A few truths react very sharply to being disbelieved, like law of gravity. Instantaneous response to attempted transgressions, aka “falsification by splat” But most are like overeating and chronic stress, gradually adding the equivalent of weight and arterial cholesterol.
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And when the consequences occur you won’t necessarily be able to trace back appropriate levels of causal attribution to all contributing causes. So “falsification by heart attack” of “poor eating is fine” is not as strong as “falsification by splat” of “gravity is a lie”.
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To put it another way, there are “limits to epistemic hygiene” as
@sarahdoingthing put it, mainly due to the natural dynamics of interacting truths with different falsification time constants and determinative sufficiency.https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/03/02/the-limits-of-epistemic-hygiene/ …Show this thread -
This leads to truth arbitraging. If Lie 1 *will* kill you in 1 year and Lie 2 *may* kill you in 2 years, and you tell yourself both lies, the second lie is essentially free to tell. You can reap any immediate upsides at no cost.
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This kind of truth arbitrage, done systematically and at scale, with particular use of longer-than-lifespan falsification half-lives, is the essence of effective subjective reality construction. Aka escaped realities for fun and profit. It’s not just okay, it’s essential.
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We are naturally excellent at this out of the womb. We do it almost unconsciously. It’s hard *not* to do it. You have to go on vipassana retreats in Burma and stuff to learn how not to do it. This is a good thing.
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Only major western philosopher I know of who’s come close to this sort of position is William James afaik. His flavor of pragmatic epistemology is closest to my own I think. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatic_theory_of_truth#James …
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End of conversation
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