Agreeing with your friends may be useful, even when they are wrong

Before we start with the post: I will clarify that, in the title, I mean truly agreeing with and believing your friends – not just saying you agree with them.  I thought about using the word “believing” instead of “agreeing”, but that suggests I mean “trusting” which I don’t.  Trusting your friends might be useful for other reasons, but that is not the point of this post.

On with the post.

If you hear something enough times, you will often believe that it has some truth to it, unless you have a strong reason to believe it is just a common misconception.  This isn’t a bad prior in my experience – it seems to me that just because no one I associate with takes a certain position doesn’t mean there isn’t a good argument for it.

But a stronger statement is also true – if you hear something enough times, you will often believe that it is true.  And this might not be terrible either – if you hear something enough times, probably many of the people around you believe it.  Also, if you make yourself more similar to the people around you, that makes it easier for you to determine how your actions will influence them, since you can just see how you would respond to your own actions (not like this is actually easy, but at least it gives you somewhere to start).  Consequently, if you want to influence the people around you in a predictable way, you might want to be more similar to them.  For example, you might want to believe things that are similar to what they believe.  In this case, having similar beliefs might make it easier to see what sorts of arguments would convince them.  And if this belief is technically wrong but not too significant, it may well be that believing this wrong thing is better than believing the correct thing. (I note knowing each truth gives you a finite about of benefit, so it’s not hard to imagine that some benefit from something else is greater.)

One may argue that it would be better to know the correct thing and just keep in mind that most people believe the wrong thing, but simulating ignorance of something is hard.

There is another way in which believing things your community believes may be helpful, even if it is false.  Let’s say you believe the world has a model A, whereas someone you’re trying to talk to has model B.  If you try to have an argument about something where model A and model B disagree, even if the topic isn’t something the other person has thought much about, it is not unlikely that you would have to argue about many related things in the model.  In contrast, if your model is similar to his, then you would have to change less about his model to convince him.

As a corollary of the title of the post, it is useful to have similar morals as your friends.  It is useful to care about other humans because your friends care about other humans.  If your friends have morals that cause them to be vegetarians (e.g. caring about animals feeling pain), then it is useful to also have similar morals, which might cause you to be a vegetarian for moral reasons.