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What is an Effective Belief?

These could be called 'useful beliefs', but describing something as 'useful' is often a way of implicitly criticizing it.  Something can be useful as a stop-gap measure, but will be discarded when the real thing comes along.  We are probably not going to put much effort into identifying and understanding beliefs which we expect to be discarded.

On the other hand, it's both pointless and unworkable to restrict ourselves to beliefs which we are absolutely certain will not be invalidated.  We need to act, and we need to make choices.  Inevitably, much of the time, we cannot know for certain either the exact details of the situation, or the consequences of our possible choices.  So we need to find beliefs which are good enough.

Another way to put it: we need to find beliefs which work - beliefs which work sufficiently well and sufficiently often, without any need to pretend that they are 100% effective in all situations.  We need beliefs which we can engage with as beliefs rather than proven truths - so we can talk about their usefulness and scope without feeling the need to convince everyone else that they must believe the same.  We need, for want of a better term, effective beliefs.

Suggestions

Here are some suggestions for ideas that might count as effective beliefs.

• Everything is connected
• Morality is real
• Only binary is binary
• The map is not the territory
• The tag-line is not the project