BeliefsDB is a unending project (until I die of course) started in November 2023 to map and evaluate all my beliefs and their relation to one another. Currently there are over 700 beliefs on everything from gender and economics to movies and media. They range in importance from “Superintelligent AI might destroy the world in the next few decades” to half-jokes like “Regardless of religion, all dogs go to heaven”. They range in rigor from academic paper to a hunch I identified while pooping. They range in confidence from “I’d stake my life on it” to “Your chances of getting killed by a cow are low, but never zero.”
#1 — To Have Fun [Entertainment/Hobby]
This is genuinely something I enjoy working on and will sometimes just sit in a cafe, watch videos, read articles, and add new beliefs.
#2 — To determine if myself and another want to invest deeply into a relationship with one another [Pro-Social Tool]
#3 — To make reusable blocks of reasoning to compile explanations for others [Conversational Tool]
I often find myself reexplaining a topic to others. As much as I enjoy discussion, it does pull my time and attention away from other things and I often end up skipping over important details or background beliefs that might not be shared by others. Being a fairly scatter-brained person, I sometimes end up making poor or unorganized arguments for things I have good reason to believe in real time. Sometimes I’ll try to give my explanation and realize “I remember that I’ve researched this heavily, but I can’t remember the specific things that lead me to this conclusion.” I wanted to have a system to make good arguments that wouldn’t involve repeating myself and to allow the reader to dig as deep as necessary to uncover where the disagreements or flaws in my logic lie.
#4 — To stress-test my beliefs with closer examination, research, and comments/critiques from my peers and update them until they become bullet-proof [Epistemic Rigor Intra-belief]
Optimally, my high-level beliefs will be able to be traceable back to my fundamental beliefs.
Want to use AI to debate me and help confront my beliefs by feeding it this data.
It’s coming from my head because it’s a metaphorical brain-bat
#5 — To uncover hidden connections between previously unrelated ideas, identify conflicting beliefs and biases, and see if I have any circular reasoning. Use this as a kind of second brain. [Epistemic Rigor Inter-belief]
Use this as a research tool.
#6 — Make important life decisions
Pros and cons lists
<aside> 🎯 Other reasons
#7 — Start Conversations
</aside>
This database is much more like a wiki or a digital garden than a blog. A blog is a single start-to-finish idea that requires a lot of patience, focus, and certainty in beliefs than what I would like, and they’re not as highly connected like a relational database is. If I were to make each of my beliefs or thoughts into a blog post, then I would never get around to 5% of my beliefs. Also, as mentioned in reason #3 on why I started this, I can build a blog post out of these elements!
https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
You can think of switches as groupings of mutually exclusive ideas in which one and only one can be true. Ex: Determinism is either true or false.
| Switch Beliefs | The ideas that are mutually exclusive (Determinism is [True] and Determinism is [False]) |
|---|---|
| Switch | The topic that groups all of the ideas together (Determinism is…) |
| Name | A short description of what the belief is |
|---|---|
| Tags | Self explanatory |
| Importance | How important these beliefs are to the actions I take in my own life. People in different fields or with different values may value things differently |
| Certainty | A rough idea of how certain I am about a topic. |
| Examination Level | Not examined means I haven’t really thought about this at all. Thoroughly examined means that I believe I have thought about and researched the topic to the point where there is not much more to know about the subject. |
| Explanation progress | Within the BeliefsDB page itself, to what extent have I explained my viewpoint? |
| Controversy | Among my top 100 closest peers, what percent of them would disagree with the statement if they knew the basics about the topic (estimated obviously) |
| Political Leaning | Whether this belief is broadly leftist or rightist. May be removed. |
| Slug | This is a few-word long name that is short hand for the belief |
| AI Summary | Notion AI reads the page contents and fields to generate a short summary of the belief. These are typically inaccurate, but helpful. |
I will refer to the belief that has these properties belief A and the belief that the field that belief A is pointing to belief B
The diagram from which the arrow icons on the relational fields are derived from
Corollary
“a proposition that follows from (and is often appended to) one already proved” (the initial one isn’t proved in this instance, but we can say “if true, then it reinforces/challenges this idea”. These are often more abstract than the idea you’re looking at.
| Reinforces (+Corollary, ∴) | If belief A is true, it increases the chance belief B is true |
|---|---|
| Challenges (-Corollary, ¬∴) | If belief A is true, it decreases the chance belief B is true |
Lemma
“a subsidiary or intermediate theorem in an argument or proof”. In this case, we can say that this is kind of a subpoint of the idea. These are often less abstract than the idea you’re looking at.
| is Reinforced By (+Lemma, ∵) | If belief B is true, it increases the chance belief A is true |
|---|---|
| is Despite (-Lemma, ¬∵) | If belief B is true, it decreases the chance belief A is true |
Consistency
| not in conflict with | Despite some possible idea that belief A conflicts with belief B, this is not the case. In a way this is a bit of a non-statement saying “yes, I have considered belief B but I don’t think it has a relation to belief A” |
|---|---|
| Consistent with | Belief A and Belief B or mutually reinforcing ideas. The two are much more likely to either be both true or both false. |
“not in conflict with” is different from “consistent with” in that it maintains that belief A and belief B are independent knowing all other beliefs. | | Inconsistent with | Belief A and Belief B or mutually challenging ideas. It’s more likely that either one OR the other is true but not both. |
Two main views, info and relations
Info View
The info view is a view focused on the particular info or meta-data of the belief — tags, importance, certainty, etc.
Relations View
The relations view is a view focused on the relationships beliefs have to other beliefs. The degree is how many many relationships total this belief has with other beliefs. In the future I would hopefully want something more similar to Obsidian where you can view a graph of vertices and edges.
If you are interested in getting access to BeliefsDB, please fill out this form:
