hear from lots more of you!

Comments

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I might get time to make a post about this at some point, but roughly:

- Self-deception can be dangerous
- There is no way to assess the safety of a proposed self-deception, because in order to do so you'd have to give the truth of the matter an unstinting sober look of the sort that would make future self-deception impossible
- People often think that they self-deceive about X, when in fact what they deceive themselves about is their own belief on X - cf I believe that people are nicer than they really are
- I get from this that a lot of people are harbouring this huge lurking pessimism about humanity, that they don't dare to look at in the face, and so try to convince themselves that they've banished through self-deception, whereas they might actually feel *more* optimistic about humanity if they could look at it square in the face.
- In practice, of course, people self-deceive about far more than the things they've admitted to in this post, and in ways that seem to have much greater potential for harm. I think that allowing the harmless cases people talk about here also bolsters the more harmful cases that we don't admit to when we talk about this.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I've been thinking about this, and wondering exactly what it is we mean by self-deceit, because as Eliezer alludes to, actually believing that which we believe to be false is tautologically impossible.

It seems to me that there are two things we're talking about - one is being mistaken about what we believe about ourselves, which seems to be what you're talking about in your bullet points above, and probably what people are doing when they say they're self-decieving. It seems a bit inaccurate to call it self-deceit though, because the point at which the actual deceit is going on doesn't involve one's own volition or awareness, so really it's just being wrong.

The other thing, which I think is more what I was talking about, is also a bit of a misnomer - acting the way you think you would act if you believed differently, which is in a sense deceiving someone else. Although the more I think about this, the more I realise that that isn't actually what I'm doing. (The example in my head is that I act as though I trust people even when I don't, because being trusted makes people want to live up to that, and the cost of not trusting them is often quite low. But actually what I'm doing deciding that the same action is appropriate whether I trust them or not.)

Actually, yes, I think I'm convinced. Would be good to see a top-level post about it though, as the ideas could do with being spread to a wider audience than me noodling in the comments of a month old thread.