User shared Steve Stewart-Williams' Substack newsletter post Can You Control Your Own Beliefs? (a guest essay by Turi Munthe, condensed from his May 2026 book Why We Think What We Think) and flagged it as "interesting." Provenance: heard about Stewart-Williams through Chris Williamson — which checks out (Stewart-Williams was MW #786, May 2024; recorded a second Austin taping in late 2025/early 2026).
The user's "interesting read" share, on this surface, is a recognition gesture — the article is a posture piece (the intellectual-independence frame), and the user already operates inside that frame (the preferences as proxies for capability page is the same move applied to dating preferences: "the surface question is the wrong question, what you actually want is the underlying capability"). The resonance is structural, not topical.
"Only if you know how your beliefs control you."
Our beliefs are largely shaped by quirks of history, geography, climate, psychology, and genetics — far more than by reading, deliberation, and "reasoning." We can control our beliefs (we are "hardwired not to be hardwired"), but we are predisposed to many of them. Understanding these unconscious influences is the first step toward intellectual independence.
The book/article is a tour of the non-rational roots of belief. The most legible items:
| Surface preference | Hidden driver | Mechanism | |---|---|---| | Conservative / meritocratic views | Pretty privilege | Attractive people experience a gentler reality → trust meritocracy because it works for them (Guardian report) | | Hot/humid regions → xenophobia + conformity | Pathogen load (behavioural immunity) | Bacteria/parasites → fear of strangers; conformity as "stick to known safe practices" | | Neuroticism → radical ideologies (both hard-left and hard-right) | Existential discomfort | High-neuroticism voters in 2015 UK: Greens and UKIP (the wings, not the centre) | | Drought regions → moralising deities | Climatic necessity | Drought is the great killer — only strict moral rules and social cohesion let societies survive it | | Wheat cultures → individualism; rice cultures → collectivism | Cultivation economics | Wheat = one-family labour; rice = paddies need whole communities | | Bretons more liberal / less patriarchal | Historical accident | The Romans never fully conquered Brittany; 500-year-old Roman paternalism never took root | | Brain scans predict teen politics at 70% accuracy | Neuroanatomy | Larger/more active amygdala → conservatism (fear/threat response); more active prefrontal cortex → liberalism (ambiguity tolerance) | | Identical twins share more politics than fraternal twins, even raised apart | Genetics | ~50% of the variance in views on tax policy and pornography is heritable |
"The 'reasons' we hold our convictions are often more accurately attributable to quirks of history, geography, climate, psychology and even genetics than to reading, deliberation and 'reasoning'."
The article's frame: your stated reasons are usually post-hoc rationalizations of preferences that were already shaped by where/when/to-whom you were born. The intellectual-independence move is not "find the true reason" — it's "recognize that the true reason is often a non-rational input you can't fully escape."
This is a posture piece, not a craft piece. It generalizes across every domain the user operates in. The structural echo of items already in the brain:
Munthe's frame has a selection-problem gap he doesn't fully close. He documents that beliefs are shaped by environment + genes. He concludes that awareness of this is the path to "intellectual independence." But the same environmental forces that shape your beliefs also shape your awareness of them — including your awareness that awareness helps. The honest version of the frame: awareness is a partial counterweight, not an escape. You can notice you're pulled toward a view because of where you grew up; that noticing lets you update with less drift. But you can't step outside the system that shapes the noticing itself.
Stewart-Williams' "hardwired NOT to be hardwired" handle already gestures at this — plasticity is real, but it's the system's plasticity (gene-culture coevolution, niche construction), not yours as an individual reasoner. The user reads for these posture-vs-craft distinctions; the post earns the share because it lands the right way on the distinction.