Political Truth

Politics at its root is about tribes, not truth.

Politics masquerades as the search for truth, so people get taken in. But a truth that makes your tribe lose is a very unpopular truth. Truth is always beneficial in the long term. Copernican theory led to satellites. In the short term, though, you might have gotten burned at the stake.

Political truths—like money, status, and borders—are true if everyone believes them to be true. You can change these by rewriting facts in people’s brains, such as: What is a dollar worth? Who is the president? Where is the border? These truths are what our establishment is set up to manipulate.

In politics, there's almost never an incentive to tell a truth that could annoy your tribe. A truth that leads to your tribe suffering a disadvantage is a truth that goes untold.

In politics, the normal incentives are reversed. Admitting an error costs personal status, while making an error only imposes costs on others. There are the people interested in your argument, and there are the people interested in distorting your argument.

Journalist Michael Kinsley says, “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth—some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say."

We select people who win popularity contests, then wonder why they're bad at allocating scarce resources.

This is the paradox of a free society. If it’s really free, it may allow ideologies to flourish that want to stamp out society.

It’s not just about free speech. It’s about the cost of speech. If you’re jailed by the state for speech, you may not speak out. But if you’re fired by an employer for speech, that is costly too—a cost greater than most can pay. Costly speech means only the wealthy speak freely.

The monopoly on truth is upstream of the monopoly on violence.

The opinions of others are imperfect proxies for analyzing the data yourself.

The more technical knowledge you have in an area, the less you need to rely on reputational signals. A few scientists publish a study; a few dozen people summarize it; a few million read the summaries. Then everyone argues with each other. Most of the nodes involved in that scenario are signal repeaters. What actually matters for determining truth are signal sources.

Signal repeaters are valuable because they bring items to your attention. Sometimes their summaries are even reliable. But the truth is upstream.

Data allows absolute reckoning of truth; reputation is relative reckoning. The internet makes it much easier to rely on data but much more common to rely on reputation.

People around you repeating the same idea may have gotten it from the same source. This fools our truth sensors, but popularity does not equal truth. There is no point debating someone who can't whip out plots, primary URLs, or raw data. Argue with signal sources, not signal repeaters.

Many people do not reason forward from logical premises, but backward from social consequences. This has its own logic because social capital is capital. Screaming at the outgroup is much cheaper than investing in the ingroup.

Everybody has strong opinions about people they've never met based on tales told by people they do not know.

A great book called The Gray Lady Winked shows how we've been constantly gaslighted by the New York Times Company and other institutions. It's not just that the New York Times Company wrote itself out of causing the Iraq war with false information or wrote itself out of messing up the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic with false information…it wrote itself out of other historical episodes too. The company has never actually had a good informational track record. It printed Nazi propaganda verbatim, Soviet propaganda verbatim, and Castro's propaganda verbatim. In many historical episodes, it was on the wrong side, and because it controlled the narrative later, it could rewrite history. You realize the extent of it when you go back in the archives and compare what its articles actually said to what it said they said. You realize, “Oh, that doesn't add up.”

We have a huge problem in every area where social consensus determines truth. It's much, much deeper than people think.

Is it all a social construct?

Well, then, that means we can construct society.