I’d break apart instrumental rationality instead, because grouping what is in there is less important than identifying what is in there. I made a start at that above. Epistemic truths allow for accurate modeling of the world. Very instrumentally rational (note epistemic rationality as a sub type of instrumental rationality), but there are ways in which a belief can be useful besides modeling.
Here are some ways a belief can be socially useful:
Back to what I can do with a belief, I can tell it to my neighbor. That becomes a very complicated use because it now involves the interaction with another mind with other knowledge. I can inform my neighbor of something. I can lie to my neighbor. I can signal to my neighbor. There are quite a number of uses to communicating a belief to my neighbor. One interesting thing is that I can communicate things to my neighbor that I don’t even understand.
What I would expect, in a population of evolved beings, is that there’d be some impulse to judge beliefs for all these uses, and to varying degrees for each usage across the population.
The signaling aspect of beliefs is likely the most socially powerful aspect.
I get all this, I think. I didn’t realize you were equating “socially useful” and “socially true.”
I guess those might feel very similar; that one’s experience of the social use of a belief could feel a lot like truth. In fact, a belief seeming socially useful, a belief seeming not to cause cognitive dissonance, and a belief seeming epistemically true might be the same experience in other people’s heads—say, a belief feeling “right.”
Despite knowing this, I still feel deeply wronged and get filled with negative emotion whenever I see or hear the phrases “social truth” or “socially true”. A bit like watching someone get raped or pushed onto the tracks of an incoming train or something.
Thanks, your comment was useful. This helped me reorder and re-estimate my values a bit.
I’m not confident I know what you mean by “social truth”. Can you break that apart?
Here’s a longer and more contextualized comment on the sam: http://lesswrong.com/lw/eqn/the_useful_idea_of_truth/7jyn
I’d break apart instrumental rationality instead, because grouping what is in there is less important than identifying what is in there. I made a start at that above. Epistemic truths allow for accurate modeling of the world. Very instrumentally rational (note epistemic rationality as a sub type of instrumental rationality), but there are ways in which a belief can be useful besides modeling.
Here are some ways a belief can be socially useful:
The signaling aspect of beliefs is likely the most socially powerful aspect.
I get all this, I think. I didn’t realize you were equating “socially useful” and “socially true.”
I guess those might feel very similar; that one’s experience of the social use of a belief could feel a lot like truth. In fact, a belief seeming socially useful, a belief seeming not to cause cognitive dissonance, and a belief seeming epistemically true might be the same experience in other people’s heads—say, a belief feeling “right.”
Despite knowing this, I still feel deeply wronged and get filled with negative emotion whenever I see or hear the phrases “social truth” or “socially true”. A bit like watching someone get raped or pushed onto the tracks of an incoming train or something.
Thanks, your comment was useful. This helped me reorder and re-estimate my values a bit.
I agree with you—social truth or intersubjective truth are different things than empirical truth and pretending otherwise is misleading.