To Speak Veripoop

I do not mean to offend. However, your particular style of writing would not be considered standard within the fields in which I am familiar, nor is it considered standard within Lesswrong. As such, if you wish to make yourself better understood, you may wish to revise your style.

Five tons of flax.

I have downvoted this.

First, as I understand, in the beginning you state the problem P: rationality isn't attractive enough to become everybody's substitute for religion. Then you propose the solution S: replace "truth" by "veripoop". I fail to see how S solves P. According to your following arguments, S avoids some conflicts between theists and rationalists, but that's a different problem from P. We already have tools to avoid the conflicts which work similarly to your proposal (although people are generally too snobbish to say "veripoop" and rather prefer the phrase "separate magisteria"), but many rationalists oppose such policies because they are detrimental to solving S. The goal isn't to be free to pursue science without much harassment by religious fanatics - this we already have, at least in the developed countries. The goal is to spread true beliefs, and by forgoing the use of "truth", you strip science of the powerful persuasive connotations of this word.

Second, beginning your argument by "I cannot imagine" doesn't seem to be a good idea. Most targeted readers probably can imagine a more rational world, and an argument is worth having only if both parties share the premises. You should have gone deeper and provide a justification for your stated certainty, such that the whole structure doesn't stand on lack of imagination. (The point was already made by other commenters.)

Third point is that you assume that some people need religious beliefs and then act as if that implied no space for further improvement ("how can mere logical, rational, rhetoric be looked to in order to bring about [disempowering organised religion]?") . But rationality was historically succesful in disempowerig organised religion and you have not shown that today all people who could be deconverted by logic already have been.

Fourth, although we can never be absolutely certain, I suspect that talking about imperfections of human knowledge the way you do it hardly clarifies anything. It is even not clear what you mean by "truth" and what is your point here. "Truth" is only a word and we use it in certain situations. Do you object to that? For example, do you think that the utterance "I think this proposition is true" is somehow inherently wrong and should have "true" substituted by "human-level true" or "veripoop" or whatever, in everyday language? If so, what uses would there remain for "true"?

Fifth, your example with greenness of grass is a fairly typical instance of a definition dispute (in this case the equivocation is in "green") and has little to do with limits of human knowledge, which you seem to be discussing there.

And of course there are formatting issues. You have probably copied the text from some more advanced editor, which is responsible for the non-standard font and paragraph separation. It makes the text more difficult to read. I would also prefer emphasis realised by italics to ALL CAPS. I suggest you should change the formatting (perhaps by copying the text to some plain text editor, like Windows's Notepad or Linux's gedit, and then back). Non-standard formatting can slightly bias people against the article even if its content were perfect.

Your post isn't clear enough for me to find our points of disagreement, which probably accounts for most of its downvotes.

Have you read the Map and Territory sequence yet?

Because I can't post an image directly:

http://cheezburger.com/View/4856602624

![](image url here)

Verigoodidea.

I must say that coming back two day after posting I'm massively surprised by the negativity. I wish someone would explain to me what the beef is. I mean the piece makes no claims at all so what is there that would need to be backed by references? It offers a few notions that are self evident, such as the abstract nature, and postulated underpinnings of human knowledge. The piece simply asks what would happen if we had a word that stood for what we usually call "truth with a small tee," and offers such a word with an aim at humor. How can such a simple, innocuous piece be so hated? I'm gratified to see though that there are at least some positive comments. Perhaps they actually understood it for what it is.

A fine and important idea packaged in a pithy box. Pardon the metaphor.