I think this is a really important question, one I’d like to explore further in future work.
I agree that there are areas where being locally incorrect can be pragmatically useful. Real people are bad at lying, so it’s often locally EV-positive to believe something that is false.
The distinction I was focused on here though is on correct truths that are valuable vs. ones that aren’t. Among correct beliefs, there’s a broad spectrum in how useful those beliefs are. I think we could get pretty far optimizing valuable truths, before we get into the territory of marginally valuable untruths.
How to Measure Anything gets into the distinction of information that is only true vs. information that is both true and also highly valuable; or relevant for important decisions. That’s what I was going for when I wrote this.
I’m not sure what you are looking for. Most people know very little in the space of all the things one could find out in books and the like, much which is useful to some extent. If you’re curious what things I specifically think are true but the public doesn’t yet know of, then continue to read my blog posts; it’s a fair bit of stuff, but rather specific.
There is a large and old thing which is dedicated to teaching people a subset of the useful things in books, and that is education. Rationalism is a small and new thing which is effectively claiming to be able to do the same thing better....so it would be helpful to have some concrete examples.
I think this is a really important question, one I’d like to explore further in future work.
I agree that there are areas where being locally incorrect can be pragmatically useful. Real people are bad at lying, so it’s often locally EV-positive to believe something that is false.
The distinction I was focused on here though is on correct truths that are valuable vs. ones that aren’t. Among correct beliefs, there’s a broad spectrum in how useful those beliefs are. I think we could get pretty far optimizing valuable truths, before we get into the territory of marginally valuable untruths.
How to Measure Anything gets into the distinction of information that is only true vs. information that is both true and also highly valuable; or relevant for important decisions. That’s what I was going for when I wrote this.
What are the useful truths that the mainstream doesn’t know?
I’m not sure what you are looking for. Most people know very little in the space of all the things one could find out in books and the like, much which is useful to some extent. If you’re curious what things I specifically think are true but the public doesn’t yet know of, then continue to read my blog posts; it’s a fair bit of stuff, but rather specific.
There is a large and old thing which is dedicated to teaching people a subset of the useful things in books, and that is education. Rationalism is a small and new thing which is effectively claiming to be able to do the same thing better....so it would be helpful to have some concrete examples.