# Crony beliefs
Notes from reading [Crony beliefs/Melting Asphalt](https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/).
The blog post deals with (loosely paraphrased) the following problem:
_We believe we hold internally consistent beliefs. At the same time, we quickly see that others often tend to believe falsehoods. Assuming they see it the same way, the world is inconsistent. What the heck?_
The author finds a very interesting and I also think useful way to analyse the problem by introducing a small conceptual framework identifying two types of beliefs:
1. **Meritocratic beliefs**, which we judge for their accuracy out of fear that we'll stumble by acting on a false belief; and
2. **Crony beliefs**, where we don't care about accuracy so much as whether our beliefs make the right impressions on others.
Both are useful in their own right. The first deals mostly with physical reality, while the latter with our social realities. This (coincidentally) feeds into [the quip about two levels of reality](https://qoto.org/@FailForward/105652797745648749) (note to self: needs more exploration).
A more precise dissection of the two types is summarised in the following table:
<img src="https://meltingasphalt.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/merit_vs_crony_beliefs.png" width="100%"/>
In the remainder of the post, the author goes on with the framework and explores consequences and nuances of it. There are two remarkable points there:
1. the author introduces an example of climate change belief and points out that whatever we do, as critical thinkers, in this framework we identify this belief as a crony one (not wrong, just crony!); and
2. at the end, it seems to me, he argues that we shall strive for identifying crony beliefs and try to improve our situation to have less of those.
On the first, I realized that most of our beliefs about future have this nature. The author also lists several such beliefs, but I would generalize it: whenever we try to predict future while at the same time we face huge amounts of uncertainty, we either end up nowhere, or with a crony belief.
## Grounded crony beliefs as drivers of societal change
To the second, I agree that we shall create pressure to improve our situation and try to get less crony beliefs. At the same time, I would argue, we need significant non-zero amount of them, otherwise it would cripple our social action. While crony beliefs are often wrong, I claim, they often serve a good purpose. First, however, we need to distinguish between grounded (truthful) crony beliefs and ungrounded (false) ones - as in how correlated they are with the underlying reality. Note, these beliefs are crony for a reason: we are probably not able to get to their substance in physical reality. To most (if not all) people who believe a crony belief, their physical reality essence is inaccessible. That is the definition of crony belief.
The interesting thing about some crony beliefs (those I call grounded - probably this term needs more work!) is that over time, their nature is malleable. They can change/morph into meritocratic beliefs. Think slavery, or flat Earth stuff. While you have no tools to evaluate a merit of a certain belief it remains crony. Over time, however, new tools become available and the belief can turn into a meritocratic one.
So as a social swarm we act on our crony beliefs. Some of them are grounded, some are not - neither of which matters to humans, as we cannot see the difference at a given time and space. However, these grounded beliefs, over time reveal themselves as such and turn from crony to meritocratic. An example of such is climate change. Whichever way you act on it, in about 100, or 300 years, we as humankind will discover what was the grounding of that particular belief.
In this sense, the potentially grounded crony beliefs are useful as drivers of societal change. They compete with each other in our society and some of them turn out non-grounded and some yes. People standing for these beliefs struggle and fight with each other, all for the sake of improving the society's future (even though the competing group probably does not believe so, and sometimes rightly so). Those who (completely arbitrarily at their time and space) turn into heroes in the end and prevail, while the others (again completely arbitrarily) turn into villains of history. **_A grounded crony belief is a bet we make with the world. Sometimes we win, sometime we win. Either way, the objective is to survive._**
So shall we strive to eradicate crony beliefs entirely? I believe not. World without crony beliefs would be a stagnant one, a paralysed one.
At the same time, do crony beliefs kill people? Absolutely. Do I mind? Absolutely! Do I accept it as one of the mechanisms of how human reality? Yes (with a sigh).
(Do I want to be killed by a crony belief? Absolutely not! Would I adopt a crony belief protecting me from such killing? You bet! But that is an entirely different story...)
