Patri Friedman

2/ For example, it is not (strictly) true that the God of Abraham existed & performed the miracles of the Bible. But it's very useful to be able to access the heart posture of opening to God; and a sacred text is an incredible social coordination mechanism.

3/ It is not (strictly) true that we should give our lives for 2 brothers or 4 cousins. That's our genes speaking & our vehicular incentives differ. But the nucleic sequences that value family survive, while those that don't inevitably perish. Genetic alliances are useful.

4/ There are multiple Nobel-winning fields dedicated to analyzing economic alignment questions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design …). But it feels like truth/usefulness belief alignment is under-studied.

5/ As a simple example, one can view the infamous Newcomb's paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox …) as pitting a truth (the boxes contents are set; taking both will strictly increase your outcome) against the useful belief that your choice now determines box B's contents.

6/ More broadly, neoreactionary philosophers (which, contra https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Patri_Friedman&direction=prev&oldid=936020859 …, I am not) model our age as one of declining governance masked by capital & tech prowess. Think "watching Netflix while police sirens wail:, or "stuck in traffic in your safe, affordable car".

7/ We could instead model this as an age where truth has triumphed at the expense of usefulness. Truth does give us many amazing powers, and it's meaningfully advancing our entire species. But abandoning useful fictions comes at enormous cost.

8/ The United States, as an open society, has more truth than China. But abandoning useful fictions about the nature of the state & role of individuals makes US demonstrably worse at building useful infrastructure quickly & cost-effectively. That matters too!

9/ Discovering biological truths has allowed us to control our reproduction. Vast libraries of truth make it reasonable to study through your 20s. And our tech truths produce endless distraction. All these are at the expense of useful practices that led to population growth.

A/ The result is that large swaths of the world are so useless as to not even be maintaining their human capital (population), in what @sovereignfamily calls "intergenerational suicide". We've gone from sterilizing medical tools to sterilizing ourselves.

B/ Or consider the truths about humanity's impact on Earth, which is often negative, and leads foolish people to forget the useful belief that Nature is here to serve Humans. A belief without which we would never have built the satellites that now measure our thermodynamic guilt.

C/ And so I ask you, my small but influential audience, to keep this tension in mind as you conduct your life, build systems, analyze the world, and move our species forward. Don't just think about what is true, but what is useful - and how to align them.

D/ For example, I am becoming a happier, more compassionate person as I slowly learn to open my heart to God (h/t @kamalravikant @johnmarkcomer @notredameparis). My life was worse when I let the truth of atheism shut out the usefulness of faith. Many others have found the same.