Thoughtful questions like these, and the thoughtful people who ask them, do indeed lead to truth.

My concern is more with intellectual dishonesty and naive, shallow understanding.

An uneducated person who knows he is uneducated has more truth to him than an uneducated person who thinks he knows a lot and holds forth with BS.

An uneducated person doesn’t think of themself as “uneducated”. They view it as having a different set of experiences that has led them to a different truth. A truth that you won’t be able to understand because of all of your “education”.

Spoiler alert, everyone is uneducated. And everyone has naive shallow understanding of the future.

There is more knowledge in the world than a single person ever learn.

> intellectual dishonesty

Unfortunately if one has a mental model for this or that, and that model yields only a perception, that person has _maybe_ half a mental model. That means one can expect little traction and lots of frustration. The effective model will yield energy (instructive, actionable, or otherwise) toward the execution of this or that action or group of actions. Perceptions alone can be really concerning for sure...

> naive, shallow understanding

I'd say the same here, but add that there's usually a depth in there somewhere. For example, shallow understanding but deep empathy--_therefore_ that person showed up to support your opponent, for example. So can you expect to teach that person, in order to sway them? Probably not. Working the empathy side of things though--this could even be a really fruitful discussion for both sides.

Concerning, and frustrating, for sure...still, the journey may be worth the stretching and growing.

Some value acceptance by an in group, so will proclaim whatever is demanded, as the price of admission. Belief as attire.

Some prefer actionable predictions, so will favor beliefs which lead to higher quality predictions. Belief as optimization.

Which value is represented by statements such as there is no truth, truth is unknowable, we make our own reality?

Edit: Grateful for chance to articulate my own heuristics. Decided to add third category. All the stuff people do and say just to get thru their days. Knowingly or not, sincerely or not. Social graces, agreeability, cooperation in the form of habits, idioms, norms, and culture. Belief as social cognition.

Not incompatible to view belief as an optimization while also realizing our measurement of the truth function is biased and noisy (with everyone measuring getting different biases).

The earth is not flat. Smoking causes cancer. Global warming is happening and is man made. The problem with relativism is that it gives a justification to someone who says these statements are false.

Those are all also false, depending on the perspective. Flat from where, to whom. Cancer in who, and how many, after how long, from which ratios, with which error rate on which factor. Global warming to who, where, and which men.

(I'll offer that these may be maddening perspectives, but that does not itself mean they are invalid)

If you want to reconcile or come to a shared understanding with flat-earthers, it may help to meet them where they are at, and show them why their mental models are effective and truth-yielding in some ways, while also limited in others. It may also help to understand their psychology, and work from a different angle. Wielding "wrong" as one's only tool can limit the opportunity to try a variety of such approaches, and test for effect.

Absolute truth is a mental model. It may have its uses, but its own absolute utility or validity is not guaranteed. Further it may do one great intellectual or psychological harm to remain caught in this logical trap: It feels so right, but its key doesn't fit all these locks (others' annoying positions). So why keep using it over and over? Humans can be amazingly flexible thinkers, holding contradicting mental models in the same mind. So why not take advantage of this? Absolutes and fixed thinking are a huge liability in this way.

Edited to add: In most cases the stakes are lower, too. Global warming probably won't be solved by one person's mental models, no matter how absolute or flexible and thoughtful. So there's also a misleading aspect, perhaps a falsehood-perspective, to the given examples. See also: Was so-and-so the dictator good in some ways, or pure evil, etc. These questions may belie the hyperbolic beginner mind more than they form a high-quality test of the framework.

> Those are all also false

Only on perverse semantics. You can always provide a plausible-sounding semantic model of any proposition stated in natural language that renders that proposition true or false. But natural language utterances actually do mean things despite their inherent ambiguity. When someone says "Smoking causes cancer" they mean, "Smoking a lot produces a statistically significant increase in your risk of developing cancer." They do not mean, "Smoking one cigarette is guaranteed to give you cancer." Picking at semantic nits is counterproductive. There's probably even a name for it as a logical fallacy but I'm too lazy and frustrated at the general state of discourse in the world to bother looking it up right now.

> There's probably even a name for it as a logical fallacy...

Maybe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

> perverse semantics

Hmm. I'm curious as to the value of attaching such an archaic, subjective values-oriented term as "perverse" to the label here. What does "perverse" mean in this context, and is it really expected to sway opinions with what appears on its face to be rather emotional language?

> But natural language utterances actually do mean things despite their inherent ambiguity

This statement seems to work in anyone's favor, or no one's, where the argument is concerned...

> Smoking a lot produces a statistically significant increase in your risk of developing cancer

With an error rate of...zero? With a bell curve of...? With a qualitatively superior study based on the population of...? Let us have the study. Let us tear it apart. What do we have to lose by admitting that smoking may not cause cancer in this way or that one?

> They do not mean, "Smoking one cigarette is guaranteed to give you cancer"

Your assumption, but not mine. For all I know, smoking one cigarette may do the job.

> Picking at semantic nits is counterproductive.

Why? Details are important.

> There's probably even a name for it as a logical fallacy

Even logical fallacies are not fallacies when they are relevant to the discussion at hand. This is Logical Fallacy 101--see the "Fallacy Fallacy".

> I'm too lazy and frustrated at the general state of discourse in the world to bother looking it up right now.

This is discourse, right here. Bringing frustration into it is fine, but there's no guarantee it won't affect the quality of the discourse...

Smoking causes an early death.

Shooting yourself in the head causes an early death.

Eating sugar causes an early death.

All of those are true in some cases and false for others. Nuance matters because that’s where the truth actually is. You don’t convince people who disagree with you by loudly yelling the generality - they know the generality and already disagree with it. Dig deeper.

I think people get frustrated since even if you actually get through to someone and understand their perspective, it doesn't guarantee that person will be open to learning and abandoning their previously held beliefs.

It's difficult to accept that some individuals will never be open to a change of mind, or maybe that the patience required is too much.

For sure, there's no guarantee. For this reason absolute truth has at times been turned into an emotional baseball bat under such circumstances. It's frustrating to lose traction, or even find oneself pushed backward. Argument thus becomes a full-time employee of boiling emotion.

And that's also a really good reason to have a simple framework to help with the moderation of effort, if the goal is to change a mind. For example, at the very least it may need to be understood that such a process could take years and years. It's not even just a logical precision or debater-quality question; it's also a question of energy, relationship values, and emotion.

I'd add that at an individual level there are also some leverage points that aren't available at a group level. For example, you can sometimes more quickly identify and speak to an individual's value system. E.g. are they afraid of being closed-minded in general, and as such do they get sucked up into every conspiracy that comes along? Usually there are a lot of little values that add up, within the individual. Walking through these can bring outside perspectives to an individual's awareness more quickly, as perhaps-unconscious motives are made conscious.

The contrast between the individual and group level is something I've been thinking about a lot lately.

Your point about the value system is intriguing. In my experience, debate has always been more fulfilling on the individual level, since it feels like the exchange of ideas comes more easily. Trying to expand this to a wider audience takes much more effort like you described.

Surely you would admit that this breaks down in many cases. Suppose you are teaching someone to drive. They might have some funny ideas about what they can do safely. But there isn't any room for debate. Same if we are building a bridge. I can't come in with some creative new idea and implement it with out first learning the right way to build a bridge. Nature doesn't have some mental model that I can choose to disagree with. It is what it is and I have to adapt my model or suffer.

> They might have some funny ideas about what they can do safely. But there isn't any room for debate

What are the ideas, and why isn't there any room for debate? It seems like a bit of an imaginative and wide-open perception to yield much traction for the purposes of this discussion.

> I can't come in with some creative new idea and implement it with out first learning the right way to build a bridge

Hmm, is there "a" right way? What size is the bridge? For what use? I can build a Lego bridge that's pretty strong. Did I just meet nature at its bridge-building rules while not knowing your right way, or are those rules perhaps more nuanced than expected? Also, are we sure that the imaginary creative idea in question is in total disagreement with nature? What if it's fitting observed perceptions? Perhaps it has leverage in this way or that. Again there's not much else to be said in the conceptual zone here. I'd also add that dichotomous model like "adapt or suffer" is in my experience a common sign of a mental model which may be in need of further adaptation :-)

Adapt or suffer is not a mental model. I'm not talking about politics or religion. If you routinely drive down the wrong side of the highway because you would not adapt then you will suffer. That's just the way it is. Can you agree on that?

The imagined example seems suspiciously detached from real context, and also detail-avoidant. Hypotheticals that get even broader and less detailed aren't really doing such an absolutist position any favors. Instead they would seem to buttress the position that absolutism is easily divorced from real-life utility and social benefit.

I would offer that the questions you ask do seem to point at a fixed mental position, around which theoretical and intractable constructs are arranged as seems most expeditious to the closure of the discussion. If that's what you really want, permission to go your way and think your thoughts without others butting in with details, then you don't really need a partner with whom to reach that decision. But there's also no guarantee that relevant and contextual details won't cause someone in your position considerable philosophical trouble in the future, around this fixed concept of truth...

Fair enough. You avoided my question. Looks like we are at opposites then. I see your position as absolutist. Everything is a model. No exception. There is no truth.

I think there is truth and that we have to drop our egos and continually adapt and understand. To be honest I think that humanities ego has never been bigger, postmodernism is a symptom of this, and we are suffering more than we need to because of it.

To be clear, your question about traffic was unwisely unencumbered by real context and details. Let me give you a personal example: I have a friend who routinely drove in the oncoming traffic lane. She never had to adapt to a rule about driving in this way, because she had an additional layer of frameworks to protect her. She was a construction engineer. The adaptation was already performed for her, by smart civic policy.

So what you have to ask is, who's doing this thing, and why? What factors are involved? Details. Otherwise the solution will fail to the extent that it is divorced from context. And that's no way to develop policy, be it personal or public. This kind of fixed, non-adaptive thinking leads to the Judge Judy phenomenon, rewriting public policy discourse as shallow "common sense" pornography for what amounts to entertainment for armchair critics.

Your summary of my position as "no truth" is also unfair to the details, since I communicated upthread that multiple truths and perspectives may exist, and that this can create a smarter approach to problem-solving. This is true even in computer programming, where multiple, conflicting truths about an object can be reconciled, simulated and leveraged. But the trick is depth, and details. That's why there's no computer program that stops everyone from driving in oncoming traffic. By itself it's not a useful rule in that it fails to account for the exceptions.

What seems to be happening at the end of your comment is that you have a set of perceptions from your past, these exist as fixed labels or categories in your mind, and you are attempting to map them onto my words without so much as asking if they're relevant. Which, unfortunately, they're not. Postmodernism needn't be involved; these ideas predate it by quite a stretch. So while your conclusion seems to have felt therapeutic, it's also a communication of subjective-emotive values, and not quite ready for logical and useful public discourse.

I'm trying to be straight with you and ignoring the condescension in your comments. (Anyone can do that). This appears to have been far too charitable given your last sentence.

Anyway, I'll continue to treat you as an equal and tell you straight that I think you are being dishonest throughout this exchange. Most people when asked the question about driving in the wrong lane would give me the benefit of the doubt and assume that it wasn't the highly unusual situation you describe. I think your know full well what I meant but you chose to come at it like a lawyer (which is what I mean by dishonest). In order to prevent that I'll try to lock it down:

Would you agree that if you routinely drive down the wrong side of the highway when it is fully open to the public and there are cars driving against you in the lane that you are in that in that case you are likely to suffer as a result of your failure to adapt your model to that of the rest of the society around you?

> come at it like a lawyer (which is what I mean by dishonest)

This seems to get more and more emotional, but even if not so, I would suggest that people who feel it's an absolute truth that every lawyer is dishonest are really doing the legal world a disservice by not at least offering training via ethics courses.

I also admit to being frustrated at the unfairness of the argument, in which I've communicated several times a point that gets at the crux of the issue: Real context and details. Both are needed.

So what happened was: I encouraged you to think about real context, and instead you added more details to the fake example, turning it into a corner case and making it an exceptional situation as opposed to a workable general example justifying absolute truth. In effect you've further marginalized the reality and utility of the absolute truth idea.

Your sense of the existence of absolute truth is apparently held hostage by unrealistic conceptual examples, turning it into a straw man, which I hope you can understand I'm not interested in debating...

There's an article linked from hn that I just read where the author says:

"There are, after all, no post-fact conversations when we talk about how to build a bridge, for example."

I don't know if I would be able to function in a world where this kind of statement had to be qualified every time. The editor of Die Zeit appears to think similarly. So it looks like there's at least three of us who think like this. But you're not alone either. Each to their own.

Alas, “post-fact” itself is a bit of a straw man. “Many truths” is not the same thing as “no truths”.

Your scenario has changed significantly now to someone willingly driving at oncoming traffic in the same lane. I think you’ve inadvertently proven your adversary’s point.

Knee jerk black and white statements are very rarely correct.