Created: July 10, 2020
Modified: January 23, 2022
Modified: January 23, 2022
truth is a low bar
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- Language is an incredible bottleneck. There are infinitely many true facts about the world, even just in pure math, and yet we communicate on low-bandwidth channels that cannot possibly share any representative fraction of them.
- This means that using language well means not just saying things that are true, but saying things that are interesting. Even within a purely belief-based view of speech, you want to say things that help other people improve their beliefs.
- Of course a belief-based view is an impoverished model. Much of language is speech acts. These can be relational actions, like telling your partner you love them. This is not a strictly impassionate expression of belief---hopefully it is true that you love your partner, but saying it even when you're not quite sure how it grounds out at the moment is part of how you keep it true.
- Political discussion inherently works in terms of speech acts. Mentioning certain facts is how one makes arguments for larger positions. Even if the facts you state are indisputably true---maybe a study really did find that black people have lower IQs than white people---the fact that someone brings up the particular facts they do represents a choice. It indicates that they think the fact is relevant and in particular that it supports whatever larger argument they're making.
- It can be legitimate to 'suppress the truth' in bandwidth-limited settings (and any individual setting is bandwidth limited) because there's just too much truth to go around. Suppressing some truths in elite circles is necessary in order to focus on the most interesting, relevant, or helpful truths. Lots of things are true but wrong. But things become Orwellian when you suppress truths in society at large, in other people's conversations rather than your own conversations.