I still remember my introduction to how wrong the news can be. I was in elementary school and had participated in the regional Spelling Bee. After the contest, I was interviewed by a journalist for the local newspaper. A few days later, when I read the published article, I was surprised by how it got some facts wrong and kind of misrepresented what I’d said.

Around 4th grade I must have started to get a big head, thinking that I was starting to know a lot or something, because I remember my Dad putting me in my place by introducing me to the 4 levels of knowing and assigning me to the worst level by informing me: “…and right now, Joel, you don’t know what you don’t know.” (And that probably remains true to this day. : ) )

Not long after that, my childhood research into the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot led me to conclude that they were likely hoaxes. What were the odds that *every* one of the dozens of alleged pictures of the Loch Ness Monster would be so blurry and inconclusive? Not very likely, I conceded.

Throughout school, the dominos of supposed truth just kept falling of course. And, like you wrote in the article, I learned that history painted a somewhat bleak picture of our ability to get things right. It was hope-inspiring to learn that science at least tries to find contradictory evidence and adjust theory accordingly. But I shouldn’t have been surprised to later learn that we still manage to regularly thwart even the scientific method and that there would be a crisis in the reproducibility of research results.

Eventually I learned about the myriad cognitive biases plaguing our thinking (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases) and our struggles seemed more explainable.

I was hopeful that cataloging and knowing each of our “bugs” would enable us to debug ourselves. Curiously, my own personal experience proved otherwise as I kept noticing myself falling for them (e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_travelled_road_effect ) even after I was thoroughly aware of them. As I reflected on my sorry self-improvement performance one day, the words of G.I. Joe rang eternal in my mind: “…and now you know, and knowing is half the battle!” “Bullshit!” I thought to myself, “It’s so much less than half the battle, at least for me.” Then I Googled “G.I. Joe knowing is half the battle is a fallacy” and was shocked to learn that some psychologists had recently dubbed the granddaddy of all meta cognitive biases “The G.I. Joe Fallacy” – https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25436 . And, of course, for complete dismality, The G.I. Joe Fallacy applies to the G.I. Joe Fallacy — i.e. knowing that knowing is much less than half the battle actually does little to prevent us from *still thinking* that knowing the bugs in our thinking will go a long way toward removing those bugs from our thinking.

As fate would have it, I married a psychologist that same year. And so my education continues. : )

And, yes, I’m learning that you are right; there’s even more that I’m wrong about. : )

So as to end on a positive note (I really am a generally happy person, despite the fact that I’m cognitively incorrigible), I’ve recently found a reason to feel more appreciation for our condition. The more I contemplate A.I., the easier it is for me to imagine that we could have brains that function in much the same way that they do — making the same decisions, taking the same actions, etc. — but *without us having an internal experience of any of it* (consciousness). And this experiencing is the only thing that gives life any meaning. Literally, without it, nothing would matter. We could be living exact the same lives as “psychological zombies”, so to speak, and it would all be inert and meaningless. And even though we might be more “Passengers” (to steal from the apt title of the last episode of “Westworld” season 2) in this experience and less in control than we like to believe, the fact that we get to experience at all — that gives me a deep feeling of both wonder and appreciation.

For example, a few weeks ago I was waiting on the bus. I checked when it was supposed to arrive, which I thought was 02:19. At 02:24 I got angry at the bus driver for being late. I checked again, and then I remembered my mom had told me that morning that the summer-schedule had started, so the bus was supposed to arrive at 02:30. It still came 5 minutes late, but that was a big eye opener for me. It wasn’t the bus driver that had made me angry, it were my thoughts.

Anyway, through this experiment I hope to increase my intellectual honesty and humility.

Another thing is this; I’ve been reading books by Geert Crevits called the Morya Wisdom series (among others). And he says in Morya Wisdom 3 that it’s not so much the question about whether it’s true or not, but what kind of ‘energy’ is behind the words.

For example, it’s been very hot here in the Netherlands but I still wore my sweatvest. People could say “Isn’t it hot in that sweatvest?” Sort of like “Why aren’t you wearing clothes like me or any other people I approve of?”. Or they can say it out of genuine unselfish concern; Isn’t it hot in that sweatvest?”.

I know it’s difficult to discerning the energy in online text, but in real life the tone of voice and the feeling behind what they’re saying or with what intent, is in my experience much more important than just what idea (or whatever) they’re trying to convey.

Mostly I feel what the Buddha said was true, more important than a thousand hollow words is one that brings peace.

Because the truth, for me, is usually peaceful.

@buynothing2018, Yeah, we all live in a society. So, there would definitely still be societal norms that you can’t get away from and some societies would consider some things to be wrong and others would consider it perfectly OK. So, things wouldn’t be perfect by any means. As far as I understand societies that have more of a free market will have more personal freedoms and high quality of life and the poor are richer than societies with less of a free market. So, I think there is some backing to these ideas beyond just ideas. There is also economic theory that points to certain modern day practices that may be counter productive to what people say they really want for society and themselves. The Economic Freedom Index is a nice reference to how much freedom people are given in different countries. I always think it is fascinating how people point to other “socialist” nations as being wonderful but you look at their economic freedom index and they actually score pretty high.

I think there would be market failures. I would consider government a market failure itself. Among many other things. But, like I said, I could be wrong about it all. But I think that is what makes it so important they people have the freedom to try new ideas and see how they work out. But when you have an organization that monopolizes the solutions from a top down position you no longer have that capability, or, at the very least, new ideas are much more difficult to come about.

I see the appeal of this idea, but I think it’s misguided. Who’s to say live and let live would be better than every other possible set up? If we applied the same thinking to scientific inquiry, wouldn’t we throw our hands up and give up? We don’t know, so why bother trying? I think if policy-making should be approached as a science. Try something, gather evidence, adjust where necessary and try again. This still leaves open the question of what the best society would look like, but I think there is enough general agreement about what is bad and what is good that we can still give it a go. Maybe I am wrong about that last one though. Or maybe I’m wrong about everything! It’s quite possible.

I agree with the spirit of your last comment: truth exists in the world, but we aren’t great at getting at it. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying. Sometimes you have to pretend to be more confident than you are to accomplish anything, especially in politics. No one knows with 100% certainty the exact set of policies that will make the world better (even if we all agreed on what “better” meant), but we still have to make policy decisions and convince others they are the right decisions.

Thanks for the comment Roberto. There are fundamental laws that govern the way the universe operates (like gravity, thermodynamics etc.), but if there are ‘truths’ in the world we are are not designed to be able to see them. All of us have a great deal of bias we can’t even recognize. Our brain is simply designed to develop models that help us predict future events, and survive long enough to pass our genetic material to the next generation. When I use this mental model the world makes a lot more sense to me. In my younger years the world, and peoples actions and beliefs confused me.

Is gravity truth? Probably. I’m not sure what it is or how it works, but it is a pretty darn good predictive model. It has never failed me. Is religion true? I’m not sure about this either, but it is a very poor predictive model. Various religions have predicted 1000 of the last 0 apocalypses.

Would a more liberal/conservative/libertarian/socialist policy on *insert topic here* make the world a better place 100 years from now? I have no idea, and neither does anyone else, although people on both sides on any argument usually have reams of data to back their position.

I’m not saying we should ignore everything, nor should we not use science or common sense. We should wash our hands and vaccinate ourselves against deadly diseases (thanks science!). We should not dump toxic chemicals into lakes. We should lock up serial killers and human slave traffickers. I think scientific experimentation is the best tool we have for creating better models and predictions, but much of what we ‘know’ to be true today is probably not.

I have to agree with you here, although this may be confirmation bias.