Yesterday, I blogged:
I was surprised to run across this aphorism on Facebook the other day: "That Which Can Be Destroyed By the Truth Should Be." There were lots of comments celebrating this abstraction. I considered delivering truth that would destroy their bullshit celebration of a principle I doubt they believe.
Today, I must destroy my own statements with truth. I'm going to give this post my rarely used "I was wrong" tag!
I wasn't wrong about running across the aphorism on Facebook the other day, but I was wrong to remember "lots of comments celebrating" it. I merely imagined that other people would read it and celebrate it. My son John had reposted something he'd originally posted 8 years ago that passed along a post from Humans of New York. The Humans of New York post had a photograph of a young man with a purple notebook and this conversation between the photographer and the man:
"If you could give one piece of advice to a large group of people, what would it be?"
"If something can be destroyed by truth, it should be."
"I like that. Where'd it come from?"
"I'm not sure exactly. But it's really just another way of stating the scientific method. We shouldn't be clinging to hypotheses that are contradicted by observation.
John quoted "If something can be destroyed by truth, it should be" and he added it to a Facebook "album" of his that he calls "Intellectual Honesty." I'd say John is expressing some admiration for the adage. I have some admiration for it myself, but when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out in the abstract, I get suspicious.
There were 2 comments on John's repost. The first one, "Topical quote," is slightly celebratory, possibly satirical, possibly partisan. The second one "R'amen" is a joke that I get: It's "amen" for believers in The Flying Spaghetti Monster.
So, clearly, truth has destroyed "There were lots of comments celebrating this abstraction."
Posts
17 comments:
Truth isn't destruction... Truth is restorative.
Lies are destructive.
"But it's really just another way of stating the scientific method. We shouldn't be clinging to hypotheses that are contradicted by observation."
In other words, we shouldn't be clinging to the current global warming theories. As William Briggs (PhD Cornell U. - Statistics) says, "Only actual model performance counts. That’s how science is supposed to work. We trust only those models that work. Can we say anything about actual performance? Yes, we can. We can say with certainty that the models stink. We can say that models have over a period of many years predicted temperatures greater than we have actually seen. We can say that the discrepancy between the models’ predictions and reality is growing wider. There is no reason to place much warrant in the models’ predictions."
My truth is that we evolved with a spot in our psyche for shared spiritual faith with our particular band of humans because it helped us to survive in an uncaring wilderness, it's the cubby in our mind where we keep 'meaning,' and sure, any one of these faiths could be destroyed with "the Truth" but it's the "should be" that leaves me cold.
It's like telling billy goats that they shouldn't butt heads against each other because it's not rational. Somehow, for all goat kind, it is rational, on a level that no individual billy goat understands.
my rarely used "I was wrong" tag!
No kidding…
Sometimes the truth is not the Great Destroyer. Sometimes it's just an inconvenience to be shut down, quieted, put away, and not heard from again for years. The truth cannot be killed, but it can be kidnapped. And then rendered harmless.
Look at the Russia Collusion incident. It was kidnapped long enough to affect an election. Then let out, a bit at a time. And...nothing.
The Hunter Biden laptop incident was kidnapped. Stashed away until well after the election. Then let out into the air and...nothing.
The Wuhan Virus lab leak was certainly kidnapped. Moved around from safe house to safe house. And is still trying to escape- to leak out. But it, too, has been rendered harmless.
And on and on. The truth requires some timing to be The Great Destroyer. Otherwise, in our era of bytes and bites, it's just another 20 second blurb that we hear before we move onto the next blurb.
"We shouldn't be clinging to hypotheses that are contradicted by observation."
A wise manager of mine used to say, "Observation and deduction without investigation is worthless." He was right. Too much anecdotal observation, or observation filtered by prejudgement, leads to wrong conclusions.
How about this one? "When you get your enemy down, make sure you kill him."
Aphorisms are pithy but reductive.
Only a few good men can handle the truth. Tom Cruise could not be reached for comment.
The truth is, Chinese lab gain of function research participant Fauci, has a painting of himself above his desk.
It's indicative that the phrase comes from science fiction or science popularization. Most of the time, people aren't looking to destroy things, even with the truth. But when lying becomes bolder, more pervasive, and more unashamed, people can definitely work themselves up into that state.
Who gets to decide what is true? - That is the issue at the heart of it all.
Yeah, I was surprised by the idea that there's anywhere where it gets broadly celebrated, outside of the small "rationalist" community.
I am accordingly happy with this post. Another aphorism of the "rationalist" community is that "Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality." That is, if you have a harder time "rationalizing" the untrue than accepting the true, it indicates you're doing thinking right, you're actually managing to use your brain to separate truth and fiction rather than just using your intellect to defeat yourself.
(I keep putting "rationalist" in quotes because, although it's the word that tends to get used, everybody in the community knows it's a poor name. "Bayesian empiricists who spend special effort on working out how to think effectively" could plausibly shorten to "rationalist" in ordinary English, but "rationalist" was already loaded with all sorts of other implications, so . . .)
Now I remembered a clip of the Dark Horse podcast that mentioned Chesterton’s Fence:
Chesterton's fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. The quotation is from Chesterton’s 1929 book The Thing, in the chapter entitled "The Drift from Domesticity":
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it. 1)
1) "Taking a Fence Down". American Chesterton Society. Retrieved 21 June 2014.
Dark Horse podcast video clip ���� https://youtu.be/3FNfdQzNmUY
The scientific method and scientific truth are applicable only to scientific methods and scientific truths. I don't think Marx hit upon the science of history or economics. He had his reasons and he had his methods, but they were not, in fact, scientific. Likewise with Freud. Freud and his followers claimed that he was a scientist, but, whatever the pros and cons of Freud's observations, they weren't scientific......Paradoxically, people have developed a kind of religious faith in the scientific method. The scientific method works fine when observing molecules under stress and how they will behave, but not so hot when observing individuals in pursuit of money or sex or salvation and how they will behave.
Yesterday I decried the proposition, because a good many great things have been accomplished from a basis of untruths, and their destruction leaves much to be desired.
Today I wholeheartedly agree that the scientific method, applied via disproof of the null hypothesis, is exactly the correct method to determine most convincingly that a hypothesis is sufficient to describe phenomena observed. If something later comes along that is both factual (for our scientific purposes, true) and confounds or contradicts that previous hypothesis, a new hypothesis is required to describe the entirety of the data observed.
Thus Newtonian Physics was augmented by Relativity Theory, which explained more of the observable data in such fields as astronomy. But in closing, to say that Truth should be used to destroy, say, religious belief, is to misunderstand the aphorism, and to misapply it.
'"If something can be destroyed by truth, it should be."'
The Easter Bunny has a concern...
"If something can be destroyed, it should be."
Seems more in keeping with the zeitgeist.
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