Would you believe

Assume that the ability to evaluate a statement and to make-belief is distributed unevenly in any population.

A statement can be evaluated and re-evaluated before it is encoded as belief.

A belief may be defined as a statement. There are many more definitions. Some of include a statement of truth.

Not all beliefs align with ground truth. We experience ground truth differently, and, likely, update our beliefs about ground truth in different and unusual ways. On this I can only point to James March and shrug.

In this post, I’ll unpack statement evaluation and end on a few points about what affects it.

Evaluating Statements

Context is important. You’re reading this text right now. For most of you, you don’t know the typical rhythm of my speech or how I’d move my hands as if I were delivering this monologue to you live and in person. You don’t know that I’m smiling. Because you can’t see me. You can’t see my head tilt. You can’t see the skin around my eyes crinkle. I’m telling you about it, as you read this, but you can’t see it for real, as in real photons hitting your rods and cones. Maybe some of you can imagine it. But to quote every out-of-control teen on the Maury show, “You don’t know me.” There is no analog signal here. There isn’t any non-verbal communication. But there’s still context.

These words are written on a blog in the mid-2020’s. That’s kind of eccentric. Who the hell is still blogging in 2025? And that’s an eccentric context. And maybe there’s the context around the incentive to mislead you about my present physical state. I’m not.

The sum of your experiences and how they help you read these words is important. They could be everything, in your context, to you. Including whether or not you’re reading these in the original Canadian English they were authored in or if you’re reading them translated. These words are getting absorbed against some networked structure in your mind. And you didn’t arrive at these words as an empty shell. So there’s a wider experiential context.

Second, the words themselves are important. They aren’t necessarily everything. But they’re a lot. And there a lot of words here. A lot of the information we get about the world is expressed in words.

Words, context, and experience processing all contribute to how you’re evaluating these statements. Including this one.

Would you believe

Consider the following three statements:

• Statement A: “The word “the” has three letters.”

• Statement B: “The word “pumpkin” has four letters.”

• Statement C: “The word “four” has four letters.”

Do you believe any of these statements? Are any of them true? Are any of them useful in making predictions about the future?

It depends on the distinctions that you can see and the context. As I am writing this in 2025, when Canadian English makes use of the words: the, pumpkin, and four, which each contain a character count of 3, 7 and 4 respectively. I don’t intend for the quotation marks to be counted as a character. I intend for the word in the quotation marks to taken as quotes, as the word quoted: the, pumpkin, and four. I intend the verb has to indicate the quality attribute of each word, in this instance, the count of the number of letters in each word. You can tell this is what I intend because I’m writing these words intentionally.

And all of this depends on your experiential context. Do you know what a Canadian English letter is? Do you know the symbolic relationship and distinction between three, four, and seven in the base-ten number system?

At the time of writing, in my context, Statement A and Statement C are accurate. And for what it’s worth, they’re beliefs. I believe, unironically, that there are three letters in the word “the” and that there are four letters in the word “four”. I literally believe this.

Statement B is not accurate. I do not believe that there are four letters in the word “pumpkin”, because I count 7 letters. Two of those letters, the first and the fourth, are both the letter p. Even under the interpretation that the word pumpkin has 6 unique letters, the Statement B is still false.

Your experience may vary because I certainly can’t predict all the ways that, from my perspective, in the version of time I experience as now, the future will unfold. Your perspective may be entirely different. Perhaps the letter t and h undergoes an exciting merger and are now represented as a single letter? I don’t know. I’m crystalized in time back here, just as you will be…right now. Fun, right?

Most language isn’t self-contained and internally complete and consistent, and likely, neither of the most basic logical systems. Göddel gave us that gift. Because no system knows what it is, the fabric of this reality itself is unsure of what it is. Maybe it’s still trying to figure that out? As a result, the ability to make the most basic of statements about anything can always be contested on any ground, at anytime.

You could believe in Statements A and C because they’re likely to be true. In a way, because you can count the number of letters for yourself, you might even call them facts. Facts are pretty useful in making predictions about the future and such, useful for forming beliefs. Are the facts represented by Statements A and C useful? Sure. They served their purpose.

Should you be believe in Statement B? Statement B isn’t true and it isn’t a fact. Should you update your beliefs about the word pumpkin? Probably not. The belief about the count of Canadian English (2025) letters in the Canadian English word pumpkin is unlikely to enhance your survival or happiness. And in that way, it isn’t as useful as Statements A and C. But it served its purpose.

What we believe

I haven’t ever tried asking 1000 English Canadians about how many letters there are in the words: the, pumpkin and four. It could be used as one of those attention testing questions. And I bet you’d get some variation.

The aggregate answer would probably be a somewhat accurate, but never a perfect, reflection of public opinion about the nature of the word pumpkin. People are in a hurry and they miscount. People make mistakes. Some people aren’t paying attention.

And some people may misreport their assessment as form of protest against the triviality of the question itself?

That’ll show them…to not…ask me about…pumpkins! Damn elites! *shakes fist*

As a result, thinking about the nature of the distribution in the capability of statement evaluation is a bit tricky. To be a bit clearer, it’s likely much harder to observe a statement without evaluating it unconsciously. Because the tool, your consciousness and the survey instrument combined, itself affects the answer. And the map is most certainly not the terrain. It’s to your advantage to accept that there’s fuzziness around the distribution of the ability to form reliably evaluate a statement, in context, and to form beliefs about it.

In my context, here in Toronto, Canada, 2025, I’m exposed daily to quite a few statements that their author’s sincerely hope ossify into beliefs.

The factors that affect evaluation capability

I’ll end this post on a note about factors that affect evaluation capability.

There’s sleep. I don’t make great decisions on specific day/time combinations. I felt as though this became known and so I’d deliberately book offsites during those periods. Was it strategic depth as a hedge against my adversaries? What a thing to think! Well, my friends and allies sure as hell knew not to ask me to make decisions at those times.

There’s lead. Before 1990, many friends played in and around leaded gasoline fumes. I don’t remember thinking about lead a whole lot as a child. I bet I would have been confused about the idea of a metal being light enough to be in air. I had no idea what a neurotoxin was. I think a lot of kids were exposed to a lot of neurotoxin before 1990. And probably quite a bit since then. There isn’t a version of me that doesn’t contain some lead, microplastic and who knows what, so, I don’t know how much of me could be potentially missing.

There’s trust. Before 2004, I trusted a few people at a few institutions to tell me the truth. I remember calculating the cost, from their perspective, if they got found out. If you earn everything from society by having attention allocated to you, for telling us the truth, and you break that agreement, then wouldn’t you be risking everything you earn? And when I found them out, I was absolutely surprised that they didn’t appear to have made that calculation. You can’t lie about sending young men to have their penises blown off and expect to retain trust! You can’t lie about pipeline leaks and expect to retain social license to operate. People learn to disregard statements, even if they’re close to ground truth, from people they formerly trusted. Mistrust is a lot like a neurotoxin. I remain confused.

There’s fear. I think of this one a lot. The calculus of fear on evaluation is quite complex. In part because it’s self-referential. Do you believe that you’re afraid? If so, why? There’s a wonderful link between the ability to simulate the world without affecting it, and affecting the world. It’s wild. And then, there’s the calculus of using fear to change minds, almost like heating sand to shape glass.

And here may be the take away. It may be worth considering evaluative capacity from time to time. Not that I think most of us in my time have a realistic hope of gaining complete liberty over their evaluative process. But, because maybe there’s some joy in that direction? It may be neat, every once in awhile, to look at a statement, and just unironically decompose it. Just to check what you may not be aware of what you believe. Maybe there’s something there?

I don’t know.