Concise Summary简洁概述
Evidence is not merely "information" — it is an event physically entangled, through chains of cause and effect, with the thing you want to know about. A detector that beeps the same way regardless of what it measures gives no evidence. For an event to count as evidence, it must happen differently depending on the state of the target: there must be Shannon mutual information between them. This is why rationalists insist a belief is only worthwhile if you could, in principle, be argued out of it. If your brain ends up in the same state no matter what you observe, you are cognitively blind. Conversely, if your beliefs are genuinely entangled with reality, they should be transmissible — rational beliefs are contagious among honest people. A belief that claims to be non-contagious is thereby confessing it is not entangled with reality.
证据不仅仅是「信息」——它是通过因果链条与你想了解的事物发生物理纠缠的事件。一台无论输入什么都发出相同提示音的探测器，不提供任何证据。一个事件若要算作证据，它必须随目标状态的不同而不同地发生：两者之间必须存在香农互信息。这正是为什么理性主义者坚持：一个信念只有在原则上可被说服放弃时，才真正有价值。如果无论你观察到什么，你的大脑都落在同一状态，你就是认知上的盲人。反过来，如果你的信念真的与现实纠缠，它们就应当是可传递的——在诚实的人之间，理性信念具有感染力。一个自称不具感染力的信念，其实是在坦白自己与现实并无纠缠。
Infographic信息图
Entanglement, not just correlation
纠缠，而非仅仅相关
Evidence requires a causal chain linking the evidential event to the target; a rock near your shoelaces is no witness because it does not end up in a different state depending on whether the laces are tied.
证据要求一条因果链把证据事件与目标相连；你鞋带旁的一块石头不是证人，因为无论鞋带是否系好，它都落在相同状态。
Differential response is the key
差异性响应是关键
For photons to be evidence about your shoelaces, they must arrive at your retina in a detectably different state depending on whether the laces are tied — same final state means zero evidence.
光子要成为关于鞋带状态的证据，它们抵达视网膜时的状态必须随鞋带是否系好而可检测地不同——相同的最终状态意味着零证据。
Blind faith is literal blindness
盲目信仰是字面意义上的失明
A belief system that demands unconditional belief — your mind ending up in the same state regardless of what you observe — is cognitively indistinguishable from having your eyeballs poked out.
要求无条件信仰的信念体系——无论你观察到什么，你的心智都落在同一状态——在认知上与被戳瞎眼球没有区别。
Honest beliefs propagate
诚实的信念会传播
If your belief is genuinely entangled with reality, saying it aloud over a phone transmits that entanglement to your listener — rational beliefs are contagious among honest folk.
如果你的信念真的与现实纠缠，在电话里说出来就会把这种纠缠传递给你的听者——理性信念在诚实之人之间具有感染力。
Reflective correction closes the loop
反思修正形成闭环
If your model says your beliefs should not be contagious, that model is confessing they are not entangled with reality — and you should stop believing them.
如果你的模型说你的信念不应该具有感染力，那个模型其实是在坦白：你的信念与现实没有纠缠——你应该停止相信它们。
Detailed Summary详细概述
The Causal Chain Behind Belief
Yudkowsky opens with two epigraphs — Tarski's disquotational truth and Aristotle's correspondence maxim — then immediately cashes them out in physical terms. Walking down the street, your shoelaces come untied. Light leaves the sun, bounces off the laces, enters your pupils, hits your retina, becomes neural impulses, gets reconstructed in your visual cortex, and you end up believing your shoelaces are untied. The laborious detail is the point: the final state of your mind mirrors the state of your shoelaces because of a traceable chain of cause and effect.
What Evidence Actually Is
Evidence is not just "information about" something. It is an event entangled — through causal links — with the thing you want to know. The word "entangled" here is Yudkowsky's own technical shorthand, explicitly distinguished from the physics term; he just means two things that end up in correlated states because of cause and effect between them.
Crucially, not every causal link creates evidence. A machine that beeps when you enter winning lottery numbers is useless if it also beeps for losing numbers. Photons bouncing off your shoes would not be evidence about your shoelaces if the photons reached your retina in the same physical state regardless of whether the laces were tied. The requirement, stated abstractly:
For an event to be evidence about a target, it must happen differently in a way that's entangled with the different possible states of the target.
In technical language: there must be Shannon mutual information between the evidential event and the target of inquiry, relative to your current uncertainty.
Entanglement Is Contagious — and So Are Beliefs
A rock near your shoelaces won't absorb entanglement; it doesn't change detectably based on lace state. A photographic film will. Your brain, if it works correctly, will. That is why Yudkowsky can say:
Rational thought produces beliefs which are themselves evidence.
And because cause-and-effect can travel through speech, a spoken true belief transmits its entanglement to the listener. When you say "my shoelaces are untied" over a cellphone, you are sharing your entanglement with the facts. This means rational beliefs are contagious among honest people.
Blind Faith Is Literal Blindness
Here the argument sharpens into a critique of dogma. If your retina ended up in the same state regardless of what light hit it, you would be blind. Certain belief systems make an analogous demand: believe unconditionally, no matter what you see or think — your brain is supposed to end up in the same state regardless of observation. The label "blind faith" is, Yudkowsky notes, perfectly accurate.
If a belief's truth does not depend on what you observe, it is not entangled with reality. And if your beliefs are not entangled with reality, there is no reason to act on them.
The Reflective Test
The essay closes with a demand for self-examination: explain why the thought processes you use systematically produce beliefs that mirror reality. If you cannot, or if your own model implies your beliefs are not transmissible to honest inquirers, you have a confession on your hands. "My belief is not entangled with reality" means "my belief is not accurate." The moment you genuinely believe that, you should — automatically — stop believing the first-order claim. Anything less is a breakdown in reflective coherence.
信念背后的因果链
Yudkowsky 以两段题词开场——塔尔斯基的去引号真理论与亚里士多德的符合论格言——随即将其兑换为物理语言。走在街上，你的鞋带散了。光离开太阳，从鞋带上反弹，进入你的瞳孔，落到视网膜，变成神经冲动，在视觉皮层里被重建，你最终相信自己的鞋带散了。这种啰嗦的细节正是重点：你心智的最终状态之所以映照鞋带的状态，是因为一条可追溯的因果链。
证据究竟是什么
证据不只是关于某件事的「信息」。它是通过因果链条与你想了解的事物发生纠缠的事件。这里的「纠缠」是 Yudkowsky 自己的技术简称，他明确区别于物理学术语；他只是指：两件事因其间的因果关系而落在相关状态中。
关键在于，并非每一条因果联系都产生证据。一台在你输入中奖彩票号码时发出提示音的机器，如果输入落选号码时也同样提示，就毫无用处。如果无论鞋带系好还是散开，光子到达视网膜时都处于相同的物理状态，那么从鞋子反弹的光子就不是关于鞋带的证据。抽象地表述这一要求：
要使一个事件成为关于某目标的证据，它必须以与目标不同可能状态相纠缠的方式，不同地发生。
用技术语言说：相对于你当前的不确定性，证据事件与探询目标之间必须存在香农互信息。
纠缠具有感染力——信念也是
你鞋带旁的石头不会吸收纠缠；它不会因鞋带状态的不同而发生可检测的变化。感光胶片会。你的大脑，如果正常运作，也会。这正是为什么 Yudkowsky 能够说：
理性思维产生的信念，其本身就是证据。
又因为因果关系可以通过语言传递，一句说出口的真实信念会把它的纠缠传递给听者。当你在电话里说「我的鞋带散了」，你正在与对方分享你与那个事实的纠缠。这意味着理性信念在诚实之人之间具有感染力。
盲目信仰是字面意义上的失明
论证在这里收紧，演变为对教条的批判。如果你的视网膜无论光线如何都落在相同状态，你就是盲的。某些信念体系提出类似的要求：无条件地相信，无论你看见什么、想到什么——你的大脑应当无论观察到什么都落在相同状态。「盲目信仰」这个标签，Yudkowsky 指出，是完全准确的。
如果一个信念的真假不取决于你观察到什么，它就与现实没有纠缠。而如果你的信念与现实没有纠缠，就没有理由依据它们行动。
反思性测试
文章以一个自我审视的要求收尾：解释为什么你所使用的思维过程系统性地产生映照现实的信念。 如果你做不到，或者你自己的模型意味着你的信念无法传递给诚实的探询者，你手上就握着一份供词。「我的信念与现实没有纠缠」意味着「我的信念并不准确」。一旦你真诚地相信这一点，你就应该——自动地——停止相信那个一阶主张。不然的话，就是反思连贯性的崩溃。
FAQ常见问答
What does 'entanglement' mean in this essay, and why avoid the physics term?这篇文章里的「纠缠」是什么意思？为什么不用物理学术语？
Yudkowsky uses "entanglement" to mean two things that end up in correlated states because of causal links between them — not quantum entanglement. He explicitly flags this to avoid confusion. Your shoelace state and your retinal state are "entangled" in this ordinary sense: the lace being untied causes, through a chain of photons and neurons, your retina to be in a particular state.
Yudkowsky 用「纠缠」指因果联系导致的相关状态——而非量子纠缠。他明确说明了这一点以避免混淆。你鞋带的状态与你视网膜的状态在这种普通意义上「纠缠」：鞋带散开通过光子和神经元的链条，导致你的视网膜处于某种特定状态。
Why must evidence happen 'differently' — what is the Shannon mutual information requirement?为什么证据必须「不同地」发生——香农互信息要求是什么意思？
If an event occurs in exactly the same way regardless of the target's state, it cannot shift your probability estimates about the target at all. Shannon mutual information quantifies how much knowing the event reduces your uncertainty about the target. Zero mutual information means zero evidential value — the event is statistically independent of what you're investigating.
如果一个事件无论目标状态如何都以完全相同的方式发生，它就根本无法改变你对目标的概率估计。香农互信息量化了「知道该事件」能在多大程度上减少你对目标的不确定性。零互信息意味着零证据价值——该事件在统计上独立于你所探究的内容。
Why does Yudkowsky say a belief is only worthwhile if you could be persuaded to abandon it?为什么 Yudkowsky 说只有在原则上可被说服放弃时，信念才有价值？
This follows directly from the definition of evidence. If no possible observation could change your belief, then your belief is not entangled with observations — and observations are our only causal window onto reality. A belief that is immune to all evidence is thereby confessing it is not responsive to the world. This is the same logic as: if your retina ends up in the same state no matter what light hits it, you are blind.
这直接从证据的定义推导而来。如果没有任何可能的观察能改变你的信念，那么你的信念就与观察没有纠缠——而观察是我们接触现实的唯一因果窗口。对一切证据免疫的信念，由此坦白了它对世界没有响应。这与以下逻辑相同：如果你的视网膜无论被什么光照射都落在相同状态，你就是盲的。
What makes rational beliefs 'contagious,' and why is a non-contagious belief suspicious?为什么理性信念具有「感染力」？声称不可传递的信念为何可疑？
If your belief is genuinely caused by reality — via the causal chain of perception, reasoning, etc. — then communicating it to an honest listener transmits that causal link. The listener's belief then has the same entanglement with reality as yours did. A belief you claim is non-transmissible (private revelation, ineffable insight) is thereby admitting it was not produced by ordinary causal contact with the world — so it gives no one, including you, reason to trust it.
如果你的信念真的是由现实引起的——通过感知、推理等因果链——那么把它传达给诚实的听者，就传递了那条因果联系。听者的信念随后与你的信念具有相同的与现实的纠缠。你声称无法传递的信念（私人启示、不可言说的顿悟），由此承认它不是通过与世界的普通因果接触产生的——所以它没有给任何人（包括你自己）信任它的理由。
How does this connect to the essay's closing demand: explain why your thinking produces accurate beliefs?这与文章结尾的要求——解释为什么你的思维产生准确的信念——有什么联系？
The demand is a consistency check. If you cannot give an account of how your thought processes entangle your beliefs with reality, you have no grounds for trusting those beliefs. And if your own model says your beliefs should not be contagious to honest inquirers, that model is saying your beliefs are not accurate. The moment you genuinely hold that meta-belief, the corresponding first-order belief should automatically collapse — anything else is a failure of reflective coherence.
这个要求是一项一致性检验。如果你无法说明你的思维过程是如何使你的信念与现实纠缠的，你就没有信任这些信念的理由。而如果你自己的模型说你的信念不应该对诚实的探询者具有感染力，那个模型就是在说你的信念并不准确。一旦你真诚地持有这个元信念，相应的一阶信念就应当自动崩溃——否则就是反思连贯性的失败。
Is the essay's argument limited to perceptual evidence, or does it cover testimony and reasoning?这篇文章的论证是否局限于感知性证据，还是也涵盖证言和推理？
It explicitly covers all three. Yudkowsky shows that entanglement travels through chains of cause and effect, including speech: your spoken belief can transmit your entanglement with your shoelaces to a friend on the phone. Reasoning is also implicitly covered — valid inference preserves (or improves) entanglement with the facts. The essay's framework is general: any process that reliably differentiates between possible states of the world generates evidence.
文章明确涵盖了全部三者。Yudkowsky 说明纠缠可以沿因果链传递，包括语言：你说出口的信念能把你与鞋带的纠缠传递给电话那头的朋友。推理也隐含地被涵盖——有效推断保留（或改善）与事实的纠缠。文章的框架是普适的：任何能可靠地区分世界不同可能状态的过程，都产生证据。
In-depth Analysis · Pros & Cons深入解读 · 优缺点
This compact essay (around 900 words) does something ambitious: it gives a physical, causal account of what evidence is — not a definition from logic or epistemology, but a structural fact about cause-and-effect chains. By grounding evidence in causal entanglement and Shannon mutual information, Yudkowsky turns the question of what counts as evidence into a question about physics and information theory.
这篇精悍的文章（约900词）完成了一件雄心勃勃的事：它给出了证据是什么的物理因果说明——不是逻辑或认识论意义上的定义，而是关于因果链条的结构性事实。通过把证据奠基于因果纠缠和香农互信息，Yudkowsky 把「什么算作证据」这个问题转化为关于物理学和信息论的问题。
- Rigorous yet accessible definition严谨而易懂的定义The move from photons hitting your retina to Shannon mutual information is bold but earned — it gives readers a genuinely technical standard without requiring them to do the math.从「光子打到视网膜」到「香农互信息」的跨越大胆而有据——它给读者一个真正技术性的标准，却不要求他们做数学运算。
- The blind faith is blindness argument is structurally exact「盲目信仰即失明」的论证在结构上是精确的The parallel between perceptual blindness (retina in the same state regardless of light) and epistemic blindness (belief in the same state regardless of evidence) is not merely metaphorical — it is structurally the same failure.感知失明（无论光线如何视网膜状态不变）与认识论失明（无论证据如何信念状态不变）之间的平行，不仅仅是比喻——在结构上，这是同一种失败。
- Contagion of rational belief is an underappreciated point理性信念的感染力是一个被低估的论点The observation that genuine evidence-based beliefs should be transmissible — and that a non-transmissible belief is thereby suspect — is a crisp, underused argument against dogmatism.真正基于证据的信念应该具有可传递性——声称不可传递的信念由此变得可疑——这是一个简洁而少被使用的反教条主义论证。
- Self-applying conclusion自我适用的结论The closing demand — explain why your thinking reliably mirrors reality — applies the framework to itself, modeling intellectual integrity rather than merely preaching it.结尾的要求——解释为什么你的思维可靠地映照现实——把这套框架应用于自身，是对知识诚实的示范而非说教。
- The causal theory of evidence has well-known problems证据的因果理论有众所周知的问题Philosophers of science have long debated purely causal accounts of evidence: causal chains can be screened off, common causes can mimic entanglement, and the relevant chain is not always clear. Yudkowsky gestures at mutual information as the fix, but does not develop it far enough to deflect these objections.科学哲学家长期争论纯因果的证据说明：因果链可以被屏蔽，公因能模拟纠缠，而「相关」的链条也并非总是清晰。Yudkowsky 以互信息为解决方案，但展开得不够深入，无法化解这些反驳。
- Transmissibility sets a high bar that much legitimate evidence fails「可传递性」设定了很多合法证据都无法达到的高标准Personal phenomenal experience, tacit knowledge, and many forms of expert judgment are genuine evidence yet notoriously hard to fully transmit. The essay's principle, taken strictly, would cast suspicion on large swaths of ordinary epistemic practice.个人现象体验、默会知识以及许多形式的专家判断，都是真实的证据，却出了名地难以完整传递。若严格遵循文章的原则，会让大量普通认识论实践受到质疑。
- The reflective-correction step is asserted, not operationalised反思修正步骤是被断言的，而非被操作化的The essay says that recognizing your belief is not entangled with reality should automatically cause you to drop the belief. In practice, motivated reasoning and compartmentalization prevent this; the gap between meta-recognition and first-order belief revision is psychologically large.文章说，认识到「我的信念与现实没有纠缠」应该自动使你放弃那个信念。在实践中，动机性推理和区隔化阻止了这一点；元认知与一阶信念修正之间的差距，在心理上是巨大的。
- Conflates different epistemic contexts混淆了不同的认识论情境The essay moves seamlessly from direct perceptual evidence (shoelaces) to testimony (cellphone) to reasoning, without acknowledging that each raises distinct reliability questions. The physical shoelace chain is far more direct than most real-world evidential situations, which involve multiple uncertain inference steps.文章从直接感知证据（鞋带）到证言（电话）再到推理，无缝滑行，却没有承认每种情形都引发不同的可靠性问题。物理鞋带链条比现实中大多数证据情境要直接得多，后者往往涉及多个不确定的推断步骤。
A tightly argued, genuinely illuminating account of what makes something evidence — the causal-entanglement framing and the mutual-information criterion are real contributions to an intuitive understanding of epistemology. Its main risk is making evidence seem simpler than it is: real-world evidential reasoning involves screened-off causes, uncertain inference chains, and the psychologically non-trivial task of actually revising beliefs once their groundlessness is recognised.
这是一篇论证严密、真正具有启发性的文章，阐明了是什么使某物成为证据——因果纠缠框架和互信息标准，是对直觉认识论的真正贡献。其主要风险是让证据看起来比实际更简单：现实中的证据推理涉及被屏蔽的因果、不确定的推断链，以及一旦认识到信念的无根性就要切实修正它的心理非平凡任务。
Original Text原文
The sentence “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white.
—Alfred Tarski
To say of what is, that it is, or of what is not, that it is not, is true.
—Aristotle, Metaphysics IV
Walking along the street, your shoelaces come untied. Shortly thereafter, for some odd reason, you start believing your shoelaces are untied. Light leaves the Sun and strikes your shoelaces and bounces off; some photons enter the pupils of your eyes and strike your retina; the energy of the photons triggers neural impulses; the neural impulses are transmitted to the visual-processing areas of the brain; and there the optical information is processed and reconstructed into a 3D model that is recognized as an untied shoelace. There is a sequence of events, a chain of cause and effect, within the world and your brain, by which you end up believing what you believe. The final outcome of the process is a state of mind which mirrors the state of your actual shoelaces.
What is evidence? It is an event entangled, by links of cause and effect, with whatever you want to know about. If the target of your inquiry is your shoelaces, for example, then the light entering your pupils is evidence entangled with your shoelaces. This should not be confused with the technical sense of “entanglement” used in physics—here I’m just talking about “entanglement” in the sense of two things that end up in correlated states because of the links of cause and effect between them.
Not every influence creates the kind of “entanglement” required for evidence. It’s no help to have a machine that beeps when you enter winning lottery numbers, if the machine also beeps when you enter losing lottery numbers. The light reflected from your shoes would not be useful evidence about your shoelaces, if the photons ended up in the same physical state whether your shoelaces were tied or untied.
To say it abstractly: For an event to be evidence about a target of inquiry, it has to happen differently in a way that’s entangled with the different possible states of the target. (To say it technically: There has to be Shannon mutual information between the evidential event and the target of inquiry, relative to your current state of uncertainty about both of them.)
Entanglement can be contagious when processed correctly, which is why you need eyes and a brain. If photons reflect off your shoelaces and hit a rock, the rock won’t change much. The rock won’t reflect the shoelaces in any helpful way; it won’t be detectably different depending on whether your shoelaces were tied or untied. This is why rocks are not useful witnesses in court. A photographic film will contract shoelace-entanglement from the incoming photons, so that the photo can itself act as evidence. If your eyes and brain work correctly, you will become tangled up with your own shoelaces.
This is why rationalists put such a heavy premium on the paradoxical-seeming claim that a belief is only really worthwhile if you could, in principle, be persuaded to believe otherwise. If your retina ended up in the same state regardless of what light entered it, you would be blind. Some belief systems, in a rather obvious trick to reinforce themselves, say that certain beliefs are only really worthwhile if you believe them unconditionally—no matter what you see, no matter what you think. Your brain is supposed to end up in the same state regardless. Hence the phrase, “blind faith.” If what you believe doesn’t depend on what you see, you’ve been blinded as effectively as by poking out your eyeballs.
If your eyes and brain work correctly, your beliefs will end up entangled with the facts. Rational thought produces beliefs which are themselves evidence.
If your tongue speaks truly, your rational beliefs, which are themselves evidence, can act as evidence for someone else. Entanglement can be transmitted through chains of cause and effect—and if you speak, and another hears, that too is cause and effect. When you say “My shoelaces are untied” over a cellphone, you’re sharing your entanglement with your shoelaces with a friend.
Therefore rational beliefs are contagious, among honest folk who believe each other to be honest. And it’s why a claim that your beliefs are not contagious—that you believe for private reasons which are not transmissible—is so suspicious. If your beliefs are entangled with reality, they should be contagious among honest folk.
If your model of reality suggests that the outputs of your thought processes should not be contagious to others, then your model says that your beliefs are not themselves evidence, meaning they are not entangled with reality. You should apply a reflective correction, and stop believing.
Indeed, if you feel, on a gut level, what this all means, you will automatically stop believing. Because “my belief is not entangled with reality” means “my belief is not accurate.” As soon as you stop believing “ ‘snow is white’ is true,” you should (automatically!) stop believing “snow is white,” or something is very wrong.
So try to explain why the kind of thought processes you use systematically produce beliefs that mirror reality. Explain why you think you’re rational. Why you think that, using thought processes like the ones you use, minds will end up believing “snow is white” if and only if snow is white. If you don’t believe that the outputs of your thought processes are entangled with reality, why believe the outputs of your thought processes? It’s the same thing, or it should be.
「雪是白的」这个句子为真，当且仅当雪是白的。
——阿尔弗雷德·塔尔斯基
说是者，谓其是；说非者，谓其非——此即真。
——亚里士多德，《形而上学》第四卷
走在街上，你的鞋带松开了。不久之后，出于某种奇怪的原因，你开始相信自己的鞋带松了。光离开太阳，打在你的鞋带上反弹开来；一些光子进入你的瞳孔，落在视网膜上；光子的能量触发神经冲动；神经冲动被传输到大脑的视觉处理区域；在那里，光学信息被处理并重建成一个三维模型，被识别为一根松开的鞋带。这是一连串事件，一条因果链，在这个世界和你的大脑之中运行，使你最终相信你所相信的。这一过程的最终结果，是一个心智状态，它映照着你实际鞋带的状态。
证据是什么？它是一个事件，通过因果链条，与你想了解的任何事物相纠缠。例如，如果你探究的目标是你的鞋带，那么进入你瞳孔的光就是与你鞋带相纠缠的证据。这不应与物理学中「纠缠」的技术含义混淆——我在这里所说的「纠缠」，只是指两件事因其间的因果联系而落在相关状态中这个意思。
并非每一种影响都能创造出证据所需的那种「纠缠」。如果一台机器在你输入中奖彩票号码时发出提示音，而在你输入落选彩票号码时也发出提示音，那它就没有任何帮助。从你鞋子反射的光，如果无论你的鞋带是系好还是散开，光子都落在相同的物理状态，那么这光也不会是关于你鞋带的有用证据。
抽象地说：要使一个事件成为关于探询目标的证据，它必须以与目标不同可能状态相纠缠的方式，不同地发生。（用技术语言说：相对于你当前对两者的不确定性状态，证据事件与探询目标之间必须存在香农互信息。）
纠缠在被正确处理时可以具有感染力，这正是为什么你需要眼睛和大脑。如果光子从你的鞋带反射后打到一块石头，那块石头不会有多少变化。石头不会以任何有用的方式反映鞋带；它不会因为你的鞋带是系好还是散开而产生可检测的不同。这就是为什么石头在法庭上不是有用的证人。感光胶片会从入射光子那里感染鞋带的纠缠，使照片本身可以充当证据。如果你的眼睛和大脑正常工作，你将与你自己的鞋带纠缠在一起。
这就是为什么理性主义者对这个看似矛盾的主张如此看重：一个信念只有在原则上你可以被说服相信相反的事时，才真正有价值。如果你的视网膜无论什么光进入都落在相同状态，你就是盲的。某些信念体系，在一个相当明显的自我强化把戏中，声称某些信念只有在你无条件地相信它们时才真正有价值——无论你看见什么，无论你想什么。你的大脑应当无论如何都落在相同状态。因此才有「盲目信仰」这个短语。如果你所相信的东西不取决于你所看见的东西，你就和被挖去眼珠一样有效地被弄瞎了。
如果你的眼睛和大脑正常工作，你的信念将与事实相纠缠。理性思维产生的信念，其本身就是证据。
如果你的舌头说的是真话，你的理性信念——它们本身就是证据——可以充当他人的证据。纠缠可以通过因果链传递——如果你说话，另一人听到，那也是因果关系。当你通过手机说「我的鞋带散了」，你正在与朋友分享你与鞋带的纠缠。
因此，理性信念在诚实且互相信任诚实的人之间具有感染力。这也是为什么声称你的信念不具有感染力——你出于无法传递的私人原因而相信——是如此可疑。如果你的信念与现实纠缠，它们应该在诚实之人之间具有感染力。
如果你的现实模型暗示你思维过程的输出不应对他人具有感染力，那么你的模型说的是你的信念本身不是证据，意味着它们与现实没有纠缠。你应该施加一次反思性修正，停止相信。
事实上，如果你在直觉层面感受到这一切的含义，你将自动地停止相信。因为「我的信念与现实没有纠缠」意味着「我的信念并不准确」。一旦你停止相信「『雪是白的』为真」，你就应该（自动地！）停止相信「雪是白的」，否则就是出了很大的问题。
所以，试着解释为什么你所使用的那类思维过程系统性地产生映照现实的信念。解释为什么你认为自己是理性的。解释为什么你认为，使用像你这样的思维过程，心智将当且仅当雪是白的时候才相信「雪是白的」。如果你不相信你思维过程的输出与现实相纠缠，为什么要相信你思维过程的输出？这是同一件事，或者说本该是。