Food for thought

• Promoting Open-mindedness: Being respectful of others' delusions can promote open-mindedness and tolerance. It encourages you to consider different perspectives and understand that people's beliefs may be shaped by various factors, including personal...

Learning Opportunity: Engaging with people who hold different beliefs can be a learning opportunity. By respecting their delusions, you might gain insights into their worldview and understanding of the world, which can broaden your own perspective.

• Of course there is a limit to respecting other people’s delusions. Delusions that directly harm or impede others shouldn’t be tolerated.
• The key here is accepting that everyone is deluded in their own unique way. You,...

Incentives and Decision-Making:

Decisions are often driven by incentives, even when statistically flawed. Acknowledging this bias is crucial in analyzing one's own justifications and actions.

When there’s an absence of perfect information, emotion, passion, and tribal identity fill the void.

• Benford's Law of Controversy suggests that passion inversely correlates with available information, i...

• When you realize that you – the good, noble, well-meaning, even-tempered, fact-driven person that you are – have views of how the world works that are sure to be incomplete if not completely wrong, you should have empathy for others whose deluded beliefs are obvious ...

Nothing is as persuasive as what you’ve experienced firsthand.

• Since we’ve all had massively different life experiences, what seems obvious to me may be bonkers to you, and vice versa.
• M...

Your willingness to believe something is influenced by how much you want and need it to be true.

Perception of Belief:

Individual beliefs are influenced by personal circumstanc...