I think I understand your worry: you think there's a truth thing separate from the heuristic I gave, and that the latter is just a loose approximation that we should not use as a replacement for the former.
I differ in that I think it's the reverse: truth always "cashes out" as a useful self-to-reality model, and this becomes clearer as your model gets more accurate. Rather than a just a heuristic, it is ultimately what you want when you say you are seeking the truth. And any judgment that you have reached the truth will fall back on the question of whether your have a useful self-to-reality model.
To put it another way, what if the model you were given performs perfectly? Would you have any worry that, "okay, sure, this is able to accurately capture the dynamics of all phenomena I am capable of observing ... but what if it's just tricking me? This might not all be really true." I would say at that point, you have your priorities reversed: if something fails at being "truth" but can perform that well, this "non-truth" is no longer something you should care about.
Less Wrong is a large community of very smart people with a wide spectrum of expertise, and I think relatively little of that value has been tapped.
Like my post The Best Textbooks on Every Subject, this is meant to be a community-driven post. The first goal is to identify topics the Less Wrong community would like to read more about. The second goal is to encourage Less Wrongers to write on those topics. (Respecting, of course, the implicit and fuzzy guidelines for what should be posted to Less Wrong.)
One problem is that those with expertise on a subject don't necessarily feel competent to write a front-page post on it. If that's the case, please comment here explaining that you might be able to write one of the requested posts, but you'd like a writing collaborator. We'll try to find you one.
Rules
You may either:
or...
I will regularly update the list of suggested Less Wrong posts, ranking them in descending order of votes (like this).
The List So Far (updated 02/11/11)