If You Want to Find Truth You Need to Step Into Cringe

epistemic status: I'm more thinking out loud. I tried to put in a lot of "I think" and "perhaps" and question marks, but if I sound very confident in my phrasing, re-word it as more speculative.

I think this has a lot of truth behind it, but also I think it espouses a too all-encompassing view on the subject and wraps being true to yourself in a not-useful cloak of "seeking truths about reality".

If you honestly seek truth, and if you decide to tell the truth, at some point, you will accept to appear cringe to the eyes of most people.

To more accurately support what I think you mean based upon the rest of your post, I think this could be more accurately stated:

"If you honestly seek truth, and if you decide to tell 100% of the truth you've found, and if you decide to tell 100% of the truth you've found to anyone you can, to become the leader of truth-tellers, to make telling the truth your reason for existence, to make Telling All Of The Truths your livelihood, then you will appear cringe to the eyes of most people".

While true, it does not seem likely to me that this is a useful ideal to aspire to.

It seems likely to me that for most people, most of the time, a better ideal to aspire to is: you can honestly seek truth and yet decide to tell the truth judiciously, selectively (without a requirement of lies!) and thus appear non-cringeworthy to most people.  (Probably cringe to some small subset.)

I think your definition of "reality" conveniently excludes the society we are embedded within, but the society we are embedded within is perhaps the most important part of the reality we need to navigate and influence to meet our goals.

Unfortunately, it seems like much of the rest of your points are built on this foundation.

When seeking truth, you shouldn't worry about if the truths you are discovering would be laughed at and scoffed at if said aloud. You would be like a swordsman who keeps glancing away to see if anyone might be laughing at him [LW · GW]. Doing so makes you waste time, and it makes you move or withdraw for the wrong reasons.

I agree that when seeking truth you shouldn't worry about what would happen if you said them aloud, but from the context...it does not seem that is actually the point of this post? It seems like the point of this post is more accurately captured in this re-phrased sentence:

"When speaking truth, you shouldn't worry about if the truths you are revealing will be laughed at."

As described above I do not think this is absolutely true.

You wouldn't be like a swordsman who keeps glancing away to see if anyone might be laughing at him, you'd be like a swordsman weighing which stance to take. And/or building the muscle memory to let the correct stances and moves to "flow". (Or something like that...I'm not a swordsman!)

There isn't a swordsman here, and his opponent there, and other people over there...the other people and the opponent are all one.

Now, I would not argue that people should keep their mouths shut about things just to avoid appearing cringe. Maybe being weeaboo and posting it on the internet is just what you require for happiness.  If so, get out and do that shit! However, be aware that you're trading one useful thing for another useful thing and, unfortunately, sometimes you can't have both useful things.

Acceptance and influence in society is not the be-all and end-all of goal fulfillment.  

But it's also not nothing.

Hadn't thought of this before, but "cringe" seems pretty related to the rationalist notion of "ugh fields [LW · GW]".

According to my intuitions about cringiness, it's more about how people say things than what they say.  E.g., discussions on inter-group differences in IQ are frequently really cringy when they happen on some culture war subreddit, but they can be fine (to my ears) when it's Sam Harris talking to a guest on his podcast. 

I guess you might reply that this effect is just: Sam Harris has a professional podcast and is already established, whereas redditors will seem like social outcasts when they discuss the same ideas? But I don't think that's what's going on. I feel like it's mostly the way a topic is addressed (framed, put into appropriate context, interpreted), and if I took the time I could point out various reasons why I think the reddit discussions are cringy. (Here's a list of things to get started.)

I'd say you can always say true and important things without sounding cringy! (According to my cringingness intuitions, that is.) 

In this case, if you followed social norms, you would deny the truth about if you like anime or not, and you would pursue something else that would make you less happy. 

When it comes to persuing the truth about what makes you happy, just observing that it's sometimes fun to watch anime, is not really strongly about truth persuit. 

The way do persue truth would be to actually start measuring how happy various activities in which you engage make you build models of what makes you happy and act according to those models.

I think of this quote from Nietzsche

“The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you need to seduce the senses to it.”

I empathize with what you're saying here because I miss the culture that existed in the world prior to, say, 2010 where some people evaluated claims based on merit rather than sexiness or virality on social media or whatever. The kind of pre-cringe world when 'cringe' wasn't a one word counter argument to something unpleasant.

I think we should focus on keeping islands of merit-based argumentation alive, but recognize that communicating it to a wider audience requires some "seduction of the senses"-- as Fred put it.

(will pledge to respond to this comment for two weeks with an option to renew). 

In this case, if you followed social norms, you would deny the truth about if you like anime or not, and you would pursue something else that would make you less happy.

Why would this happen rather than "you would be pushed into experiences and thought patterns that resolve the highly path-dependent determination of which things you enjoy in a way that makes it smoother for you to bond with the social groups around you"? Here I'm not asserting that the "deny" form is (generally) false, only that it doesn't seem clearly true. Experiential evidence suggests that there's a wide gradient, and indeed that alief-preconceptions about how much of one's identity is social themselves skew the gradient a lot.

Unattractiveness => Cringe

Or Cringe => Unattractiveness, or they have a common cause. The people in the video may be unattractive because the author wanted to convince the viewer that weeabooism correlates with low social status. When you listen to the linked song, the reasoning it brings forward for why the viewer should consider weeaboos cringe is that they believe to have higher social status than they do.

I think it's possible to say in a somewhat sarcastic fashion, that when Galileo proposed the idea that the Sun was actually at the center of the solar system and that the Earth orbited around it, he was cringe. At the time, making pronouncements that went contrary to the Churches stated beliefs by anyone was considered cringe. He was deprived of his freedom until he recanted his theory, and so fell in line with the accepted 'truth' of mainstream society, thereby (somewhat) having his reputation and social status restored (but not.) 

I'm a firm believer that there are "ugly truths", "beautiful truths", and "inconvenient truths" among others, and you are more than likely going to find more social status by discovering and proselytizing for "beautiful truths" than the other 2; find more sympathy and support for discovering and sharing "inconvenient truths" than "ugly" ones; and potentially be stigmatized and ostracized for discovering and insisting people see the "ugly truths."

Of course these are all fads in typical human form; yesterday's beautiful discovery of atomic science and all the scientific benefits thereof, as well as the codification of the modern and efficient "Nuclear Family" Model and suburban sprawl, becomes today's terror of Nuclear Weapons, Radiation induced Zombification, the overflowing Nursing and Retirement home system where Moms and Dads have hidden their parents away for decades after abandoning inter-generational households, and the plethora of abandoned suburbs, strip malls and roadways as the younger generations attempt to move back to 'revitalized' inner cities through gentrification. 

This makes me wonder what horrific unintended consequences will come about tomorrow because of the Quantum age we've entered. I'm steady trying to figure out how Quantum science will destroy humanity, what the "Quantum Family" Model looks like, and how it'll screw up society even more, and how quantum understandings will negatively affect city planning for the foreseeable future. What I see is an interrelated series of "ugly truths" about societies inability to learn from our past mistakes. 

So do I step into cringe and tell the truth I see there, hoping that people will see my contributions as valuable, and therefore raise my social (financial status), or do I let someone else do it, someone with more social status to start with so that they can do it in a more 'socially acceptable' way, and thereby devalue my own social status by passing up an opportunity to point to an issue and take a stab at trying to come up with solutions?

Truth is subjective - Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - When in Rome, do as the Romans do - But, Nero did fiddle...and I don't want to be rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Some people get to spend their lives surrounded by beautiful truths, and nothing but the purest gold falls from their lips whenever they speak. Some people spend their lives surrounded by ugly truths, and can't speak of their lives for the gag in their mouths, and when they do pull it from their jaws, people run away screaming and clutching their ears after only a few words. The inconvenient truth is that people surrounded by beauty can only speak about beauty, and people surrounded by ugliness can only speak about ugliness, and most people would much rather hear about beauty. 

I think that's pretty cringe myself.