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The Cretan Method
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pieterh wrote on 28 Nov 2014 23:57
The search for truth is an ancient, and difficult pursuit. Modern society still swims in a sea of lies, in politics, business, and especially the software industry, where grand lies breed like cults. My work is to cut through the lies to develop better theories of the truth. It turns out that lies cause pain, and as we approach truth, we also become happier. In this essay I'll explain how I do this, and provide a series of tools and lessons for your benefit.
FoldUnfold
Table of Contents
Approaching the Truth
A Theory of Lies
Mind as an Evolved Strategy
Pain is Valid Data
The Abusive Bond
The Role of Emotions
The Core Process
Bedtime Stories
Simple is not Easy
Resolving the Gender Gap
Intruder, Identify Thyself!
Conclusions
Grounding
Thanks
Approaching the Truth
Humanity is a powerful eusocial species, and one of our superpowers is the collection of knowledge about the real world. We do this by building models, or theories, refining them through practice, and teaching them to our young. Of all the layers of reality that we can model, the one that affects us most, every day, is the reality of other people. Karl Popper wrote: "We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being."
There is an art to shaping, testing, and applying theories. The truth is a curious thing. Like an irrational number, it exists, is not negotiable, nor subjective, yet unreachable. Truth is an absolute property of 4-dimensional space-time. We can never reach the truth, only build theories that approximate it better and better.
We construct theories apparently out of nothing. We take observations and gut feelings, and the endless legacy of theories delivered to us by past generations. We design new, or improved theories, and we encode them in language and words to be argued, remembered, and shared.
Popper argued that there are essentially two kinds of theory. There are scientific theories, which can be falsified by data or observations, and there are magical theories, which cannot. To put this another way: you cannot ever prove that a theory is true, as the truth can never be reached. You can however try, and fail, to prove a theory wrong. When you remove all the provably wrong, what is left approaches the truth.
All theories are inaccurate to some degree. However, falsifiable, scientific theories have an interesting property that magical theories lack. That is, they can be evolved towards finer and finer approximations of the truth. Here are a set of theories you will recognize:
The ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, Pi, is constant.
Pi has the value 3.
Pi has the value 22/7.
Pi has the value 3.141592.
These are all falsifiable, and cannot be proven true. Take the first theory. We can measure as many circles as we like, and each time we'll get approximately the same answer. We won't get any data that disproves the theory. We won't get any data that proves it. So far, so good. The second theory looks good, and is trivial to nullify. See, wrongness is scientific! The second theory is better, yet as we improve our measuring tools, we'll start to see...