The Fight for Truth (...first, we must discover, ... and agree, .... upon a common reality)
- sciart0
- 22 hours ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 1 hour ago
Excerpt to first link above: "Every society from a small tribe to a large country has a problem with reality, which is people perceive reality differently and they get in fights over it. What’s true; what’s not true? In a small tribe, on something that’s got pretty much instantaneous feedback, like, Where is the next water hole? or, Where’s the enemy tribe located? Are they over the next hill? or, Is that a tiger in the bush?—you’re going to get quick feedback and you’re going to be fairly reality-based. But on the bigger, more abstract questions—which a lot can depend on—like Which God do we worship to make it rain?, you’re going to disagree.
Down through the ages, societies have mostly settled that question through violence, war, oppression.
They rely on an authoritarian leader, a priest, an oracle—terrible, terrible ways to stay grounded to reality.
....The American crisis of democracy is shaping up to be bigger than any one person, even a person as outsize as Donald Trump.
The crisis will not end when Trump’s career does. The crisis may, in fact, be getting bigger, more dangerous, more institutional, more permanent.
A crisis of the house divided as grave or graver than any since the Civil War.
.... So I think the same is true of the constitution of knowledge. There is—so what’s unique about the reality-based community, the rules of the constitution of knowledge, is that they’re open-ended and impersonal in the same way that markets are and in the same way that elections are. So everyone has to follow the same rules no matter who they are, which means that in principle, you can perform an experiment in Picton, Ontario, Canada, and someone speaking a different language in India can rerun the experiment and find out if you were right, or you can make an argument in a magazine and someone speaking Swahili in Africa can trace your logic and your cites and see if you’re right.
The only system that can set up a global network of hundreds of thousands of institutions and hundreds of millions of individuals trained to communicate with each other, to constantly exchange information in search of each other’s errors, is the constitution of knowledge, because it’s the only system that says what matters is your hypothesis, not who you are, and every hypothesis needs to be checked and rechecked before it’s admitted as fact.
No other system does that. No other system can turn all of humanity into a kind of global super-brain that literally transforms the capacity of our species to know and literally creates more new knowledge every day before breakfast than was created by Homo sapiens in its first 200,000 years. No system that relies on priests or politbureaus or monarchs or sacred texts or oracles can ever come anywhere near that."