Today
The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
How to Pursue Truth in Six Steps
Epistemological Panic, or Thinking for Yourself
Inside the Metaverse Meetups That Let People Share on Death, Grief, and Pain
The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling
We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.
Ted Chiang, Exhalation: Stories
How to Pursue Truth in Six Steps
Our minds are easily led away from truth—how best can we pursue it?
In a world full of misinformation, polarization and indoctrination, countless ideas compete for our assent, and conflicting claims are pronounced with forceful bravado. If our minds are so easily misled, how can we navigate through all of this noise to pursue truth with any reliability?
Step One: Cultivate Intellectual Humility
The first step on the path to truth is intellectual humility, which involves the acknowledgement of our limitations and fallibility in forming beliefs. When it comes to difficult questions lacking consensus answers, most of us are wrong about most things, and all of us are wrong about at least some things.
Nathan Mech, Discourse
Epistemological Panic, or Thinking for Yourself
To think is not to process information. We have impoverished our understanding of thinking by analogizing it to what our machines do. What we do is not processing. It is not computation. It is not data analysis. It is a distinctively, incorrigibly human activity that is a complex combination of conscious and unconscious, rational and intuitive, logical and emotional reflection. It is so complex that neither neurologists nor philosophers have found a way to model it, and the engineers of artificial intelligence are still struggling to replicate some of the simplest forms of pattern recognition that human cognition does so effortlessly. We must beware that in our attempt to make computers think like us we do not end up thinking like them.
Michael Ignatieff
Inside the Metaverse Meetups That Let People Share on Death, Grief, and Pain
Welcome to “Death Q&A,” a space with a unique combination of anonymity and togetherness, where avatars discuss what weighs on them most heavily.
A virtual destination where conversation can veer from the abstract to the incredibly intimate, Death Q&A is a weekly hour-long session built around grappling with mortality, where attendees often open up about experiences and feelings they’ve shared with no one else. Bright, cartoon-like avatars represent the dozen or so people who attend each meetup, freed by VR’s combination of anonymity and togetherness to engage strangers with an earnestness we typically reserve for rare moments, if we reveal it at all.
Hana Kiros, MIT Technology Review
I encourage you (always) to read the full piece, but for those who just want to know the six steps, here they are: (1) Cultivate intellectual humility, (2) Get a crash course in logic, (3) Impartially study the best arguments on each side, (4) Appreciate nuance, (5) Write it down and get feedback, (6) Have intellectual courage.
One of the reasons I’m keeping today’s post brief is because this essay is so long, ~6,000 words. I thought it was well worth the time it took to read, though. I found myself wanting to share paragraph after paragraph, as there’s so much to draw from so many of them. In the end, I settled on one. In summary: Click the link. Read the rest.
I’ve been responding to some of the writing prompts that Bridget Phetasy has been posting to her Write Club. One of the things I like about it is that it’s so far been a small group conversation where people can cut right to the chase, go as deep as they want into whatever the prompts ask without being the annoying commenter that goes on for too long about their thoughts and themselves (👋). The name Write Club, I assume, is a play on Fight Club, and it kind of reminds me of Fight Club, too. Meaning, it’s a place for people to go and do something with the things they’ve got going on deep down, things that want out. Anyway, I think that’s why this piece resonated with me when I read it this morning. The VR group described struck me as another kind of digital Fight Club/support group. On the one hand, it saddens me that we’ve become so reliant on technology to connect with one other. On the other hand, I see no road back, and it lifts my spirits to know that we have tools that allow us to cut the shit and go deep.