One of the social technologies I miss the most from my world is the Belief Holders.

It’s frustrating, because this world sure has no shortage of people who profess beliefs contradictory to others’, in many cases loudly and publicly. This world even has the notion of a “public intellectual”, the closest analogoue you have to Belief Holders, but which fail to serve most of the roles a society needs Belief Holders to fulfill.

Sorry. Bad habit. I should start with the thing, and leave any criticisms for the end if they still feel necessary at that point. You can already see from failures like this that I’m not upholding the virtues expected from Belief Holders consistently enough that I could be one.

I don’t know how to describe what a Belief Holder is, exactly, but I do know how to describe what is expected of them. They are expected to write public responses to the questions and arguments posed to them and to explain their positions at length. They are expected to trade on prediction markets and show their track record. They are expected to apologise and be pretty darn explicit about their errors. They are expected to conduct productive disagreements and adversarial collaborations with other Belief Holders. They are expected to do the cognitive work of presenting novel, adjudicatable statements relevant to their domain.

If a Belief Holder has a long standing list of unresponded rebuttals with large bounties on their Feed, people start to wonder whether they are selectively avoiding the strongest rebuttals. “‘I don’t know’ is better than silence”, goes the saying. If they start to let belief professing get ahead of doing the work of making them clear enough to be falsifiable, people will start asking them to pay their rent on attention. And no matter how good their Contributions page, literally no Belief Holder has a good enough track record that they shouldn’t have a Mistakes page, too.

The… profession, I suppose, is highly selective, and indeed it is so by design. One reason you have Belief Holders in the first place is to make your society’s belief holders easily replaceable if they start messing up. It is not enough to have your distinguished scientists, popular writers, elected leaders and accomplished CEOs share their beliefs and let that be the public consensus. If a brilliant scientist states blatantly false predictions to a journalist – and those somehow make their way to a newspaper – she realistically won’t get fired or even end up having less resources to work with. Why, she’s a brilliant scientist, after all, not a public commentariat. Whereas if a Belief Holder does the same thing, they will immediately lose standing. You really need the selection effect towards publicly presented statements being true, rather than merely being presented by someone with domain expertise.

The more obvious reason of course is that being a Belief Holder requires a clearly different skillset compared to achieving great success within most other professions. Few people are ever expected to concretise their statements to nearly the same extent as Belief Holders are, and anyone who has ever taken a class on experimental design know just how hard it is to state a concrete, non-vacuous prediction. At the same time, Belief Holders are accountable to the public, and anyone who has ever taken a class on communications knows just how hard it is to successfully convey non-standard thoughts to a diverse audience.

And, of course, being a Belief Holder really requires a strong dose of domain expertise. There are many reasons why Belief Holders exist separately from journalists, this being near the top of the list. It is simply not tenable to expect that a journalist has deep models of every topic they cover, or that they have time to have regular long exchanges with the relevant professionals, or even that they have read all the relevant reports and papers. Hence the need for specialised Belief Holders who are able to stomach the outputs from the firehose of information and then convey that to the public. This has the additional benefit that Belief Holders, unlike your typical scientist, have training and experience in communicating effectively to journalists.

Behind all this is a principle taken for granted in my world. The people voicing their views in public have no inherent epistemic authority. The title is purposefully Belief Holder – anything like the Finnish alternative of Thing Knower would be solemnly rejected as draconian – to reflect how others’ respect for your beliefs is something that must be constantly earned. As the saying goes, a Belief Holder who doesn’t contribute is just a guy who holds beliefs.