The Universality Test for Beliefs
Test any belief by asking whether you'd still hold it in any other time or place
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 72%
Epistemic luck is the unsettling fact that had you been born elsewhere or elsewhen you'd believe different things, yet you're convinced today's beliefs are correct. Gurwinder's response is a test: judge a belief by whether you could imagine yourself holding it in any time or place. The mechanism is a counterfactual relocation of yourself across history and geography. If a belief only makes sense given your society, it's likely a product of that society rather than something true. If it would have been useful even a thousand years ago (his example is germ theory, which didn't exist then but would still have helped), it passes as more universal and trustworthy. It's an imperfect but powerful filter against absorbing ideology wholesale.
Origin
Gurwinder Bhogal frames this around the philosophical concept of 'epistemic luck', developing a personal heuristic of testing beliefs for universality across time and place after noticing how closely his own liberal views tracked the liberal society he lives in.
Core principles
- 01If you'd have had different beliefs born in a different place or era, your current beliefs may be luck, not truth.
- 02Beliefs that are merely local to your society should be treated as suspect.
- 03A good belief would still have been useful in a very different time and place.
- 04Universality of applicability is a proxy for a belief being real rather than fashionable.
- 05Knowledge grows, so the test is about usefulness across contexts, not omniscience.
How to run it
- 1
Acknowledge epistemic luck
Accept that many of your beliefs correlate tightly with where and when you were born, which suggests some are circumstantial rather than reasoned.
Pro tip Notice how a religious or political identity would almost certainly differ if you'd been born before that ideology existed.
- 2
Isolate a specific belief
Choose one confidently-held view to examine rather than testing your whole worldview at once.
- 3
Relocate yourself across time and place
Imagine holding this belief born in 19th-century India, second-century Arabia, a rich or a poor family. Ask if you'd plausibly still hold it.
- 4
Test for cross-context usefulness
Ask whether the belief would still have been beneficial to hold in that other context, even if unknown then. Germ theory passes; a fashionable political stance often doesn't.
Pro tip Usefulness-across-time matters more than whether the belief existed then.
Watch out Don't demand a belief have been known in the past — demand that it would have helped.
- 5
Sort suspect from durable
Treat beliefs that only make sense in your present as likely imbibed; keep those that transfer as more probably true.
In the wild
Gurwinder tests germ theory of disease against the universality standard. Although germ theory didn't exist a thousand years ago, believing it then would still have been beneficial — it transfers across eras. By contrast, a belief that only 'works' in your current society is a red flag that you're myopically trapped in the present moment and place.
→ Germ theory passes the universality test; time-locked fashionable opinions fail it.
He notes that a belief system claiming to be for all times and places runs into trouble under the test: someone born before that system existed obviously wouldn't hold it, revealing how much of the belief depends on the accident of when one was born rather than its universal truth.
→ Exposes how strongly identity-defining beliefs depend on circumstance of birth.
Common mistakes
Assuming your convictions are self-evidently true
Confidence feels the same whether a belief is true or merely fashionable; without the test you can't tell them apart.
Requiring the belief to have existed in the past
The test is about whether the belief would have been useful across contexts, not whether it was already known — otherwise all new knowledge fails unfairly.
Is it for you?
Best for
Thinkers who want to separate genuinely held convictions from ideology imbibed from their surroundings.
Not ideal for
Empirical questions best settled by direct evidence rather than a thought experiment.
From the transcript
“my solution to this problem is to try to find beliefs that are as universal as possible”
“will they be useful in any time and any place that's the kind of universality of a belief”
“if you'd lived in a different place or time read different books had different friends you'd have different beliefs”
From the episode
17 Shocking Lessons About Human Psychology - Gurwinder Bhogal - #742
Gurwinder Bhogal