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On Empirical Truth and Affective Truth
"We've always been at war with Eastasia."
Being able to be cloaked in the mantle of "truth," unfortunately, is extremely profitable to all manner of people.
In the broader rationalist community, there's a concern with actual genuine truth via empiricism -- observation, analysis, hypotheses, testing, falsifiability, the scientific method, and so on.
We can all laugh when the North Korean government makes a declaration along the lines of "Kim Jong-un is the third greatest leader of all time, only surpassed by his Great and Illustrious ancestors, Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-il" -- but what's not funny is that the ability to have this statement more-or-less accepted by 25 million people is quite literally a matter of life or death for the DPRK's leadership.
If we wanted to test whether Jong-un is a Great Leader, we'd probably ask for parameters. How many scientific advancements have happened under his leadership? How was the quality of life improved? Should we measure by GDP? Solving social ills? Lower disease rates, better access to medicine, reduced rates of starvation? Perhaps a more subjective measure, like the fairness and consistency of North Korean courts, perhaps as judged by inquiring and weighing the opinions of experienced and well-respected jurists across the world?
But this exercise is worthless -- even laughable -- because the North Korean government is not resting its claims on our kind of truth, empirical truth.
It seems to me, unfortunately, that humans don't naturally differentiate between the truth of Newton's Second Law of Motion "1 N = 1 kg⋅m/s2" and the truth of statements like "X Country is the greatest country in the world."
But I contend that it would be a severe mistake to fight against how the vast majority of how people think and process: the concept of "truth" has historically never been limited to empirical truth.
Furthermore, this piece started off with a statement that most people worldwide would feel to be false despite being asserted to be true and believed by a few people; that makes the job easier.
But consider instead, "Shakespeare is truth" or "I've been living a lie."
What are these?
These statements might, indeed, be true -- for some definition of true.
Indeed, to me personally, Shakespeare is truth. Xenophon is truth. I would assert that.
Though it's a different kind of truth than Newton or Maxwell.
We could call the "truth" of someone's life, art, and aesthetics "affective truth" to differentiate it from empirical truth.
"This place feel right to me" -- true! Affectively true.
If we wanted to have this enter into common parlance, we might use the words "empirically true" and "spiritually true."
When Kim Jong-un's press secretary puts out a piece about the Dear Great Leader, they're making claims of spiritual truth.
Indeed, for many definitions of religions, the North Korean government is trying to run a religion. A religion that almost all of us would call false -- affectively false, in that it feels wrong. It isn't true. It isn't a good way to live. We can feel that, intuitively. North Korea is a lie -- in terms of the claims they make about life and living.
North Korean's mythos is, certainly, also built on a house of empirical falseness, lies, empirical untruths.
But to try to argue empiricism with someone's spirituality[*] is, generally speaking, a wasted exercise.
We often see hyper-rational people refuting objectively false statements that politicians make -- for all the good it does them!
Politicians are often making appeals to affective truth, rather than attempting to give their best estimations and judgments of empirical truth.
I think -- I suspect -- at least, I hope -- that if we narrowly scope the definition of "empirical truth" to narrow standards of involving observation, testing, and resting as much as possible on mathematics and hard science, and only making highly parameterized statements when dealing with more subjective issues -- in this case, I think we'll be allowed to have "empirical truth" stand as it is.
Hopefully it can be technical and boring enough that we can avoid it becoming a political or religious battleground.
That's not to say there won't be heated disagreements by experts in a field about what the empirical is -- such is normal and productive -- but ideally we can stop much of the wasted energy that comes from when a rationalist is making an argument about empirical truth, the other party is making an argument about affective truth, and both sides are getting frustrated.
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Comments (23)
I want to break apart
affectiveandspiritualtruth so to better understand them.I think there's three kinds of truth here,
empirical,affectiveandspiritualbeing different kinds of their own.The raw, experiential, feely truth, that hasn't been tainted by reason: that's what you'd call
spiritual truth. It would be that initial feeling you get from reading beautiful poetry or witnessing the Olympic mountain range for the first time. It's the direct truth you get from your experience, before our neocortexes lure us into believing that the logical connections we derive from experience actually exist themselves.Spiritual truthis pure experience.All other truth, both
empiricalandaffective, is derived fromspiritualtruth, and it's all less true thanspiritualtruth. Like pure light being filtered through a stained glass window; the truth too is distorted. It's the solipsist's creed, that all we can truly know is that our experience is happening. All other truth is less than 100% accurate.So we're left with these two kinds of derived truth:
empiricalandeffective.Metaphorical fun! If
spiritualtruth is a pure beam of white light being shone through a glass prism, then the kind of derived truth is determined by the nature of the glass prism.The glass prism is the function that takes as input the
spiritualtruth, and outputs a derived truth. A perfect prism will break apart the light into it's respective parts with zero loss of data.Users of lesswrong tend to prefer very pure, perfect prisms. They want their prism to take the entirety of the light in, without losing any photons. They want as close as possible to
empiricaltruth. Unfortunately it's an un-catchable dragon, but we can get close!Affectivetruth, then, is a really shoddy prism. The worst sorts ofaffectivetruth are virtually stained glass windows; carefully crafted by the artist to distort the spiritual truth until it looks exactly how they want it to look.Affectivetruth is borderline manipulative. It's what our parents scolded us for when we first learned how to tell white lies. It's leaving our prism so undefined that anything can be said of the light passing through it.I don't think North Korean propaganda is very
spiritual, but I do see it as being veryaffective.Summary: Spiritual truth is experience. All other truth is derived from that. Empirical truth is good derived truth; Affective truth is less-desirable. Affective truth does not equal spiritual truth.
There is a certain relationship between the statement "snow is white" and what you see if you look at snow. The same relationship holds between the statement "my partner is cheating on me" and what you will see if you covertly follow your partner around all day. Between the weather forecast and the weather. Between what a government says about its military activities and what you will see if find all its forces and watch what they are doing.
This concept is of fundamental importance to every aspect of life: thinking, doing, feeling, everything. It deserves a single, short, familiar word that means that thing and nothing else. That word exists: it is the word "truth". To discover truth, you must look and see, and experiment.
All of the extensions of that word to other concepts, such as "affective truth", "my truth", "spiritual truth", and so on, apply it to things that lack that fundamentally important quality: that the words match the way things are. They are ways of passing off ignorance as truth, feelings as truth, lies as truth. It saves you the trouble of looking, seeing, experimenting, and updating. You can say "this is true for me" and pull the wool over your own eyes while claiming that blindness is but truer vision.
Likewise, replacing "truth" tout court by adding limitative modifiers, like "empirical truth", "scientific truth", "rational truth", and so on, is an attempt to pretend that that fundamentally important quality is not of fundamental importance, but just one small part of a rich panoply of other ways of relating to the world. But it is not.
Feelings exist. True statements can be made about them. Whatever feelings you are having, it is true that you are having that feeling. But the feeling itself is not something that is capable of being true or false. Whenever you say "I feel that...", it is more accurate to say "I believe that..." Only when you do that can you ask, "Is this belief true?" Only when you shy away from that question will you need to say "it feels true."
"They are ways of passing off ignorance as truth" Wrong, the author used the example of Shakespeare being true. That is not ignorance, that is understanding the importance of a priceless work of art. Not just it's nature as an artifact of history of drama/literature/psychology/etc, but the stories and poetry themselves are "true" in pretty much every sense that matters. Maybe there wasn't really a Romeo and Juliet tween blood sacrifice that helped solidify the postfeudalistic sociopolitical strucuture in Verona, but that play is still an excellent portrayal of that time and place.
You are talking there about simple truth, "empirical" truth, not the stuff I criticised as passing off ignorance.
BTW, the relationship of the play to historical Veronese politics is at best indirect. Tenuous, even. Shakespeare's major source was Arthur Brooke's poem "The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet" (1562), which was a free paraphrase of Matteo Bandello's "Giuletta e Romeo" (1551), which was based on Luigi da Porto’s "Giulietta e Romeo" (1530), which was an adaptation of Masuccio Salernitano's "Mariotto and Ganozza" (1476), the earliest known source for the tale. All of these were written as fiction.
Incorrect. You missed the point.
It's a way to communicate with less analytical people without acting like a clueless sledgehammer that alienates people.
We might both disagree with "Serbia is the greatest country in the world" but that's not a very good argument to communicate to a Serbian who holds that view as deeply true.
Alternatively, do the Spock thing and try to instruct the average Balkan-country citizen on their "language accuracy" and see how far it gets you.
If you can get someone who asserts their opinion is "true" to grant it's true to them but not empirically true you've already won half the battle in helping them think and communicate better.
There are other ways to not be a clueless sledgehammer. Speaking of which...
Ahem.
What is true, and what is needful to say to the person in front of you, are two different things. The difference between them is not necessarily, not even usually, one of truth and falsity, but of what truths to express, and how to express them in such a way that when the other person hears then, what they hear is true.
Why would I be arguing with him at all about that?
I am more interested in thinking and communicating better myself than in helping anyone else to. It is not that I do not care, but that I have no business doing so unless particular circumstances make it necessary. Just because I hear someone talking in terms I think mistaken is not a reason for me to jump in and start counselling them on epistemic hygiene. I do not play this person on the net or anywhere else.
If you regard valuing the simple virtue of truth as "the Spock thing", why are you here?
I think most people here are aware that there's a gap between how we tend to communicate on Less Wrong or in other rationalist circles, and how people tend to communicate in various other circles. I think that's a component of the concept of inferential distance.
But separating out various types of beliefs into categories such as "empirical truth" and "affective truth" also has a gap of inferential distance from most of the people we'd be using such concepts to communicate with, and I think it's questionable whether it's a step along the direction that brings them closest to the position we're trying to get to.
I don't think we should stop "wasting energy" disputing "affective truths". Even supposing this category of "affective truth" is useful, the main example you give is presented as empirical truth. I think such "affective truths" are usually presented as empirical truth. This is destroying the public's ability to reason. Let us at least point out the distinction.
Besides, some of us get an emotional benefit from being able to rely on beliefs resembling facts.
We're in agreement.
I do not think we should dilute the meaning of the word "truth" like this.
If I say "This painting is beautiful", I mean "my brain produces a pleasant reaction upon seeing this painting". The latter sentence is empirical truth. See also 2-Place and 1-Place Words
Also empirically true!
If by this, you mean "I like Shakespeare's writing" (an empirical truth), just say so.
If I say "This painting is round", do I mean "my brain produces a sensation of roundness upon seeing this painting"?
No. "This painting is round" is a statement about the properties of the painting itself, independent of any observer. "This painting is beautiful" is a statement about the reaction of the speaker's brain upon seeing the painting. The syntactical similarity between those different kinds of statements in English (and all other natural languages that I know of) is unfortunate to say the least.
Well, not only the speaker, otherwise it'd be completely equivalent to "I like this painting" which it isn't. It is a claim about ambijective features of the painting -- more or less "this painting has certain features such that brains (at least those raised in cultural contexts similar to us) typically produce pleasant reactions".
As I understand it, "This painting is beautiful" is completely equivalent to "I like (the visual aspects of) this painting".
Definitional arguments are not useful. Even using your interpretation, the point stands: the statement, properly understood, is empirical truth.
I was trying to get at the unnecessary turn into neuroscience.
Why bring the brain into it? Why not say that "This painting is beautiful" is a statement about the reaction of the speaker? Or, paralleling Good_Burning_Plastic, a statement about the reaction of people generally (at least those raised in etc.)?
No particular reason.
That is what I mean, yes.
Whether we define beauty to be the reaction of the speaker, or the reaction of the majority of a certain group of people that are similar to the speaker, is not relevant: in both cases "This painting is beautiful" becomes an empirical truth instead of an "affective" truth.
The piece started with a quotation from "1984". Is that the statement you meant? As a quotation from a work of fiction, it is not truth-bearing. Within the fiction it is a lie.
These statements might, indeed, be made of green cheese -- for some definition of green cheese.
One could call this semantic transubstantiation: a supposed essential substance of the word remains the same while the mere accident of its meaning is completely replaced. Or perhaps a semantic neutron bomb, which leaves the word untouched while destroying the meaning.
“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success..”
In regards to ‘empirically true’, don’t people already refer to this as ‘scientifically true’. People also refer to facts, opinions and beliefs and these seem similar to your empirical/affective/spiritual truth.
Language is not logic. Words are just wind and people can say whatever they want. I assume this holds for other languages as well, but English involves metaphors, understatement, overstatement, hyperbole etc. When people say things, they are not always meant to be assertions. The words might just be for rhetorical effect and meant as an attempt to draw attention to something. For example, I would guess that saying “Shakespeare is truth” is meant to allude to the meaningfulness of Shakespeare writings. Another example might be that you say you are starving when you are actually just hungry. This is a hyperbole or Auxesis it is not meant to be taken literally, but is meant to draw attention to the fact that you are hungry.
I find it easier to use something like this baloney detection kit. It’s normally pretty easy to tell when people are arguing about beliefs rather than facts.
Just in case somebody starts quoting Hitler in attempt to appear sophisticated, this quote is actually misattributed. Moreover, variations of this quote were actually said by Hitler and Goebbels, but about the Jews and anti-German propaganda, not themselves (see big lie). Indeed, why would Hitler say anything incriminating himself publicly enough, so it could be quoted much later?
ok I changed the qutoe. I didn't actually look at the background of the quote just the idea of it. The idea is that it is taking advantage of the fact that due to the Availability heuristic, Representativeness heuristic etc., ideas that are more vivid are going to be more likely to be believed. Of course, it didn't mention this, but you would also need to limit the dissemination of contrary information
This is a shit article here, and good article on Sebastian's website. Also has a really clickbatey attractive landing page on his new newsletter
Major question. Where do you fit the kind of truth that comes from realising an idea is incoherent, therefore must be wrong?
(For clarity, my view is that the whole notion of 'affective truth' is just plain wrong, but I have nothing to say on that which hasn't been already said)