Some of the comments in this blog have touched on the question of why we ought to seek truth.  (Thankfully not many have questioned what truth is.)  Our shaping motivation for configuring our thoughts to rationality, which determines whether a given configuration is "good" or "bad", comes from whyever we wanted to find truth in the first place.

It is written:  "The first virtue is curiosity."  Curiosity is one reason to seek truth, and it may not be the only one, but it has a special and admirable purity.  If your motive is curiosity, you will assign priority to questions according to how the questions, themselves, tickle your personal aesthetic sense.  A trickier challenge, with a greater probability of failure, may be worth more effort than a simpler one, just because it is more fun.

A popular belief about "rationality" is that rationality opposes all emotion—that all our sadness and all our joy are automatically anti-logical by virtue of being feelings.  Yet strangely enough, I can't find any theorem of probability theory which proves that I should appear ice-cold and expressionless.

So is rationality orthogonal to feeling?  No; our emotions arise from our models of reality.  If I believe that my dead brother has been discovered alive, I will be happy; if I wake up and realize it was a dream, I will be sad.  P. C. Hodgell said:  "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be."  My dreaming self's happiness was opposed by truth.  My sadness on waking is rational; there is no truth which destroys it.

"The first virtue is curiosity."
        —The Twelve Virtues of Rationality

As rationalists, we are obligated to criticize ourselves and question our beliefs... are we not?

Consider what happens to you, on a psychological level, if you begin by saying:  "It is my duty to criticize my own beliefs."  Roger Zelazny once distinguished between "wanting to be an author" versus "wanting to write".  Mark Twain said:  "A classic is something that everyone wants to have read and no one one wants to read."  Criticizing yourself from a sense of duty leaves you wanting to have investigated, so that you'll be able to say afterward that your faith is not blind.  This is not the same as wanting to investigate.

This can lead to motivated stopping of your investigation.  You consider an objection, then a counterargument to that objection, then you stop there.  You repeat this with several objections, until you feel that you have done your duty to investigate, and then you stop there. You have achieved your underlying psychological objective: to get rid of the cognitive dissonance that would result from thinking of yourself as a rationalist, and yet knowing that you had not tried to criticize your belief.  You might call it purchase of rationalist satisfaction—trying to create a "warm glow" of discharged duty.

Followup to:  Tsuyoku Naritai, Reversed Stupidity is not Intelligence

The criticism is sometimes leveled against rationalists:  "The Inquisition thought they had the truth!  Clearly this 'truth' business is dangerous."

There are many obvious responses, such as "If you think that possessing the truth would license you to torture and kill, you're making a mistake that has nothing to do with epistemology."  Or, "So that historical statement you just made about the Inquisition—is it true?"

Reversed stupidity is not intelligence:  "If your current computer stops working, you can't conclude that everything about the current system is wrong and that you need a new system without an AMD processor, an ATI video card... even though your current system has all these things and it doesn't work.  Maybe you just need a new power cord."  To arrive at a poor conclusion requires only one wrong step, not every step wrong.  The Inquisitors believed that 2 + 2 = 4, but that wasn't the source of their madness.  Maybe epistemological realism wasn't the problem either?

It does seem plausible that if the Inquisition had been made up of relativists, professing that nothing was true and nothing mattered, they would have mustered less enthusiasm for their torture.  They would also have had been less enthusiastic if lobotomized.  I think that's a fair analogy.

And yet... I think the Inquisition's attitude toward truth played a role.  The Inquisition believed that there was such a thing as truth, and that it was important; well, likewise Richard Feynman.  But the Inquisitors were not Truth-Seekers.  They were Truth-Guardians.

Followup to:  Applause Lights

When you say the word "truth", people know that "truth" is a good thing, and that they're supposed to applaud.  So it might seem like there is a social norm in favor of "truth".  But when it comes to some particular truth, like whether God exists, or how likely their startup is to thrive, people will say:  "I just want to believe" or "you've got to be optimistic to succeed".

So Robin and I were talking about this, and Robin asked me how it is that people prevent themselves from noticing the conflict.

I replied that I don't think active prevention is required.  First, as I quoted Michael Vassar:

"It seems to me that much of the frustration in my life prior to a few years ago has been due to thinking that all other human minds necessarily and consistently implement modus ponens."

But more importantly, I don't think there does exist any social norm in favor of truth.  There's a social norm in favor of "truth".  There's a difference.