Friday, July 29, 2016

The True Believers

Beliefs are either objective, derived ultimately from evidence, or subjective and derived from some internal revelation or the belief that some other person has had a true internal revelation and communicated it honestly. While not wanting to denigrate people’s beliefs in subjective truths, the success of Science and the triumphs of our modern world rest entirely on objective truths. Yet the voting public has partly lost faith in the people claiming to be purveyors of objective truth. The water is muddied by people lying for fun and profit, and by Science shooting itself in the foot with a lot of overconfident deduction and speculation having little or no support.
There is an urgent need to restore the public’s faith in Science and objective truth, which are the foundations of our civilization. Can we perhaps get some intelligent supporters of objective truth to make some sacrifices that will bring the matter to the public’s attention in a good way. Take the following as an example of the sort of thing that might work. Better ideas are welcome.
The proposal is to create a Monastery (or hopefully a network of many Monasteries) dedicated to determining the objective truth, and to discovering and “excommunicating” those attempting to pervert the search for the truth. Those who had merely strayed, making bad deductions or trusting the wrong people, would be formally forgiven and “born again”.
The monks would put their wealth in a financial Trust, and wear some modest uniform. Trusted folk from outside can act as lay advisers. There are investigations, in which evidence is collected. Then there are trials in which the two sides are debated. When nobody is available to support one side, devil’s advocates are appointed. Monks clinging to views that most monks think have been completely disproved can be demoted back to applicant status and thus expelled from the monastery.
And, of course, all this is live streamed on the Internet. Viewers can participate to varying degrees based on their level. The highest levels are applicants (wanting to become monks) and lay advisors (who typically are unable to become monks for some reason). Next are trainees learning to evaluate objective truth and preparing for tests that will get them up to that higher level. Finally there are supporters. All these lower levels can make themselves available to help the monks. The general public have a ringside seat on this vigorous search for the truth and the truthful, and the key objective is to get them to understand and support it.
Finally a little riff on the desirability of the truth. The truth can’t lead us astray if properly understood. However properly understanding it is not always easy when our culture has implanted so many subjective truths so firmly in our brain. Let’s take a simple case: bullying. You will pardon my expression of personal non-expert opinion as if it was truth. It is purely illustrative, so it doesn’t matter if wrong. Humans used to form groups of several hundred related individuals divided into families. The families have a status order, like a pecking order in chickens, and it is there for the same reason as all status hierarchies: because without it there would need to be a fight over each conflicting intention. The human situation is similar to (some species of) macaques, with family status passed from mother to daughter. Everyone needs to know their place and one of the ways this is done is by bullying. If A bullies B and B’s relatives don’t rush in then B knows that A and A’s family have higher status. In its natural setting bullying is only necessary when there is doubt. Of course in our city lifestyle this all breaks down. Status is a mess, with endless struggles leading to a lot of bullying. Now I would say that we need to understand this to make good decisions about dealing with bullying (which doesn’t even do its job in our society). But a lot of people would say “You can’t say that bullying is natural. That condones it.” Actually it only condones it if you have the subjective idea that human nature is good by default and departures from the good represent some malfunction. The correct view is that human evil, such as bullying, needs to be dealt with in human ways, not by trying to find and fix a malfunction.
Still we need to accept that the general public is not going to easily accept things which contradict their firmly implanted subjective truths. Such matters need to be dealt with carefully, and avoided as much as possible.

[update: This interact with the proposed Truth and Expertise Network (previous post) because people can just say "I trust the monastery" and get good feedback on the stuff they read.]

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