Truth?
My Poor Child
Squirt’s doing a summer camp this week learning how to program webpages. He just left for Day Four - where he’ll be designing a personal webpage to communicate facts and information about the planet Mars.
So, naturally, we discussed how we define “truth” and “reality” and what passes muster as a “fact” and what he’s able to put on his webpage. I may or may not have momentarily tried to gaslight him for the tenth time into believing that the Earth is actually flat also...
Anyways.
Finding Truth
He asked me about how I would have found this information when I was a kid, because he knows something like Wikipedia was not around. So I told him about encyclopedias and World Book and visiting the library to read books. But we were quickly talking about primary sources and what qualifies as true.
He’s not allowed to use Wikipedia in school because “Wikipedia can be edited.” Which promptly led to my contrarian ass wanting to know why the thing printed in a random book was trustworthy. Wikipedia, of course, has the benefit of general consensus and hundreds or thousands of people contributing and scrutinizing it. There are rules about primary sources and rules for what is allowed to be put on the page. Certainly these rules, and Wikipedia in general, still result in an imperfect collection of information. Wikipedia is open to criticisms of distorting information but it is still one of the wonders of the modern world.
A printed book like the “M” encyclopedia I had in my house growing up is also very imperfect. More so, in many ways. For example - it would have said with certainty that there was no water on Mars because that’s something humanity learned since I was a child. It was also entirely subject to the editing and content supplied by a very small number of people. Why are these particular people so trustworthy? I don’t know them. How much research did they do? Did they have two hours of time to look into Mars before they wrote the entry? Are they simply using the previous year’s entry and taking thirty minutes to find out what might have been newly discovered or corrected? Were they distracted by an argument with their spouse the morning they finally got to the “M” book and the “L” book was way better?
Don’t use the internet, use these books you bought from the door-to-door salesman. That’s how you know what’s really “true.” Right.
Truth is one of the most slippery things we can ever ruminate on. Truth, you see, is a matter of opinion and perspective and time. What was true when I was a child may not be true now. Maybe it was never true. Consensus changes. Besides, humans are incredibly stupid anyways, why is this consensus so powerful in the first place? What’s the proper ratio of agreement to reach the vaunted heights of capital-T Truth? A simple majority? A plurality? Perhaps we can only believe something if 95% of people say it is true?
Maybe evolution is a lie, and science is a bitch, right?
At the risk of overwhelming this written piece with video links there was a solid breakdown of some stuff over at Wisecrack about the scene above which talked a bit about fanaticism and defined it as “a belief or behavior involving uncritical zeal or an obsessive enthusiasm.” Not sure it was worth a full 20 minutes of my time but it is, nevertheless, bringing some insight into the “debate” there and the concept of fanaticism. Fanatics are so fucking certain. Bugs the shit out of me. It’s a far cry from my own stance of uncertainty and ambivalence that I’ve written about in the past.
Intelligence
I was also just reading about how There is No Such Thing as Artificial Intelligence which smelled of someone who thinks humans and our organic brains are special in all the universe. Cute, I guess, but certainly seems like it could be the type of thing like “there’s no water on Mars” to me. Whiffs of that fanaticism.
It is undeniable that AI does get things incredibly wrong. Is it more wrong than the average human, though? It’s simply a glorified auto-complete that finds the next word based on all the words it’s read out on the internet. Words written by humans. Is the Chinese Room of an LLM any different from a theoretical human that’s read everything on the internet and has no original thoughts of its own? Do we really have original thoughts of our own? Where do those come from?
I suspect the author, and we humans in general, have a bit of an overinflated opinion of how original and special we truly are. That, I think, is one of the scariest things in AI. A glorified calculator is consistently writing better code than me so who am I, really? If a glorified calculator can draw logically consistent conclusions through happenstance and training, is it somehow illogical simply because it doesn’t have a meat brain? Why?
Slippery
Truth is a slippery bitch. Much of the reasoning behind what we believe is simply gilding over something more brittle and less beautiful than people want to face. Mars doesn’t have water. Humans have some special intelligence. There’s a right way to raise your child. The right choice is clear if you just believe in your god or your political party or your own individual spirit strongly enough.
I feel bad for Squirt sometimes. To start at a webpage about Mars and end up getting “the truth is slippery, kid.” Yet I think this is perhaps one of the most important lessons of the modern world — don’t be so fucking certain about anything. Critical, and rational, evaluation is one of the most important tools out there for a modern day human.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
~ Bertrand Russell
Doubt
Unlike so many things I muddle about in my head, I feel like there’s a strong solution this time: Embrace Doubt. Embrace Uncertainty.
Be comfortable saying “I don’t know.” Be willing to follow up with “But I’ll go see what I can figure out.” If I had to pick a single major problem with the modern world it’s that everyone is so fucking certain about a world that is far more complicated and nuanced and bonkers than humans want to admit.
We aren’t as smart as we think we are.
Anyways. I’m not sure of much but I’m sure of that. And now my poor kid will have this waiting in his inbox when he gets back from a long day of summer camp. Such is the life of my child.
Squirt Says…
I think that truth and reality are similar things but can be far apart on certain things. One day we may think that the truth is there is no water on mars reality there's lots of it frozen underneath. What we think today is not always going to be the reality.
Dad Responds…
I guess my follow-up question might be is anything we think today actually reality? And what do you mean by “reality?” We might need to look over the Epistemology Wikipedia entry at some point…even if you can’t use it in your book reports.
