---
title: Belief
author: Issa Rice
created: 2014-12-22
date: 2016-07-30
belief: likely
---

This page is about the belief notices (or tags or markers) that are
displayed at the top of pages of this site.  The **belief** or
**epistemic status** of a page efficiently communicates to the reader my
overall confidence in the veracity of the claims made on the page.

In practice, belief notices are most useful when I want to publish
something on here that I find interesting but I'm not especially confident
about.  In other words, it's often a shorthand for something like, "I've
only briefly thought about this topic, and haven't really spent much
effort working on this page, so even though I think it's worth making
public, you shouldn't take this page very seriously, nor should you
assume that I believe the things I'm writing".

More abstractly, publishing content on one's personal site is not just a
statement (i.e. the content on the page), but also a
*meta-statement*---that one believes in what is said strongly enough to
publish it on one's site.  I think this probably tends to make people
more averse to publishing content that might come across as
unconventional.  Of course, there is still a meta-statement even with
belief tags; one can always attempt to pry into the psychology of the
writer, e.g.  speculating along the lines of "Well, the fact that
they're willing to make this public---even while marking it as
'unlikely'---still shows that they're a heretic".  While I recognize
that this might be a problem, I still think belief notices solve most of
the initial problem without being much of a burden.

The "standard" scale of belief that I use is as follows:

- certain
- highly likely
- likely
- possible
- unlikely
- highly unlikely
- remote
- impossible

(I think these are self-explanatory; see the [history](#history) section
for the details.)

In addition to the above possibilities, I also use the following:

fiction
:   For fictional work, which may include work that ironically resembles
non-fictional work.

emotional
:   For rants and other writing that contain strong emotions.  Pages
tagged with this are probably especially epistemically unreliable.

\[not displayed\]
:   For pages where the notion of "belief" does not make sense (e.g. the
front page of this site). This replaces gwern's and Muflax's "log" (see
[history](#history)).

# History

I took the idea of belief tags from [gwern], who in turn got it from
Muflax.

[gwern]: http://www.gwern.net/

[Muflax explains](http://webcitation.org/6DuYcqyQ3):

> I didn’t want to throw away old texts just because I changed my mind,
> but I also couldn’t let them sit around without an annotation or
> someone might think I still endorsed them.

Here is gwern's [section on belief tags][gw bt]:

[gw bt]: http://www.gwern.net/About#belief-tags

> Most of the metadata in each page is self-explanatory: the date is the
> last time the file was modified, the tags are categorization, etc. The
> "status" tag describes the state of completion: whether it's a pile of
> links & snippets & "notes", or whether it is a "draft" which at least
> has some structure and conveys a coherent thesis, or it's a
> well-developed draft which could be described as "in progress", and
> finally when a page is done - in lieu of additional material turning
> up - it is simply "finished".
>
> The "belief" tag is a little more unusual. I stole the idea from
> [Muflax's "epistemic state"](http://webcitation.org/6DuYcqyQ3 "'I
> wanted a way to show whether I still believe something I have written
> or not, and if so, how strongly.' (original:
> http://muflax.com/episteme/)") tags; I use the same meaning for "log"
> for collections of data or links ("log entries that simply describe
> what happened without any judgment or reflection") personal or
> reflective writing can be tagged "emotional" ("some cluster of ideas
> that got itself entangled with a complex emotional state, and I needed
> to externalize it to even look at it; in no way endorsed, but
> occasionally necessary (similar to fiction)"), and "fiction" needs no
> explanation (every author has *some* reason for writing the story or
> poem they do, but not even they always know whether it is an
> expression of their deepest fears, desires, history, or simply random
> thoughts). I drop his other tags in favor of giving my subjective
> probability using the ["Kesselman List of Estimative
> Words"][kesselman]:
>
> [kesselman]: https://web.archive.org/web/20140130132740/http://www.scip.org/files/Resources/Kesselman-Verbal-Probability-Expressions.pdf "'Verbal probability expressions in National Intelligence Estimates: a comprehensive analysis of trends from the fifties through post 9/11', Kesselman 2008"
>
> 1. "certain"
> 2. "highly likely"
> 3. "likely"
> 4. "possible" (my preference over Kesselman's "Chances a Little Better [or Less]")
> 5. "unlikely"
> 6. "highly unlikely"
> 7. "remote"
> 8. "impossible"
>
> These are used to express my feeling about how well-supported the
> essay is, or how likely it is the overall ideas are right. (Of course,
> an interesting idea may be worth writing about even if very wrong, and
> even a long shot may be profitable to examine if the potential payoff
> is large enough.)

# Comment

Here is a comment I once placed (at a private location):

> Can you elaborate on this? Would you prefer that these articles and blog posts
> not be published (since if the authors can't add the epistemic status headers,
> they would be unwilling to publish them as if they believe it)? Maybe you want
> them to publish less "egregious content", period, or disclaim each claim in
> their article by qualifying them, but that takes a lot more effort (at least
> for some people). If we think of writing as being on a "sloppiness scale",
> then these epistemically "egregious" articles might be at one end, with higher
> quality articles in the middle, and maybe academic journal articles and
> published books at the other end. Relative to journal articles and books, even
> high-quality blog posts might seem lacking because e.g. they might not cite
> every claim, might contain grammatical errors, etc., but not meeting some
> arbitrary quality threshold doesn't subtract from the value it provides.
> Similarly even articles with epistemic status headers that seem of poor
> quality occasionally contain valuable insight, and if adding these headers
> means more of these valuable insights are made public, then I think that's a
> net benefit for all of us.

Somewhat related (to my last point that "epistemically egregious content" can
still be valuable) is Ben Hoffman's [post][hoffman] on philosophers:

> Someone once described [Michael
> Vassar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Vassar) to me as
> paying attention not to the conclusions but to the intellectual processes of
> people he’s talking to, not in order to conform to them, but out of curiosity,
> in case they are using some valuable heuristic he should add to his toolbox. I
> often find that I get something different than usual from philosophers because
> I read them this way. I find it jarring when people casually refer to
> Nietzsche’s philosophy (to name one example) to reference some proposition or
> other he’s famous for asserting. It seems natural to me to be referring to his
> methods, but his specific conclusions seem like almost a weird irrelevancy. I
> think this is one of the most valuable things I got out of my St. John’s
> education – the ability to read thinkers to figure out what their *project*
> was, rather than a bunch of specific propositions they were advancing. This is
> my attempt to share this way of reading, by working through an example.

# Frequency

But now, given these belief tags, one might ask what the frequency of
each belief on a site such as this one should be.  Having everything be
"certain" to "likely" might be how a typical site or blog operates; i.e.
the writer only publishes what they believe.  But this sounds
limiting---and this is exactly why belief tags are useful.  But what of
the other extreme?---In other words, what if one were to only write what
one believed to be false?  A successful such execution would display the
writer's creativity, to be sure, but is unlikely to contain much useful
information.

One might also ask what the "natural frequency" of each belief might be,
if a writer were to log *all* of their thoughts\ ...

# See also

- I also use [[status]] notices on this site.

# External links

- "[The internet has made defensive writers of us all](https://pchiusano.github.io/2014-10-11/defensive-writing.html)":

    > The defensive writing style also encourages another sort of ugliness,
    > which is that “avoiding saying something wrong” becomes a primary focus
    > of the writing, rather than communicating or exploring ideas which the
    > author might himself be unsure of. It encourages a tendency to be
    > attached to ideas and defend them against attackers, rather than letting
    > ideas exist separate from ourselves as they should. I can recall many
    > occasions where I find myself in a position of defending or arguing for
    > an idea I don’t necessarily feel strongly about, but feel compelled to
    > reply to someone giving the idea such dismissive treatment.

[hoffman]: http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/projects-philosophers/ "Ben Hoffman. “Projects of philosophers”. Compass Rose. June 22, 2016."