Guardians of the Truth

But the Inquisitors were not Truth-Seekers. They were Truth-Guardians.

"What is true, and valid, does not require defense." -- Diane Duane

The Inquisitors were not Truth-Guardians. They were Doctrine-Guardians. That is a very different matter. Truth does not require guarding. Doctrines often do.

It's amusing to see 'criterion of goodness' as a simile for 'criterion of correctness'. The Inquisition believed they were both 'correct' and 'good'. In torturing you, they were saving your soul, which was, for them, the ultimate in Utility. So, in calculating utility, beware of your assumptions.

Sounds a lot like this paper by Chris Phoenix.

nothing we discover about quarks is going to throw out Darwinism

Hah, tell that to the people who say "Darwinism" is based on a "debunked deterministic metaphysics".

The "standard degeneration" link is broken.

Caledonian: "Truth does not require guarding."

Doesn't it, though? If a minority that happens to know a truth, but they all keep quiet about it, what's to keep the masses from remaining ignorant indefinitely? Of course (tautologically) the truth will still be true whether or not anyone knows it, but I get the sense that you were implying something less trivial.

If a minority that happens to know a truth, but they all keep quiet about it, what's to keep the masses from remaining ignorant indefinitely?

In my experience, loudly proclaiming an unfamiliar truth is one of the best ways to keep people ignorant.

The only sorts of knowledge that need to be protected and preserved are the ones that involve contingency: biodiversity, history, paleontology and archeology, etc. can all be harmed if their data is lost. Undying truths can always be rediscovered no matter how many times they're lost.

When you speak of "guardians of truth" I hear "guardians of social order." I don't think the Inquisition thought of truth in epistemic terms, the way we do. They thought of "truth" as the order of the world that was under constant assault by dark forces.

Truth guardianship in science might be understood as defending Kuhnian "normal science" from assault by people outside of the dominant paradigm; or perhaps the process of indoctrinating new scientists in the accepted norms of that paradigm.

The perfect age of the past, according to our best anthropological evidence, never existed.

Minor point: in defense of the esteemed Taoist, I would argue Chuang Tzu was speaking of the time humans were small groups of hunter-gatherers. Based on my understanding of Jared Diamond's "Agriculture: the worst mistake in the history of the human race".

Back on the point of your post. I am not ashamed to say I listen to Zig Ziglar tapes (I probably should be). His folksy way of putting it is "Do you want to be a learner, or learned?" With "learned" implying that you have mastered a system of thought perfectly suited for a receding past.

Quite a discussion. There's much that was strung together that might better be sifted into piles.

Moses, for example. Moses was an educated man in charge of a host of ignorant, illiterate peasants who firmly believed in magical thinking. Golden idols, etc. So he knew he couldn't make any headway with them by saying, "I'm an educated gent, and I can tell you you're wrong." He couldn't say, "We're in the desert, you fool, and if you eat that pork that's been lying around for three days, you're gonna get trichinosis." Nope. He said, "GOD SAYS pork is UNCLEAN!" And then it's on to commandments given on the mountain, etc. But the jews were "people of the book," which was their salvation. They valued study of the Torah. Which translated to the value of study in general. And that--and prohibitions against their indulgence in other professions, plus Vatican usury laws--sent them into banking and scholarship and physics and other intellectual pursuits of value to all of us.

Now, as to truth. Most embrace a specific "truth" because it suits their disposition while giving their poor little egos some reason besides accomplishment to feel themselves superior to their neighbors. (Read your Hoffer. And, of course, your Thoreau: "If anything trouble a man, if he has a pain in his bowels even, he forthwith begins reforming the world.") The real question is why one can't be happy in his beliefs unless he can impose them on others. Why, for example--a simple one, admittedly--does someone claim to be allergic to perfumes. Of those who have been tested, the only ones to respond did so only at the threshold of smell. Very strange. Could the real issues be "victimization" and control.

But, of course, the worst of all truths is the current one. Beware, my friends, of the zeitgeist. The temper of times is no guide to rational thought.

Hey,

I just put up a series of posts about Merton that I think you’d enjoy at:

http://michaelkrahn.com/blog/thomas-merton/

If you believe in G-d then you believe in a being that can change reality just by willing it. So therefore you believe it's possible for consciousness to change/control existence.

So that could explain why Guardians fear too many non-believers: they feel threatened by what they perceive as the power of other people's consciousness. They fear that if there are too many non-believers that it might change the truth somehow.

But scientists (Seekers) know that reality is what it is regardless of what other people think, so they don't ascribe so much power to their fellow beings, and therefore don't feel as threatened by them.

"Undying truths can always be rediscovered no matter how many times they're lost."

At potentially prohibitive expense. Can you imagine trying to start physics over again, from the beginning?

The greatest expense would be time. Trying to rediscover a science, from the beginning, in one or a handful of generations would require crushing amounts of money and work. If any science is ever so thoroughly lost, it would be hopeless to expect it to be retrieved so rapidly - it could only be a long-term project.

I don't think it would be too bad, though. Look at how rapidly science has developed since the end of the Dark Ages.

If we instantly forgot everything known about gravity, and even forgot calculus, but we kept the existing economic infrastructure of science and math - computers, professional mathematicians of roughly equivalent skill level who happen not to know calculus, billions of dollars a year in R&D funding, etc. - then calculus would be discovered in a month (though it wouldn't be rigorous), Newton's laws a week later, and Einstein's general relativity before the year was out. That's seriously my best estimate for how long it would take.

I once read an argument (can't find source) that a key component of a zeitgeist is whether it locates its ideals in its future or its past.

David Brin has written about this in his discussions of Star Wars (here and here) and Lord of the Rings.

Beaten to the punch on Brin. Mencius Moldbug provides an interesting contrast on the ideal of "progress", though I can't decide on a specific post to single out.

Regarding the Inquisition, there are some who claim that that our conception of it is the result of the same sort of Protestant "black legend" type propaganda that causes us to think of Gustavus Adolphus as a hero but Wallenstein as a villain. Don't know myself, but I find the idea interesting.

an academic field that stops making active progress tends to turn mean. Which ones were you thinking of? I know you don't want to upset people here, but you seem to be making a claim without providing any evidence. Lysenkoism, perhaps?

The Inquisitors were not Truth-Guardians. They were Doctrine-Guardians. That is a very different matter. Truth does not require guarding. Doctrines often do. I thought that was what made a doctrine a doctrine. At any rate, since the Inquisitors believed it was true, I don't have a problem calling them Truth-Guardians.

Prediction markets are a great way to turn the tables in favor of seekers vs guardians. The guardians will bankrupt themselves trying to keep the "correct" beliefs high in price while the seekers will advantageously extract more and more money from them.

Eliezer, can we get some confidence intervals on those time estimations? If nothing else, I'd like to know what your thought process is about what would go into rediscovering calculus in a month.

I'd like to know what his thought processes are on a disaster that could wipe out all hardcopy and memories of a subject, but leave the research infrastructure intact.

"The Inquisition thought they had the truth! Clearly this 'truth' business is dangerous."

The Inquisition was not that unusual. Religious and political loyalties tended to be quite entwined, so most states discriminated against believers in the wrong religion, sometimes banning such religions entirely. This naturally led to people carrying on the old (or new) beliefs in secret.

So the Inquisition was empowered to go looking for those secret heretics.

There were large, bloody and religiously inspired wars in Britain, France and Germany, to name but three.

There were none in Spain or Portugal, so perhaps the Inquisition did more good than you think.

Good point Eliezer. Now think about how that applies to conserving, conservation, and conservationists. And lookee here, conservationists aka eco-zealots are indeed mean sons of bitches and lying screeching zealots to boot. And the fact they happen to be right sometimes hardly makes them any less distasteful.

So that could explain why Guardians fear too many non-believers: they feel threatened by what they perceive as the power of other people's consciousness. They fear that if there are too many non-believers that it might change the truth somehow.

Now that's a good point too. Magical thinkers with no access to truth, because they have no ability to reason abstractly and thus no grasp on logic, overwhelmingly tend to think that truth is a random product of human minds. Or divine minds anyways.

It's a self-protective belief really. Very few of them have the balls to admit that their brains just aren't up to snuff. I grudgingly respect those that do admit to their own flaws but they are very few and far between.

So yeah, they find the idea that YOU can seek out and find truth to be very threatening to their beliefs and their egos. Because they can't.

If major shakeups don't arrive often enough to regularly promote young scientists based on merit rather than conformity, the field stops resisting the standard degeneration into authority. When there's not many discoveries being made, there's nothing left to do all day but witch-hunt the heretics

This is arguably NOT true since physics in the 20th century has been extremely rigid and unbending. Ridiculous notions such as Vitalism took many decades to die out. Gibberish such as non-determinism is still routinely referred to without a sneer on one's face.

The problem with your model is that scientific communities are quite capable of insulating themselves from new discoveries and innoculating against new ways of thinking in order to seal their authority. And they're even capable of ossifying into rigid authoritarian hierarchies during periods of active ferment.

In fact, I'm sorry to say this Eliezer but your model is STUPID. That's because your model is linear. And just about NOTHING in human societies, human nature, or just plain nature, is simple enough to be linear. As soon as you recognize that feedback effects occur and that active resistance against new discoveries can be mounted, you begin to suspect that the inversion of your model (that authority dissolves during calm periods when people don't have to so actively cling to The One True Bullshit) makes as much sense as your model. Only empirical data can settle the matter, and that's something neither of us has.

Chuang Tzu was referring to the hunter-gatherers.

Perhaps the difference between the Inquisition and Feynman is that science specifically claims it has nothing to say about morality, so it can't justify killing anyone in its name.

I think it's easier to go deeper yet simpler. I would say that this is close, but still missing "Questions like that don't have neat single-factor answers. But I would argue that one of the factors has to do with assuming a defensive posture toward the truth, versus a productive posture toward the truth."

and: "When people connect their personal value and self-esteem to a given belief they're prone to persecute anyone claiming that given belief to be false, since they see that claim as undermining their reason to exist".

Or more plainly: Debates become existential struggles for some people, because they ultimately do not separate themselves from their believes and opinions. Hence they react extremely strongly to any perceived threat to their belief or opinion; occasionally as strongly (or stronger) than had their physical person been threatened with extinction.

I think you have just captured the essence of what makes the Enlightenment culture different from all the others. It's also why people who aren't yet quite sold on the Enlightenment project have so much trouble understanding us; they are used to harkening back to the "good old days", and when we tell them, "No, the past was terrible; you'd die of malaria or get burned at the stake" they don't understand. They think we have no values, because we have no authorities on value. They think we don't believe in truth because we locate the truth in the future instead of the past.

(It doesn't help that there are moral relativists who actually say things like "There is no such thing as truth" and "anyone's values are as good as anyone else's". Maybe we should be spending more time refuting and repudiating such people.)

I even see this among people who mostly accept the basic ideals of rationality and science; they do things like quote Thomas Jefferson as if Jefferson were one of the ancient prophets who knew all the deep truths we have since forgotten. The man owned slaves! He was right about a lot of things, but also wrong about a lot of other things; you should be quoting him only to talk about his ideas, not yours. Similar things happen when people harken back to the US Constitution, or the writings of Ayn Rand. It's not even that wrong---it's surely better than the Bible or the Qur'an---but you're missing the whole point if you hold up a chunk of cellulose and say it's the truth. You should be pointing outside, at the world.

I think someone is failing to consider that sometimes truth gets mixed with politics. When truth and politics mix, it suddenly becomes very significant whether other people accept your truth or not. People become not just wrong, but enemy. Can this concept be dis-entwined from the concept of authoritarian guardianship of non-recoverable truth?

For example, I would say that Democrats are supposed to be forward-looking and in favor of knowledge and science, yet I'm quite sure that many Democrats would be opposed to scientific studies that show ineffectiveness of one of their social programs.

I forget where I saw this (might actually have been elsewhere on LW?), but I encountered the idea that a component of the backward-reverent ages was the Roman Empire. When your civilization is built on the remnants of Roman roads that are better than anything you can make, it's forgivable to view the world as having fallen from grace.

There is not one "truth value" in any person. Every person is a network of truth values, on all different subjects. Some are closely linked to one another, others not. Every truth exists in a hierarchy of importance.

Most people have crude heuristics. Other people (like Kurzweil, Freitas, Drexler) have well-developed hierarchies of importance, relationships, accuracy, relevance to other subjects, etc.

Any time my networked truth values, as nodes, exchange information with reality, they can be altered, updated, or solidified, based on the input, and output back to the message sender. The more communication, the more the true pattern of reality is reflected in my network, to the extent I am intelligent.

The unintelligent have little choice but to defend the limited truth they comprehend. If they properly perceive the morality of the domain they are considering, and it is a moral domain, they are obligated to defend it. This is why Penn Jilette doesn't mind preaching directed at him: he prefers honest to accuracy. If people think he's damned unless he accepts Jesus, he says he'd be upset if people didn't debate the issue with him.

I'd be annoyed, but I see his point: The domain of the truth you believe, and the amount of difference in others in your environment determines how useful you judge the truth to be. Your value judgment of your message informs others' receipt of your message. They then let you know whether they think your value judgment is accurate.

So long as force is disallowed, this is the optimum, even if it doesn't seem so to dispassionate rationalists.

After all, I might be critical of radical Islamists on their way to shoot up cartoonists. If he vociferously sends out the idea that apostates or infidels should be killed (because otherwise he believes his world would end, or whatever) then I have a lot to be thankful for. I may have my hand on my pistol, but I tell him he's 100% full of shit, and counter his claims with logic. Maybe the logic convinces him, but even if it doesn't the value judgment he's given me has informed me that I'm in a dangerous situation.

The same rules apply to the highly intelligent, but there will be less vociferous communication from them. Why? Because getting into vociferous communications with people isn't smart, unless a meteorite is headed for your city. There's no reason to get agitated, in most conversations.

So the lunatics send out more vociferous communications. OK, got it. We're used to them. But that's also useful, because the more lunatics there are, the more they're identified, and the more we can assess the health of society: It either creates a lot of lunatics who have occasion to be loud and boisterous, or it creates very few. In either case, them being honest is overall good for society, even though we don't want to hear them.

...And occasionally, there's a Kary Mullis who gets called a lunatic, but whose excellent vociferously-communicated ideas are at least equal to his crazy ones. So long as he can't impose his crazy ones on anyone with violence, the presence of his ranting is purely benevolent.

Moreover, let's say that western civilization breaks down, and we're all subjugated to Islam (or Christianity, etc.). Well, then perhaps the central nodes upon which the others rest, the ones that have been very solidified by feedback and experience, take over. Then, it's time for retaliatory force.

The truth nodes that are "protective" should deal with force. But those nodes should be very few, very small, and never used in normal situations.

Moreover: It's not useful to hunt the heretics, but it is useful to send out messages that present an alternate truth. There's no reason to "go negative" unless you're asked about the truth. Then, sure, speak the truth, reveal that you believe that "idea X" is a crazy idea, from a damaged brain, and that you're happy to debate "idea X". The willingness to put mutually-exclusive ideas into conflict with one another is another core node of western civilization, and science itself.