The truth

Figuring out a path towards global sanity

While there is still much to learn about the Corona pandemic, one thing is becoming clear; a common enemy doesn’t have to unite us.

It’s us!

The problem seems to stem from a lack of common ground. Even when we have mostly aligned goals, our understanding of the world differs greatly.

In order to unite our efforts to improve the world, we need to unite our understanding of the world. The truth you might say. This brings me to the modest goal of this article. Increase global sanity. Structurally.

Assuming good intentions

The premise of the article is to assume most people care about a world that’s good for all and can reason for themselves.

It’s us again! (except the sociopaths)

This leaves out sociopaths, a group we should provide with a harmless hobby. This also leaves out the severely stupid, who can’t reason for themselves. They need us to take care of them.

The rest of us should be enough to steer the wold towards sanity.

You can handle the truth

The topic of Truth always brings about arguments about subjectivity and how it’s impossible to define. While I fully agree, we need to ignore that notion.

The ‘everything is equally subjective’ argument is of no value when we try to align our understanding of the world. Yes everything is subjective, but not all statements are of the same value. Nobody thinks like that, and nobody can act on that.

A process to value statements

We do weigh statements for their truth value. Mostly implicitly, by a process grounded in human nature with a small layer of logic reasoning.

I propose we try to bring make this more a conscience process. A process we are aware of, talk about and evaluate. I’ll be calling it a Process of Understanding.

It’s you!

In the general sense there is a lot of talk about the challenge of figuring out what is true. I often hear many people unhappy about their own process. They feel overwhelmed by the information that’s reaching them.

I think this is because on the one hand the problem is inherently complex, The process to value statements is hard. There probably has never been so much truth to be found. But the same goes for nonsense.

The main actors

You need a way to judge on a case-by-case basis, but guided by universal principles you formed about your understanding of how the world operates.

Because you use your understanding of the world to judge new information to allow to enter your understanding, there is self-referential challenge. But I believe you need to start with your personal experiences and a way to structure your thoughts.

One way to structure them is to analyze the type of actors trying to communicate with you:

• Large groups (institutions, governments, corporations, etc).
• Experts & those who claim to be.
• The rest of us.

If you have analyzed them in the general case, it becomes easier to value statements by the specific. Then every now and then take the explicit effort to evaluate your analysis about them.

This is in essence of what I wanted to share in the article. You can obviously think for yourself, but I’ll share my current thoughts in order to give an example of such an analysis.

Large groups

Some problems require us to group our efforts. We set up governments, corporations and institutions to accomplish certain goals. This allows us to send people to the moon, create the internet and discover a vaccine. A huge benefit to society, mostly because it can gather institutional knowledge.

It’s us again!

Some extra insights:

• Large groups have incentives to keep staying alive.
• When many people collaborate, a certain level of corruption is inevitable.
• You can’t judge a large group based only on their mistakes or successes.
• Groups can belong to multiple other groups, complicating things.
• Some people seem to outright disbelieve anything that comes from a government, corporation or institution. Just because it’s from such an entity. It’s clear they have their interests and power, but that should not be enough to dismiss.
• Certain type of deep knowledge can only grow inside large groups. Also the alternative to large groups is single people. And it’s probably harder to estimate the interests and power of an individual.

Experts & those who claim to be

With experts I mean those with deep knowledge. Who have spend a lot of time with a certain subject, done tests and whose knowledge should be closer to the truth than most on a specific topic.

It’s perhaps you!

Some views I have formed:

• Experts come almost by definition from a large group (institution), because that’s where deep knowledge is formed. It’s hard to do tests on thousands of people or build an observatory with a decent telescope as an individual.
• The experts who do the actual tests are often in it for the love of the topic.
• Experts who know much about a certain topic, can be totally ignorant about other topics.
• To learn, experts need to be able to do experiments that fail. Experts that never fail experiments, or never seem to doubt are suspect.

For me this leads me to a range of questions when someone claims something:

• Is it a topic that I think requires a deep expertise?
• If so, does this person claim to be an expert in this field?
• If so, does this person come from a institution (‘large group’)?
• If so, does this institution have a process to form expertise?

Every ‘yes’ adds a little bit of extra weight to a statement in my book. Although it’s obviously not the complete picture.

The rest of us

A opinion from a layman on a specific topic is hard to value.

My insights:

• A friend or colleagues opinion is likely to be sloppy on specifics, but it is great for becoming aware of a new perspective.
• You don’t know who happens to be an amateur expert who can point to great resources to learn things.
• With friends you can much easier judge their intentions and their interests.

It’s us one last time!

So for instance, if a colleague states that his sister who works at a hospital starting to get overwhelmed by Corona patients, this weighs heavily on my sense of ‘this is probably true’. This colleague is not the type to tell grant stories for the sake of it and there is no interest to do so.

Another colleague may share a video about the possible dangers of microwaves to our health. Or that ‘there is something more going on with China’ in relation to the Corona virus. It’s worth quickly scanning the shared video, perhaps do a little research.

I’ll even respond with some quick things that sounded correct or wrong to me. For instance at the end of the video by a man claiming to be an expert, he was suggesting that there might be a connection between Covid 19 deaths and 5G radiation. I think it’s worth pointing out that according to my knowledge the effects of the virus have been noticed in countries where there has not yet been a 5G roll out. So for me that statement discredits the rest of the video quite a bit.

I think it’s of the greatest importance that we do talk about politics and ‘controversial topics’ at work at family gatherings (remember those!). It allows you to educate and be educated on your reasoning from someone who has little incentive to be dishonest.

Otherwise your thinking will rarely get challenged and you only get to see a single perspective.

My Process of Understanding

Besides a way to structure your thoughts, you probably have formed some principles you try to live by. For me these allow me to be in the right state of mind to be able to judge new information:

• Don’t look up or down on people.
• Mostly worry / focus on things you can influence.
• Taking different perspectives is how you learn.

All three go against human nature, so I often fail. But it’s what I think works best. I’m no expert (!), but I believe it’s close to Stoicism.

What are the principles you live by that help you understand the world?

If I combine my principles with my understanding of the main actors, I come to a couple of guiding rules:

• Experts over non-experts
• Experts that are confident about things they have not tested are suspect
• You can’t dismiss statements by institutions because hey are corrupt. All large groups are.
• A statement made with high confidence that you know (think) to know to be false, makes other statements suspect.
• Sociopaths are not to be trusted. A lack of shame is suspect. Pushing blame on others, claiming all success for self is suspect.
• Everybody has the right to be wrong and make mistakes.
• I rather believe someone who applies a (to me) sound process and is wrong, then someone who is (as I see it) lucky and correct.
• Future predictions that can be interpreted in multiple ways are suspect.

That’s just a sample of thoughts, it’s far from a complete list.

Examples

I was planning to go into statements by Trump, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Derren Brown, Boeing, NASA, Cults, China and religions. But somehow I feel that this would distract from my main point. Also it would require too much time to delicately write about that at the moment. Perhaps later.

So I’ll keep it more general and ask you; what is your Process for Understanding?