Thursday morning, January 15th. Someone challenges your strongly held belief. You feel the conviction—the certainty—immediately. But when you reach for the reasoning, for the evidence that convinced you... it's fuzzy. You remember the conclusion crystal clear. The path that led you there? Vapor. You know you had good reasons once. You remember researching, thinking hard, maybe even reading studies. But the actual content? Gone. You're left defending a position you can no longer justify, feeling certain about something you can't explain. Here's the uncomfortable pattern: Most of your convictions are orphaned conclusions—strong feelings detached from the reasoning that created them. You changed your mind in the past. You just forgot why.

The Thesis

Beliefs have a half-life. Not the belief itself—you keep holding the position—but your memory of why you hold it. The conclusion persists while the supporting structure decays.

The mechanism: You encounter evidence, reason through it, form a belief. The belief gets compressed into your identity: "I'm someone who thinks X." The detailed reasoning gets filed away in memory. Time passes. You recall your position easily—it's part of who you are. But the specific arguments, evidence, and reasoning? Those fade.

The result: You're left with high-conviction, low-justification beliefs. You know you're right. You remember being convinced. But if pressed to reconstruct the argument? You're improvising, post-hoc rationalizing, filling in gaps with your best guess at what your past reasoning must have been.

The controversial claim: Most of your strong opinions are held on credit from your past self. You're trusting a version of you who did the thinking, without access to their work. You're certain because you remember being certain, not because you remember why.

How Conviction Outlasts Justification

Stage 1: The initial conviction

You encounter a question. You research it. You read arguments, studies, think it through carefully. You weigh evidence. Consider counterarguments. Update your priors.

Eventually you reach a conclusion: "X is true." This conclusion feels earned—you did the work.

You're not just holding a position. You're holding it for reasons. You could explain those reasons. You have access to the reasoning.

Stage 2: Compression

But you can't walk around mentally rehearsing all your reasoning for all your beliefs. So your mind compresses.

The detailed argument gets summarized. Then summarized again. The conclusion remains accessible. The supporting structure gets archived.

You go from "X is true because of evidence A, B, C, and reasoning process Y" to "X is true" with a vague memory that you had good reasons.

Stage 3: Identity integration

Your belief becomes part of your self-concept. You're not just someone who concluded X—you're someone who believes X. It's in the cluster of positions that define you.

Now accessing the belief is easy. It's core to your identity. Accessing the justification? That requires excavating archived memories. And memory is lossy storage.

Stage 4: Forgetting

Time passes. You don't regularly use the detailed justification, so it's not reinforced. The conclusion gets reinforced every time you identify with it, mention it, or use it to make other decisions.

The reasoning fades. Specific evidence gets fuzzy. The logical steps blur. What remains sharp is the conclusion and the feeling of conviction.

Stage 5: Orphaned conviction

Someone challenges you. You feel certain. You know you're right—you remember being convinced by strong evidence and reasoning.

But when you reach for the specifics... they're not there. You find yourself saying: "I read a study once..." or "The research shows..." without being able to cite the study or summarize the research. You know the shape of the argument but not the content.

You have high-conviction belief with low-resolution justification.

Why This Matters

You can't tell if you're still right:

Beliefs should be revisable. If evidence changes, you should update. But you can't assess new evidence if you don't remember the old evidence.

You might have believed X based on study S. Study S gets debunked. You never hear about it because you forgot you based your belief on S. Your conviction persists even though its foundation crumbled.

You can't engage with disagreement:

Someone offers a counterargument. Is it one you already considered and rejected? Or is it new? You don't remember.

You can't distinguish between "I've already thought about that" and "I didn't think about that." So you treat all counterarguments as things you've surely already considered—after all, you did your research thoroughly. Right?

But maybe you didn't. Maybe your reasoning had gaps. You can't see them because you don't remember the reasoning.

You radicalize by default:

Here's the insidious part: When you defend a belief without access to the original reasoning, you often make it more extreme.

Your past self was nuanced. They considered edge cases. They acknowledged uncertainty. But you don't remember those qualifications. You just remember the conclusion.

So when you reconstruct the argument, you make it cleaner, simpler, more confident than the original. You close gaps your past self left open. You eliminate doubts they acknowledged.

Your current defense of the belief is more extreme than your original reasoning for it.

You become intellectually brittle:

You can't update because you don't know what you'd be updating from. You can't engage with evidence because you don't remember the evidence you based your belief on. You can't distinguish good counterarguments from bad ones because you don't remember your original counterarguments.

All you have is the conclusion and the feeling. So when challenged, you double down. It's not that you've thought it through—it's that you remember having thought it through, which feels the same but isn't.

Evidence This Is Real

Political beliefs:

Ask people why they hold their political positions. They'll give you reasons. Ask them when they formed those positions. Usually years ago, often in youth or early adulthood.

Now ask them to trace the reasoning that originally convinced them. Most can't. They have current reasons—talking points they've picked up, arguments they've heard—but they can't reconstruct the original path to conviction.

They're liberals or conservatives because they became liberals or conservatives years ago and integrated it into their identity. The original justification? Lost to memory. The conviction? As strong as ever.

Religious and atheistic beliefs:

Most people form their religious beliefs (or lack thereof) early in life. They're certain. But ask them to recall the specific reasoning that convinced them? Fuzzy at best.

They remember being convinced. They remember it feeling like a profound realization. But the actual evidence, arguments, or experiences? Those details have faded.

They maintain the belief because they remember having good reasons, not because they remember the reasons.

Diet and health beliefs:

Why do you think vegetarianism is healthy? Or keto? Or intermittent fasting? "I read studies," you say. Which studies? What did they show? What was the sample size? What did they control for?

Most people can't answer. They remember reading something convincing. They changed their behavior. They integrated it into their identity. The specifics? Gone.

Scientific positions you're not an expert in:

You believe climate change is real and human-caused. You should—the evidence is overwhelming. But can you cite three key pieces of evidence? Explain the mechanism? Describe how scientists distinguish human from natural warming?

If not, your belief is an orphaned conclusion. You're right (the scientific consensus is right), but you're right because you trusted experts once, compressed that trust to a conclusion, and forgot the intermediate steps.

This is fine for low-stakes beliefs. But notice: You can't defend your position. You can't evaluate new claims. You're vulnerable to motivated reasoning from either direction.

The Mechanism: Why Conviction Persists

Emotional tagging survives:

When you form a belief, especially a strong one, it's often emotionally loaded. The conclusion gets tagged with feeling: righteous anger, relief, clarity, tribal belonging.

Emotion is what the brain uses to mark importance. High-emotion memories persist longer. But emotion tags the conclusion—the feeling of being right—not the reasoning.

Result: You remember feeling certain. The feeling persists. The facts fade.

Identity is stable:

Your self-concept is relatively stable. If belief X became part of your identity, it tends to stay there. You're someone who believes X.

But the reasoning that led you to X? That's not part of your identity. That's just information. Information decays unless regularly refreshed.

Conclusions compress better:

"X is true" is easy to store and retrieve. The full argument tree—premises, inferences, evidence, qualifications—is complex. Complex information degrades in memory.

Your brain optimizes for efficiency. It keeps the compressed version (conclusion) accessible and lets the full version degrade.

Social reinforcement of conclusions, not reasoning:

When you discuss your beliefs, you express conclusions. "I believe X." Others who agree affirm you. You feel validated.

But nobody asks you to recite the reasoning. Nobody checks your work. Social reinforcement makes the conclusion feel right. It doesn't reinforce your memory of why.

Consistency maintenance:

Once you've committed to a position, your brain works to maintain consistency. If you believe X, you interpret new information in light of X. This reinforces the conclusion.

But it doesn't reinforce your memory of the original reasoning. It might even replace the original reasoning with new, weaker arguments that happen to support the same conclusion.

The Failure Modes

Mode 1: Frozen beliefs

You formed belief X based on evidence available in 2015. It's 2026 now. The evidence has changed. Consensus has shifted. But your belief hasn't.

Not because you evaluated new evidence and stood your ground. But because you forgot what evidence convinced you originally, so you don't realize the foundation has shifted.

You're fighting yesterday's epistemic battles with yesterday's confidence but without yesterday's justification.

Mode 2: Inherited positions

You adopted belief X from a community, family, or tribe when you were young. You've identified with it for years.

If someone asks why you believe it, you generate reasons. But those reasons weren't what convinced you. You were convinced by belonging, by trust, by identity formation.

You don't realize your belief is tribal rather than evidential because you've forgotten the actual process by which you came to hold it.

Mode 3: Post-hoc rationalization

Someone challenges your belief. You feel certain, so you generate arguments. These arguments feel like the original reasons you believed. They're not.

They're new arguments you just created to defend an old conclusion. They might be weaker than your original reasoning. They might be stronger. They might contradict what you originally thought. You don't know because you don't remember.

You're defending a position you can no longer justify and mistaking improvisation for recollection.

Mode 4: Radicalization drift

Your original belief was "X is probably true, with caveats A, B, C." Over time, the caveats fade. What remains is "X is true."

When you defend it, you defend the stronger version. You forgot you were uncertain. Your memory of conviction is clearer than your memory of doubt.

This isn't intentional extremism. It's memory decay selectively preserving confidence over nuance.

How to Escape the Forgetting Curve

Write down your reasoning:

When you form a strong belief, especially one you care about, write out the reasoning. Not just the conclusion—the path. The evidence that convinced you. The arguments you found compelling. The counterarguments you considered and rejected.

This creates a record. When your conviction outlasts your memory, you can check your work. You can see if you're still right for the reasons you were right then.

Regularly revisit the foundations:

Don't just hold beliefs. Maintain them. Periodically review why you believe what you believe. Reconstruct the reasoning. Check if it still holds.

If you can't reconstruct the reasoning, that's a signal. Either you need to refresh your memory (re-read the evidence) or you need to acknowledge you're holding an orphaned conviction.

Distinguish confidence from clarity:

You can feel certain without being able to justify your certainty. Notice when this happens. "I'm certain X is true, but I can't explain why" is valuable information about your epistemology.

It's not always wrong to hold these beliefs—maybe you're trusting your past self appropriately. But you should know you're doing it.

Update the label:

Instead of "I believe X," try "I believed X for reasons I no longer remember clearly." This doesn't mean abandoning the belief. It means properly calibrating your confidence.

You might still act on the belief. But you acknowledge your current justification is thin, even if your past justification was strong.

Test yourself:

Before defending a position, try this: Write out the argument as if explaining to someone unfamiliar. Don't generate new arguments. Try to remember the actual reasoning that convinced you.

If you can't, you're about to post-hoc rationalize. Knowing this doesn't mean you're wrong—but it means you should be less certain.

Seek out the best counterarguments:

If you've forgotten your original reasoning, you've probably also forgotten the counterarguments you already addressed. Fresh exposure to counterarguments can help you determine if you're still right.

If the counterargument seems new and compelling, maybe it is. Or maybe you addressed it before and forgot. Either way, engaging with it seriously is better than assuming you already thought about it.

Accept belief maintenance costs:

Some beliefs matter enough to maintain properly. Most don't. You can't keep detailed justification accessible for every position you hold.

Triage. For beliefs that matter—ones you defend publicly, act on significantly, or use to judge others—do the maintenance work. For others, acknowledge they're low-resolution convictions.

When Orphaned Convictions Are Fine

Not all orphaned convictions are problems:

Expert consensus you trust: You believe general relativity is correct. You can't derive the field equations. You're trusting physicists. This is fine—you've outsourced the reasoning to people who maintain it professionally.

Tried-and-tested heuristics: You believe "don't touch hot stoves." You don't remember the reasoning (classical conditioning as a child). The belief works. Maintenance isn't needed.

Stable foundations: You believe "causing unnecessary suffering is bad." This might be a foundational moral intuition rather than a reasoned conclusion. Some beliefs don't need justification beyond "this is a starting point."

Low-stakes positions: You believe this coffee shop makes good coffee. You can't articulate why. It doesn't matter—the stakes are low, verification is easy (just taste it), and being wrong is cheap.

The distinction: Orphaned convictions become problematic when you:

  • Defend them aggressively despite not remembering the reasoning
  • Use them to judge or exclude others
  • Resist updating when challenged
  • Mistake the strength of your feeling for strength of your justification
  • Build other beliefs on top of them

Takeaways

Core insight: Conviction has a longer half-life than justification. You form a belief through careful reasoning, then compress it to a conclusion, integrate it into your identity, and forget the reasoning. What remains is certainty without accessible justification—orphaned conviction. You're not lying about having had good reasons. You're just no longer in possession of them. Most of your strong beliefs exist in this state: high confidence, low resolution.

What's actually true:

  1. Memory is lossy for reasoning - You retain conclusions better than the reasoning that produced them, creating a growing gap between conviction and justification
  2. Identity preserves conclusions - Beliefs integrated into self-concept persist even as the evidential foundation fades from memory
  3. Reconstruction creates drift - When you defend beliefs without remembering the original reasoning, you often make them more extreme or different than they were
  4. Conviction feels like justification - The emotional certainty of belief persists independently of your ability to defend it, feeling identical to well-justified belief
  5. Most strong opinions are held on credit - You're trusting your past self's reasoning without access to their work, certain because you remember being certain

What to do:

If you hold strong beliefs:

  • Write down the reasoning when you form important beliefs, not just the conclusion
  • Distinguish between "I'm certain" and "I can justify my certainty"
  • Periodically audit: Can you still reconstruct the reasoning that convinced you?
  • When defending a position, notice if you're generating new arguments or remembering old ones
  • Accept that some convictions are orphaned and calibrate confidence accordingly

If you're evaluating your beliefs:

  • Before defending a position, try to write out the original reasoning from memory
  • If you can't remember the justification, that's data about your epistemic state
  • Seek out counterarguments to test if your forgotten reasoning would still hold
  • Don't assume you already considered something because you feel certain
  • Some beliefs matter enough to maintain; most don't—triage which ones deserve active justification

If you're changing your mind:

  • Notice that changing your mind doesn't require admitting your past self was wrong
  • Your past self might have been right with their available information
  • You might have just forgotten why they were right and no longer have access to that reasoning
  • "I don't remember why I believed this anymore" is a valid reason to hold beliefs more loosely
  • Updating should be easier when you acknowledge conviction has outlasted justification

The uncomfortable reality:

Walk through your strong opinions right now. Political positions. Views on diet, parenting, productivity. Positions on AI, climate, economics. Opinions on what makes good art, good writing, good relationships.

For each one, try this: Explain it to yourself as if you know nothing. Not with the arguments you've heard recently. With the reasoning that originally convinced you. The specific evidence. The logical steps. The considerations that made you change your mind from whatever you believed before.

You can't do it for most of them. You remember the conclusion. You remember feeling convinced. You remember it being a big deal when you figured it out. But the actual reasoning? The specific evidence? Fuzzy at best.

You're holding these positions on credit. Your past self did the work. Current you is coasting on their conclusion without access to their reasoning. You feel just as certain as they did—maybe more certain, since you've integrated the belief into your identity.

But your certainty is orphaned from its justification.

What this means practically:

You can't properly update: New evidence arrives. Is it stronger than what convinced you originally? You don't know—you forgot what convinced you originally. So you either resist all updates (because you feel certain) or update randomly (because you can't evaluate relative strength of evidence).

You can't defend your position well: Someone offers a counterargument. Is it one you already considered? You don't remember. So you either dismiss it (assuming you must have already thought about it) or get rattled (realizing you can't articulate why you believe what you believe).

You radicalize accidentally: You remember the conclusion better than the caveats. Over time, your position becomes more extreme than your original reasoning supported. You don't notice because you don't remember the original version.

You mistake feeling for reasoning: When challenged, you feel certain. That certainty feels like evidence. "I believe this strongly, therefore I must have good reasons." But strength of feeling doesn't correlate with strength of justification once enough time has passed.

The trap: You can't distinguish between beliefs you currently have good justification for and beliefs you once had good justification for. They feel the same. High conviction, strong certainty, clear position. The difference is invisible from inside your own head.

The solution isn't perfect memory. You can't remember the detailed reasoning for every belief. Your brain optimizes for efficiency, not perfect recall.

The solution is epistemic humility calibrated to memory decay: Strong beliefs formed long ago and never revisited should be held more loosely than they are. Not abandoned—just held with awareness that you're trusting your past self without oversight.

Three categories of conviction:

  1. Active justification: You remember the reasoning, you've checked it recently, you can defend it now. Hold these with confidence.

  2. Credit-based conviction: You don't remember the details but you remember doing serious work. Your past self was trustworthy, the domain hasn't changed much, and the stakes are low. Hold these provisionally.

  3. Orphaned conviction: You're certain but you can't remember why and you haven't checked in years. These need auditing. Either refresh the justification or downgrade the confidence.

Most of your strong beliefs are in category 3. You think they're in category 1. That gap is where you're vulnerable to being confidently wrong.

The deepest problem: Even after reading this, you still feel equally certain about all your beliefs. The strength of conviction doesn't update when you realize the justification has faded. The feeling persists independently of the foundation.

You'll finish reading this, nod along, and continue defending positions you can't justify with the same confidence you'd have if you could justify them. Because the forgetting curve doesn't affect how your convictions feel. It only affects whether they're still valid.

The only fix: Constant vigilance. Every time you feel certain, ask: "Can I reconstruct the reasoning that made me certain?" If not, you're running on credit. And credit eventually runs out.

Today's Sketch

January 15, 2026