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Notes -
Lots of great points here; let me respond to a few.
Agreed, although this is a problem with most psychological and social states. There is a robust conceptual distinction between someone joking vs being sincere, but actually teasing that apart rigorously is going to be hard (and you certainly can't always rely on people's testimony). Instead, when it's really essential to make a call in these cases, we rely on a variety of heuristics. The point of my screed is not that I've found a great new psychometric technique, but rather an important conceptual distinction (that psychometric or legal heuristics could potentially be built around).
Right, although that would generate predictions of its own (e.g., changing their behaviour immediately when the convenience factors changes). Hard to measure for sure, but not impossible (I think we do this all the time for lots of similar states).
That's possibly true, but not hugely interesting except for framing purposes since "counting beliefs" is a messy endeavour in the first place. Perhaps my main thesis could be reframed as "a lot of things we are inclined to think of as being beliefs aren't actually best understood as beliefs but as a distinctive type of state." Moreover, any serious attempt to quantify the prevalence of S-dispositions vs beliefs is going to have to grapple with some messy distinctions between e.g. explicit beliefs that are immediately retrievable (my date of birth is XX/XX/XXXX) and implicit beliefs that are rapidly but non-immediately retrievable from other beliefs (Donald Trump is not a prime number).
Again, this is messy in practice, but as long as we stick to the conceptual level it's fairly clear-cut, insofar as we'd expect different behaviour from a rational sincere Bayesian 60% believer vs a hypocritical 99% believer (consider, e.g., betting behaviour).
To be clear, this is theoretical psychology/philosophy of mind rather than policy recommendations, and any actual implemented policies would be several research projects downstream.
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