But I think approximately everyone has at least one of those beliefs; it’s just not that obvious because many of these strange beliefs are idiosyncratic, and people often hide them from each other and sometimes even from themselves (by avoiding thinking about that belief, or by not reflecting on how crazy the belief would seem to others).

For one person, the weird belief may be their lucky coin (see this lovely essay that I learned about from @mariellevolz after writing a first draft of this essay).

For another person, it may be an unsupported belief that they are unlovable.

For a third person, it might be an attachment to a certain diet that they’re convinced would solve all sorts of problems if everyone would just go on it (like they did).

Or it could be a strange belief they learned from their childhood religion, which everyone except adherents of their exact denomination of their religion sees as ridiculous.

And so on.

Because I think just about everyone has strange false beliefs like this, I try not to judge people too much based on the fact that they have a “weird” belief that I think is way out of alignment with reality. Of course, even if I’m right, that doesn’t mean everyone is an equally “bad” thinker.

Some people think, “That person believes X, what an idiot,” and write the person off. I aspire not to do that based on one crazy belief but rather to look at a person’s beliefs and how they arrive at their beliefs more holistically.

Being an effective thinker is better measured by how we do, on average, on the important things (weighted by their importance) rather than the worst thinking we do on any single topic.

I also believe that with time and consistent effort, we all can get better at thinking clearly and that it’s a worthwhile investment for most people.

But even with hard work, we’re unlikely to get to zero weird false beliefs.

This piece was first written on February 2, 2024, and first appeared on my website on March 7, 2024.

1: Start to think that one ideology you like – which contains genuine benefits, truths, and positive moral elements – might be the only valid perspective.

2: Surround yourself with believers until you’re convinced that your view is common and normal.

3: Ignore your own doubts so that you can fit in better. Join in on chastising (and eventually ostracizing) insiders who doubt too much. Punish slightly more harshly than you feel is fair in order to prove that you are one of the good guys.

4: Since challenging the ideology is punished, pretend to believe more than you really do – contributing to the sense that almost everyone else has no doubts – in a self-reinforcing cycle.

5: Assume that since your view is obviously correct, normal, and morally good, those who strongly oppose your view are bad people.

6: Since you are good and they are bad, conclude that you, as the good guys, should try to destroy them (figuratively, or in extreme cases, literally).

7: But how can you tell who is bad? Decide that a set of beliefs that sound similar to the bad people’s beliefs are off-limits. Anyone who believes them is probably bad. In those cases, humane treatment is no longer necessary.

8: Even just spending too much time with one of the bad people, or speaking well of them, is morally suspect. Why would you do that if you weren’t bad too?

9: Unfortunately, some true beliefs were accidentally put on the “bad” side of the good/bad dividing line. Now there are true things that you would become a bad person for believing.

10: Because of that, you and your group must avoid looking at reality too closely, lest you become bad too.

11: If you start to notice something true that you’re not allowed to believe, look away quickly or contort reality to make it seem different than it is.

12: Intensify your self-delusion and your punishment of non-believers so that you can make sure that still more people in your group will delude themselves out of fear.

13: Start teaching children (before they are old enough to think for themselves) that your belief system is the only correct one, perpetuating the system for future generations.

14: Congratulations! You’ve succeeded at being a good person who harms the world. Your mostly good ideology has eaten itself and has become more bad than good.

This has happened many times throughout history, and it will happen many more times. Watch out for this pattern so that you (and the people you love) don’t end up as “true believers” who do harm by accident.

This piece was first written on August 7, 2020, and first appeared on this site on April 29, 2022.

Just ask people. In a poll of high school seniors, only 2% thought they were below average in leadership ability, and 25% believed they were in the top 1% of ability to get along with others (note: this survey was conducted by the college board, and it is possible students feared the results would be shared with colleges). What an exceptional bunch this group of one million students must have been! American students are also apparently really good drivers. In another survey, 93% of them claimed to be in the top 50% of driving skill. Yet another poll found that 87% of Stanford MBA students rated their academic performance as being in the top 50%. Paradoxical grade inflation perhaps?

But it’s not just students that are convinced of their own greatness. A survey of university professors found that 94% thought they were better at their jobs than their average colleagues. In a poll of teachers at the University of Nebraska, 68% rated themselves as being in the top 25% for teaching ability. More remarkably still, a survey of sociologists discovered that nearly half believed they would become among the top ten leaders in their field.

What’s wrong with all these people that allows them to delude themselves into thinking they are so great? The same things that are wrong with you and me. It’s painful to think that we are below average in some important way, or bested by our peers. It’s unpleasant to see ourselves as possessing many flaws, and to blame our failures on our traits rather than circumstances. Our minds tend to flee from painful thoughts, much like our hands retract from a hot stove. And we inadvertently condition ourselves: when we think about how great we are, it feels good, positively reinforcing further nice thoughts about ourselves in the future. When we admit our flaws, it hurts, and this punishment discourages future self-examination.

There certainly do exist people who have a genuinely negative self-images. Depressed people, in particular, often believe themselves to be inadequate or worthless, and there are plenty of other people with low self-esteem. Unfortunately this state is rarely a productive one, and in many cases is no more realistic than the more typical delusions of greatness. There also do seem to be some cases where people systematically downplay their abilities. For example, it may be that case that while people with below average IQs tend to overestimate their IQs on average, people who are above average underestimate them. Self reported intelligence typically has a correlation of less than 0.30 with IQ score.

One of the biggest problems with an unrealistic self-image is that it can severely impair our ability and inclination to self improve. If you already think you are an above median driver, as 93% of surveyed American students did, will you feel motivated to become a better, safer driver? If, like 68% of teachers surveyed at University of Nebraska, you believe you are in the top 25% of teaching ability, are you really going to try to improve yourself as a teacher? If you believe that you are less flawed than those around you, your sense of superiority may well make you less interested in acknowledging and reducing your flaws. Even an unrealistically negative self-image may impair self-improvement. It may cause you to overestimate the importance of small flaws, or cause you to give up if you believe you are too worthless to be fixable.

Your actual flaws don’t disappear just because you pretend you don’t have them. In fact, ignoring them will make it much more likely that they persist indefinitely. You make yourself a worse person (more deluded, less likely to improve) by pretending that you are a better person than you are. You become a better person (with beliefs more closely mirroring reality, and more motivation to change) by acknowledging your flaws and accepting that you may be a worse person than you thought. We are all significantly flawed. But with some effort, we can become less flawed.

Here’s a quick exercise you can do to help you have truer beliefs about yourself, and become an improved person.

1. Make a list of at least 3 fixable ways that you are significantly flawed. If you can’t think of three things in a few minutes, then add to this list your poor understanding of your weaknesses.

2. For each of these flaws, write down a brief explanation of how your life or the lives of others would be better if you improved the flaw.

3. Next, write down a strategy that you can carry out to improve the flaw.

4. Write down something you can do right now that will help ensure that you actually carry out this strategy.

5. Now, go ahead and do what you wrote down in step 4!

Here’s a printable version of this exercise:

After a little reflection, it is clear that the morality of a person who carries out an action doesn’t just depend on the action itself but rather depends on the state of mind of the person who performs it. This holds for pretty much every commonly used definition of morality. Suppose, for example, that I was tricked into believing that giving money to a certain charity would help the poor when, in fact, the donation was being funneled to gangsters. Generally, Christians, Buddhists, Utilitarians, Kantians, and almost everyone else are in agreement that, although the consequences of my action were bad, I am not bad for carrying out the action because I misunderstood the action’s nature. On the other hand, if I willingly chose to fund gangsters, almost everyone would be in agreement that the action would reflect poorly on my character, even if the net result of such funding was essentially the same as in the case where I thought I was donating to charity. To give another example, there are very few who would say that a person is good for giving money to the poor merely to impress a good-looking date, whereas many would call the person good if they donated out of genuine concern for the welfare of others. Hence, pretty much however one defines ethics, there is widespread agreement that it is not our actions themselves that define how good we are, but rather the intentions underlying our actions. An action (e.g., giving money to charity) is compatible with us being a good person if the thoughts that motivate us to carry it out are considered good (e.g., a desire to help others) but may have no effect on our goodness or even make us a worse person if the motivating thoughts are considered bad (e.g., a desire to help only me at great expense to others).

What is curious is that while there is little dispute that it is legitimate to evaluate the goodness of people based on the goodness of their intentions rather than on the goodness of the consequences of their actions, many people are not willing to carry this logic out to its ultimate, somewhat startling conclusion, namely that a number of people that are generally thought of as “evil” may not really be, and in some cases, may even be “good.”

To illustrate this point, consider the hypothetical case of a person who is schizophrenic and whose delusional thinking has led him to believe that the only way to save the world from unprecedented disaster is to blow up a certain office building while it’s full of workers. If this man were to carry out this terrible act, our instincts would inevitably be to label him as evil, whereas his intentions could demonstrate that he is quite the opposite. If he not only did not want to blow up the building but was, in fact, repulsed by the idea of hurting other people and only carried out the bombing due to his mistaken belief about the action saving the world, then it seems as though he was, in fact, being genuinely good rather than evil since his intentions were very good, and he likely underwent enormous stress and effort (including overcoming his psychological revulsion to murder) only for the purpose of doing what he felt was right.

At this point, some people may object that such a person with schizophrenia should still be blamed for his bad action since he has a responsibility to act in “accord with the truth” and to verify the reality of his beliefs prior to acting. But this argument fails to take into account the experience of people suffering from schizophrenia: in some cases, they have no inkling whatsoever that they are delusional. If a person’s delusion does not seem delusional to them in the least, how can they be blamed for failing to see or question if they’re delusional?

Another objection that may arise relates to the belief some people have that “good cannot come from evil” (or, similarly, that “evil cannot come from good”), which in this context may imply that even though the mentally ill person believes that they are doing a good thing by blowing up a building, the potential goodness of their intention is tainted by the evilness of the consequences. An example can help illustrate the problem with this way of thinking.

Consider a hypothetical situation where we are forced to make the choice of pulling either one of two levers. Suppose that the first lever will lead, with a 90% probability, to the horrifying torture and death of one thousand people and with a 10% probability of us receiving one million dollars in cash. The second lever will lead, with a 90% probability, to us receiving moderate injuries and with a 10% probability of one person being subjected to horrifying torture and death. Pretty much everyone who believes in morality, I think, would agree that pulling the second lever is the moral thing to do (since it makes the torture and death of others much less likely), whereas (psychological consequences aside) it is selfishly better for the individual to pull the first lever (since, that way injuries to our own body are avoided and there is a chance at nabbing the million dollars of cash). On the other hand, if a person were to really pull the second lever, despite that being the obvious ethical choice, there is still a 10% chance that a stranger would be subjected to horrifying torture and death because of that decision. To argue that “good cannot come from evil” (in the way discussed above) is to imply that the morality of my choice depends on whether (due to random chance alone) pulling the second lever led to bad consequences. When attempting to act ethically, however, all I can do is act in a way that (probabilistically) maximizes the amount of good that I believe my action tends to do. To hold me accountable for the actual realized consequences of my action, even though those consequences could never be known to me in advance, is to effectively determine how good I am based on the random roll of a die. The implication would be that ten people could carry out the same action for precisely the same reason, and yet nine of them would be labeled good, and the tenth labeled bad, simply because the tenth was unlucky. This is a conclusion that I think few people are willing to live with.

But what are the practical, real-world consequences of goodness being based on intentions rather than actions? We have seen already that it may alter our assessment of the insane. More bizarrely, though, it may influence our opinion of the deeply religious as well. People who commit acts that (they genuinely believe) are inspired by God’s will but (according to those who do not believe in the same religion) are of a heinous and destructive nature and are very often labeled as “evil.” But in many cases, religious fanatics are absolutely convinced that their actions are “right” and even good for humankind. In such circumstances, it seems that “delusional” would be a fairer label to apply than “bad.” Going a step further, it seems likely that many extraordinarily good people who devoted their lives to doing what they knew was right were, in fact, doing great harm because of false religious or spiritual beliefs. Take, for example, the case of Christian witch burners, some of whom must have genuinely believed that by murdering (what we know to be) innocent people, they were removing a great evil from the earth.

This piece was first written on July 29, 2009, and first appeared on my website on July 3, 2025.