There is a certain relationship between the statement "snow is white" and what you see if you look at snow. The same relationship holds between the statement "my partner is cheating on me" and what you will see if you covertly follow your partner around all day. Between the weather forecast and the weather. Between what a government says about its military activities and what you will see if find all its forces and watch what they are doing.

This concept is of fundamental importance to every aspect of life: thinking, doing, feeling, everything. It deserves a single, short, familiar word that means that thing and nothing else. That word exists: it is the word "truth". To discover truth, you must look and see, and experiment.

All of the extensions of that word to other concepts, such as "affective truth", "my truth", "spiritual truth", and so on, apply it to things that lack that fundamentally important quality: that the words match the way things are. They are ways of passing off ignorance as truth, feelings as truth, lies as truth. It saves you the trouble of looking, seeing, experimenting, and updating. You can say "this is true for me" and pull the wool over your own eyes while claiming that blindness is but truer vision.

Likewise, replacing "truth" tout court by adding limitative modifiers, like "empirical truth", "scientific truth", "rational truth", and so on, is an attempt to pretend that that fundamentally important quality is not of fundamental importance, but just one small part of a rich panoply of other ways of relating to the world. But it is not.

Feelings exist. True statements can be made about them. Whatever feelings you are having, it is true that you are having that feeling. But the feeling itself is not something that is capable of being true or false. Whenever you say "I feel that...", it is more accurate to say "I believe that..." Only when you do that can you ask, "Is this belief true?" Only when you shy away from that question will you need to say "it feels true."

I don't think we should stop "wasting energy" disputing "affective truths". Even supposing this category of "affective truth" is useful, the main example you give is presented as empirical truth. I think such "affective truths" are usually presented as empirical truth. This is destroying the public's ability to reason. Let us at least point out the distinction.

Furthermore, this piece started off with a statement that most people worldwide would feel to be false despite being asserted to be true and believed by a few people; that makes the job easier.

The piece started with a quotation from "1984". Is that the statement you meant? As a quotation from a work of fiction, it is not truth-bearing. Within the fiction it is a lie.

These statements might, indeed, be true -- for some definition of true.

These statements might, indeed, be made of green cheese -- for some definition of green cheese.

One could call this semantic transubstantiation: a supposed essential substance of the word remains the same while the mere accident of its meaning is completely replaced. Or perhaps a semantic neutron bomb, which leaves the word untouched while destroying the meaning.

"We've always been at war with Eastasia."

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success..”

I think -- I suspect -- at least, I hope -- that if we narrowly scope the definition of "empirical truth" to narrow standards of involving observation, testing, and resting as much as possible on mathematics and hard science, and only making highly parameterized statements when dealing with more subjective issues -- in this case, I think we'll be allowed to have "empirical truth" stand as it is.

In regards to ‘empirically true’, don’t people already refer to this as ‘scientifically true’. People also refer to facts, opinions and beliefs and these seem similar to your empirical/affective/spiritual truth.

But consider instead, "Shakespeare is truth" or "I've been living a lie." What are these?

Language is not logic. Words are just wind and people can say whatever they want. I assume this holds for other languages as well, but English involves metaphors, understatement, overstatement, hyperbole etc. When people say things, they are not always meant to be assertions. The words might just be for rhetorical effect and meant as an attempt to draw attention to something. For example, I would guess that saying “Shakespeare is truth” is meant to allude to the meaningfulness of Shakespeare writings. Another example might be that you say you are starving when you are actually just hungry. This is a hyperbole or Auxesis it is not meant to be taken literally, but is meant to draw attention to the fact that you are hungry.

That's not to say there won't be heated disagreements by experts in a field about what the empirical is -- such is normal and productive -- but ideally we can stop much of the wasted energy that comes from when a rationalist is making an argument about empirical truth, the other party is making an argument about affective truth, and both sides are getting frustrated.

I find it easier to use something like this baloney detection kit. It’s normally pretty easy to tell when people are arguing about beliefs rather than facts.

This is a shit article here, and good article on Sebastian's website. Also has a really clickbatey attractive landing page on his new newsletter

I do not think we should dilute the meaning of the word "truth" like this.

If I say "This painting is beautiful", I mean "my brain produces a pleasant reaction upon seeing this painting". The latter sentence is empirical truth. See also 2-Place and 1-Place Words

"This place feel right to me" -- true! Affectively true.

Also empirically true!

Shakespeare is truth

If by this, you mean "I like Shakespeare's writing" (an empirical truth), just say so.

Major question. Where do you fit the kind of truth that comes from realising an idea is incoherent, therefore must be wrong?

(For clarity, my view is that the whole notion of 'affective truth' is just plain wrong, but I have nothing to say on that which hasn't been already said)

I want to break apart affective and spiritual truth so to better understand them.

I think there's three kinds of truth here, empirical, affective and spiritual being different kinds of their own.

The raw, experiential, feely truth, that hasn't been tainted by reason: that's what you'd call spiritual truth. It would be that initial feeling you get from reading beautiful poetry or witnessing the Olympic mountain range for the first time. It's the direct truth you get from your experience, before our neocortexes lure us into believing that the logical connections we derive from experience actually exist themselves. Spiritual truth is pure experience.

All other truth, both empirical and affective, is derived from spiritual truth, and it's all less true than spiritual truth. Like pure light being filtered through a stained glass window; the truth too is distorted. It's the solipsist's creed, that all we can truly know is that our experience is happening. All other truth is less than 100% accurate.

So we're left with these two kinds of derived truth: empirical and effective.

Metaphorical fun! If spiritual truth is a pure beam of white light being shone through a glass prism, then the kind of derived truth is determined by the nature of the glass prism.

The glass prism is the function that takes as input the spiritual truth, and outputs a derived truth. A perfect prism will break apart the light into it's respective parts with zero loss of data.

Users of lesswrong tend to prefer very pure, perfect prisms. They want their prism to take the entirety of the light in, without losing any photons. They want as close as possible to empirical truth. Unfortunately it's an un-catchable dragon, but we can get close!

Affective truth, then, is a really shoddy prism. The worst sorts of affective truth are virtually stained glass windows; carefully crafted by the artist to distort the spiritual truth until it looks exactly how they want it to look. Affective truth is borderline manipulative. It's what our parents scolded us for when we first learned how to tell white lies. It's leaving our prism so undefined that anything can be said of the light passing through it.

I don't think North Korean propaganda is very spiritual, but I do see it as being very affective.

Summary: Spiritual truth is experience. All other truth is derived from that. Empirical truth is good derived truth; Affective truth is less-desirable. Affective truth does not equal spiritual truth.

ok I changed the qutoe. I didn't actually look at the background of the quote just the idea of it. The idea is that it is taking advantage of the fact that due to the Availability heuristic, Representativeness heuristic etc., ideas that are more vivid are going to be more likely to be believed. Of course, it didn't mention this, but you would also need to limit the dissemination of contrary information