There are two kinds of truths. Like truth of fact and the truth of feeling. My colleague, Tom Guell-Vitch, does his research on spending your money on experiences versus on material goods. And one of the reasons that he says that we're so much happier when we when we purchase experiences like going on vacation or something is that even when those go bad, you can create a fun story from it. The way that I was thinking about this is the difference between say you're making a documentary film, right? You might think that the work is in gathering all of the footage, but that's not most of the work.
Memory is highly selective and often inaccurate. But what if we had an easily searchable video record of all our experiences and interactions? How would that affect our relationships? What would it reveal about our characters and our sense of who we are? Is there a kind of truth that can’t be determined by perfect objectivity? David and Tamler dive deep into Ted Chiang’s amazingly rich and poignant short story “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” which explores how new technologies shape individual and group identities.
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