Three big reasons we struggle to find the truth

June 3, 2021

As I see it, there are three main causes for our struggles to see the truth on any particular topic: 1. Mimicry: when our in-group promotes falsity that we copy 2. Incentives: when we predict that knowing the truth would feel bad or harm our objectives 3. Complexity: when the truth is hard to figure out Examples: 1. Mimicry • Some are Christians because all their friends and family are, too; some are atheists for the same reason. • Some think that it makes sense to ...

Weird but potentially valuable new roles we could have in our society

November 18, 2020

There are certain roles in society that come with special training, powers, and responsibilities. For instance: doctors (can prescribe medicine), lawyers (client-attorney privilege), judges (can bindingly interpret law), etc. Here's my list of some weird but potentially really valuable roles in society that don't exist but maybe should: Role 1: Truth Teller They wear a special, very noticeable hat. When wearing it, they are not permitted to say anything they know to be untrue (they...

How Ideology Eats Itself

August 7, 2020

A quick primer on how to be a genuinely good person who harms the world: 1: Start to think that one ideology you like - which contains genuine benefits, truths, and positive moral elements - might be the only valid perspective. 2: Surround yourself with believers until you're convinced that your view is common and normal. 3: Ignore your own doubts so that you can fit in better. Join in on chastising (and eventually ostracizing) insiders who doubt too much. Punish slightly more hars...

Three Types of Nuanced Thinking

June 15, 2020

image from: https://www.pikist.com/free-photo-vixok

I think that one of the most important skill sets for good thinking is “Nuanced Thinking”: resisting binary dichotomies on important, complex topics. Our brains, too often, are dichotomizing machines. We tend to simplify the world into true or false, good or bad, is or is not. This dichotomizing tendency works well when it comes to relatively simple topics like: • 1+1=2 (true) vs., the Illuminati controls our planet (false)• viruses (bad) vs. puppies (good)• a fedora is a hat; a fedora is no...

How word choice subtly manipulates us

October 19, 2018

Images by Lisa "welshie.wonders" on Pexels (eye) and Piotr Łaskawski on Unsplash (letters)

It's remarkable the degree to which language can paint a picture of something being good or bad, or someone being trustworthy or unreliable, without actually making any factual claims. The more aware of this you become, the more you start seeing it all over the place. Language is often not neutral and objective even when it professes to be. We all know that language can have positive or negative connotations without actually claiming anything specific, but I think it's easy to underestimate how...

How Journalism Distorts Reality

April 7, 2012

Journalism provides us with important information about what's going on in the world. But when you consider the incentives that journalists have, combine that with their usual lack of scientific training, and add in the constraints of the medium in which they work, serious distortions of reality can result. Many journalists produce excellent work. But others leave you less informed after reading their articles than before you began. What causes journalistic distortion? 1. Equal time to eac...

Finding Our False Beliefs

September 7, 2011

By definition, we believe that each of our beliefs is true. And yet, simultaneously, we must admit that some of our beliefs must be wrong. We can't possibly have gotten absolutely everything right. This becomes especially obvious when we consider the huge number of beliefs we have, the complexity of the world we live in, and the number of people who disagree with us. The trouble though is that we don't know which of our many beliefs are wrong. If we knew that, we should have stopped believing th...

Viewing Your Time As Money

August 16, 2011

Should I wait in line to get this free mug? Should I walk to dinner rather than taking a taxi? Should I drive an extra fifteen minutes to go to the cheaper grocery store? Should I keep reading reviews for another twenty minutes to make sure I've really found the best hot water bottle that $10 can buy? These questions can be quite difficult to answer without a framework for valuing our time, especially since considerations of this sort tend to trigger cognitive biases. To figure out how much w...

Truth Discernment Can be a Super Power

August 3, 2011

When we think of super powers, we usually consider things like invisibility, super strength and the ability to fly. Technology is bringing us closer to the realization of these dreams (for examples see invisibility, strength, flying). But there is a super power that has existed for much longer, which we might call "truth discernment". This is the ability to figure out what is likely to be true in hard, important, real world problems. There are difficult questions like the blue eyes logic puzz...