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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I was quite astonished to see that not only the post, but also all comments, are agreeing on a single (very disputable) issue: "there is one truth only, and it is intelligible". It thought that this illuministic illusion had been overcome since years, but maybe I should not be surprised of finding such orientation in a website like this.

The fact (?) is that there is no such thing as "unbiased" understanding of reality, that's why our societies do not value this as a virtue. Modern physics were the first scientific field which had to acknowledge - almost one hundred years ago - that reality has as many different possibilities (all true in themselves) as the number of observers. So which one is the unbiased one?

If we are to accept this scientific evidence, the only way out is to appreciate "integrity", which is the correspondence between what one "sees" and what he/she claims he "sees". Nothing more than that. The reality will often follow. Terrible, terrific, but true.

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Robin Hanson's avatar

Barkley, I tried to make this distinction clear in my post but let me emphasize again: a lie is a deviation between belief and words, which is very different from the issue of whether your belief is true.

Eric, yes we respect people who are effective at achieving their goals, but this is only incidentally about truth; we respect people just about as much when they achieve their goals even using beliefs at odds with the truth. The prudent salesman really believes in his crappy product, for example.

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