The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong LW - Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow by Elizabeth
May 27, 2024
25:42
Link to original article
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow, published by Elizabeth on May 27, 2024 on LessWrong.
Introduction
First they came for the epistemology/we don't know what happened after that.
I'm fairly antagonistic towards the author of that tweet, but it still resonates deep in my soul. Anything I want to do, anything I want to change, rests on having contact with reality. If I don't have enough, I might as well be pushing buttons at random.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of forces pushing against having enough contact with reality. It's a lot of work even when reality cooperates, many situations are adversarial, and even when they're not entropy itself will constantly chip away at your knowledge base.
This is why I think constantly seeking contact with reality is the meta principle without which all (consequentialist) principles are meaningless. If you aren't actively pursuing truthseeking, you won't have enough contact with reality to make having goals a reasonable concept, much less achieving them. To me this feels intuitive, like saying air is necessary to live. But I've talked to many people who disagree, or who agree in the abstract but prioritize differently in the breach.
This was supposed to be a grand post explaining that belief. In practice it's mostly a bunch of pointers to facets of truthseeking and ideas for how to do better. My hope is that people can work backwards from these to the underlying principle, or flesh out their own relationship with truthseeking.
Target audience
I think these are good principles for almost any situation, but this essay is aimed at people within Effective Altruism. Most of the examples are from within EA and assume a certain amount of context. I definitely don't give enough information to bring someone unfamiliar up to speed. I also assume at least a little consequentialism.
A note on examples and actions
I'm going to give lots of examples in this post. I think they make it easier to understand my point and to act on what agreement you have. It avoids the failure mode Scott Alexander discusses
here, of getting everyone to agree with you by putting nothing at stake.
The downside of this is that it puts things at stake. I give at least 20 examples here, usually in less than a paragraph, using only publicly available information. That's enough to guarantee that every person who reads this will find at least one example where I'm being really unfair or missing crucial information. I welcome corrections and arguments on anything I say here, but when evaluating the piece as a whole I ask that you consider the constraints I was working under.
Examples involving public writing are overrepresented. I wanted my examples to be as accessible as possible, and it's hard to beat public writing for that. It even allows skimming. My hope is that readers will work backwards from the public examples to the core principle, which they can apply wherever is most important to them.
The same goes for the suggestions I give on how to pursue truthseeking. I don't know your situation and don't want to pretend I do. The suggestions are also biased towards writing, because I do that a lot.
I sent a draft of this post to every person or org with a negative mention, and most positive mentions.
Facets of truthseeking
No gods, no monsters, no epistemic daddies
When I joined EA I felt filled with clarity and purpose, at a level I hadn't felt since I got rejected from grad school. A year later I learned about a promising-looking organization outside EA, and I felt angry. My beautiful clarity was broken and I had to go back to thinking. Not just regular thinking either (which I'd never stopped doing), but meta thinking about how to navigate multiple sources of information on the same topic.
For bonus points, the organization in question was
J-PAL....
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow, published by Elizabeth on May 27, 2024 on LessWrong.
Introduction
First they came for the epistemology/we don't know what happened after that.
I'm fairly antagonistic towards the author of that tweet, but it still resonates deep in my soul. Anything I want to do, anything I want to change, rests on having contact with reality. If I don't have enough, I might as well be pushing buttons at random.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of forces pushing against having enough contact with reality. It's a lot of work even when reality cooperates, many situations are adversarial, and even when they're not entropy itself will constantly chip away at your knowledge base.
This is why I think constantly seeking contact with reality is the meta principle without which all (consequentialist) principles are meaningless. If you aren't actively pursuing truthseeking, you won't have enough contact with reality to make having goals a reasonable concept, much less achieving them. To me this feels intuitive, like saying air is necessary to live. But I've talked to many people who disagree, or who agree in the abstract but prioritize differently in the breach.
This was supposed to be a grand post explaining that belief. In practice it's mostly a bunch of pointers to facets of truthseeking and ideas for how to do better. My hope is that people can work backwards from these to the underlying principle, or flesh out their own relationship with truthseeking.
Target audience
I think these are good principles for almost any situation, but this essay is aimed at people within Effective Altruism. Most of the examples are from within EA and assume a certain amount of context. I definitely don't give enough information to bring someone unfamiliar up to speed. I also assume at least a little consequentialism.
A note on examples and actions
I'm going to give lots of examples in this post. I think they make it easier to understand my point and to act on what agreement you have. It avoids the failure mode Scott Alexander discusses
here, of getting everyone to agree with you by putting nothing at stake.
The downside of this is that it puts things at stake. I give at least 20 examples here, usually in less than a paragraph, using only publicly available information. That's enough to guarantee that every person who reads this will find at least one example where I'm being really unfair or missing crucial information. I welcome corrections and arguments on anything I say here, but when evaluating the piece as a whole I ask that you consider the constraints I was working under.
Examples involving public writing are overrepresented. I wanted my examples to be as accessible as possible, and it's hard to beat public writing for that. It even allows skimming. My hope is that readers will work backwards from the public examples to the core principle, which they can apply wherever is most important to them.
The same goes for the suggestions I give on how to pursue truthseeking. I don't know your situation and don't want to pretend I do. The suggestions are also biased towards writing, because I do that a lot.
I sent a draft of this post to every person or org with a negative mention, and most positive mentions.
Facets of truthseeking
No gods, no monsters, no epistemic daddies
When I joined EA I felt filled with clarity and purpose, at a level I hadn't felt since I got rejected from grad school. A year later I learned about a promising-looking organization outside EA, and I felt angry. My beautiful clarity was broken and I had to go back to thinking. Not just regular thinking either (which I'd never stopped doing), but meta thinking about how to navigate multiple sources of information on the same topic.
For bonus points, the organization in question was
J-PAL....