Hopefully that helps clarify what I’m talking about there.
It does. Those examples help a lot. Thank you!
Preferring anything over truth creates room for confusion.
We might be talking about preferring things over truth in two different ways.
If you prefer something alternate to the truth, the thing you prefer could be right or wrong. To the extent it’s wrong you are confusing yourself. I agree with that, and I think that’s what you mean by ‘preferring something over truth’.
What I meant is more like “How much effort I’m going to expend getting at this truth.”
An (admittedly trivial) example: There’s a TV show I like, whose ending is only available for paying customers for a streaming service. I judged it not worth my money to buy the service to get the ending. In a sense, I value the money more than the truth of the show’s ending.
An example with greater consequence: for most truths, I’m unwilling to sacrifice stranger’s lives to learn them. Which isn’t to say that lives are a sacred value that cannot be traded—just that most truths aren’t worth that cost. In that sense, I value human lives above truth.
(That’s probably a bad example because so seldom can one trade human lives to learn truths, but alas. The first real world situation that comes to mind is Covid19 vaccine testing, and I’d absolutely let volunteers risk their lives for that.)
Does my view on how much effort to spend pursuing truth still lead to confusion? It might.
But maybe that 20-year marriage sounds way sweeter.
A person using my reasoning may think “I don’t want to risk sacrificing my marriage to learn that particular truth.” Depending on the marriage, maybe it would be worth it to hold back… although my intuition says a marriage based on lies won’t be. And of course, to know whether it would be worth it or not means that you’ve got to risk sacrificing it. That way is closed to you.
I’m going to have to think about it more. I don’t want to trade poorly.
Even so, one can’t study everything. How does one choose which truths to pursue? Indeed, to bring it back around, how does one choose which biases to focus on correcting, and which to let go for now because trying to overcome them would only add clutter to one’s mental processes?
Thanks for trying to figure that out, and responding so thoroughly.
I think you’re equivocating a bit between information and truth. For example in the TV example, you would pay to get the information of what the ending is. It would make more sense to talk about the truth of the show’s ending if, say, there was a character you were very attached which you didn’t want to die, and they might die in the last episode. Would you like to know how the show ends even if you have to face the truth of this character’s death?
In other words, truth is more about what you believe than what information you have (though obviously you need information to get at the truth). You can have different beliefs with the same information, so the question is more about whether you’re willing to accept the truth if it costs you something.
Without additional cost, I’d definitely prefer to know what happens even if my favorite character might die.
For a different show, I would not care. Whether or not I value the information depends on the show, or the domain… How much I’m willing to pay for information, and by extension the truth, depends a lot on the thing about which I’m learning.
To me it looks like the thing itself is what is important, and my desire to have accurate beliefs stems from caring about the thing. It’s not that I care about the accurate beliefs themselves, so much.
Even so, I don’t want false beliefs about anything. All domains are one.
It does. Those examples help a lot. Thank you!
We might be talking about preferring things over truth in two different ways.
If you prefer something alternate to the truth, the thing you prefer could be right or wrong. To the extent it’s wrong you are confusing yourself. I agree with that, and I think that’s what you mean by ‘preferring something over truth’.
What I meant is more like “How much effort I’m going to expend getting at this truth.”
An (admittedly trivial) example: There’s a TV show I like, whose ending is only available for paying customers for a streaming service. I judged it not worth my money to buy the service to get the ending. In a sense, I value the money more than the truth of the show’s ending.
An example with greater consequence: for most truths, I’m unwilling to sacrifice stranger’s lives to learn them. Which isn’t to say that lives are a sacred value that cannot be traded—just that most truths aren’t worth that cost. In that sense, I value human lives above truth.
(That’s probably a bad example because so seldom can one trade human lives to learn truths, but alas. The first real world situation that comes to mind is Covid19 vaccine testing, and I’d absolutely let volunteers risk their lives for that.)
Does my view on how much effort to spend pursuing truth still lead to confusion? It might.
A person using my reasoning may think “I don’t want to risk sacrificing my marriage to learn that particular truth.” Depending on the marriage, maybe it would be worth it to hold back… although my intuition says a marriage based on lies won’t be. And of course, to know whether it would be worth it or not means that you’ve got to risk sacrificing it. That way is closed to you.
I’m going to have to think about it more. I don’t want to trade poorly.
Even so, one can’t study everything. How does one choose which truths to pursue? Indeed, to bring it back around, how does one choose which biases to focus on correcting, and which to let go for now because trying to overcome them would only add clutter to one’s mental processes?
Thanks for trying to figure that out, and responding so thoroughly.
I think you’re equivocating a bit between information and truth. For example in the TV example, you would pay to get the information of what the ending is. It would make more sense to talk about the truth of the show’s ending if, say, there was a character you were very attached which you didn’t want to die, and they might die in the last episode. Would you like to know how the show ends even if you have to face the truth of this character’s death?
In other words, truth is more about what you believe than what information you have (though obviously you need information to get at the truth). You can have different beliefs with the same information, so the question is more about whether you’re willing to accept the truth if it costs you something.
Thanks, that gets rid of most of my confusion.
Without additional cost, I’d definitely prefer to know what happens even if my favorite character might die.
For a different show, I would not care. Whether or not I value the information depends on the show, or the domain… How much I’m willing to pay for information, and by extension the truth, depends a lot on the thing about which I’m learning.
To me it looks like the thing itself is what is important, and my desire to have accurate beliefs stems from caring about the thing. It’s not that I care about the accurate beliefs themselves, so much.
Even so, I don’t want false beliefs about anything. All domains are one.