this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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Belief without evidence is a powerful tool when used correctly.
When drag first met drag's dragon several years ago, it suffered from crippling depression. Couldn't work a job, couldn't clean its house. Couldn't even maintain most of its friendships because it had no motivation to do anything. All the evidence it had available said that things would keep on getting worse until it killed itself. It didn't have any good reason to believe it could ever be healthy.
Drag told it, fuck the evidence. Every day we spend hours together. We read books, watch movies, play games, and discuss politics, philosophy, and the arts. Drag tries to push it a little further than it's comfortable with each day. Drag tells it not to give in to despair, no matter how likely its fears seem.
Belief without evidence saved its life.
Well, the problem with this line of thinking is that we do have empirical evidence that depressed people DO get better by making a huge effort to get better.
Drag had anecdotal evidence, which is incredibly weak evidence.
Drag may have had baseless belief in something and it worked out, but my point is, the evidence WAS available to support that point.
Yes, it was, but evidence doesn't work on most people with severe depression. The disease impairs the part of your brain that processes good news. Drag understood the evidence, but drag's dragon couldn't, because it was sick. That's what depression is.
Drag doesn't have to explain depression to me.
If Drag understood the evidence, then it sounds like the conclusion Drag should come to is not to baselessly believe in things without evidence, but rather to make a better use of context to rid dragself of blindness caused by anecdotal evidence.
Is that your advice to depressed people who think life is hopeless? To use context better?
No? I'm depressed, too.
Let me do the same stupid shit drag just did.
Is that your advice to depressed people who think life is hopeless? Belief in things without having real evidence?
My point is that drag came to the wrong conclusion.
Yeah, that's exactly what drag was trying to say. Believing in things without evidence forms an important PART of a treatment plan. It should also be supplemented by exercise, medication, social activities, and CBT if possible.
Drag is saying that depressed people should "just believe" which is much crazier than saying depressed people should "just believe in evidence".
People do not need to believe in what drag is saying without evidence, because that evidence exists, so they can just as easily believe in it WITH evidence.
Depression makes it harder to believe the evidence that things can get better, because the disease impairs the part of your brain that processes good news. If you're functional enough that you can believe good news, drag is proud of you.
So drag somehow thinks that believing in nothing is easier than believing in proven fact?
Yeah, if you have a disease that impairs you ability to process facts. When a disease is impairing your judgement so you can't see the facts, believing in facts is impossible. You can't see them. That's like asking a blind from birth person to believe in the colour red. When you tell a severely depressed person to believe in facts, they just feel frustrated that they can't see the facts. They feel like you're lying to them. It's counterproductive.
If you tell them to believe in nothing, well that's easy, because nothing is precisely what they can see. It doesn't feel like a contradiction to them. They are acknowledging the absurdity of what they must do and then doing it.