Conversation

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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Call these two kinds of truths acute versus chronic truths, which differ primarily in their falsification time constants and degree of determinative sufficiency. An acute truth acts quickly and without much need for help from other truths, to falsify disbelief.
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A chronic truth is one that responds to attempted transgression by slowly dripping fragility into the entire edifice of beliefs it is connected to, increasing the probabilities of other falsifications.
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The transgression of chronic truths doesn’t hurt you instantly and deteminisitically, but gradually weakens your sense of agency (call it earned helplessness as opposed to learned) and slowly increases the risk of death by other more acute causes like heart attack.
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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 put it, mainly due to the natural dynamics of interacting truths with different falsification time constants and determinative sufficiency.
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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.