[extropy-chat] Enhancing Our Truth Orientation

[Hal Finney]

I never responded to Robin's paper, http://hanson.gmu.edu/moretrue.pdf.
This whole area of self-deception and disagreement is one of the most
fascinating and paradoxical topics I have come across.  I imagine it
will create quite a stir when it makes it into the popular press.

One of the paradoxes of self-deception is that we probably don't really
want to stop.  We just think we do.  We are deceiving outselves about our
desire to overcome self-deception and learn the truth.  We gain social
benefits by proclaiming ourselves to be dedicated to the truth.  We make
ourselves look good by vowing to root out the evil of self-deception
and to improve ourselves by freeing our minds of these distortions.
It makes us look more honest, and makes us seem more trustworthy.
And of course, in order to improve the odds of achieving those social
benefits, we fool ourselves so that we really do believe what we say.
We convince ourselves that we really do seek the truth, just so that
we can lie more effectively to other people.  It helps us to manipulate
them into seeing us as honest and reliable partners.

I've commented before about a Zen-like quality in these considerations.
Zen students struggle to free their minds, but the harder they work,
the more they bind themselves to mundane reality.  The harder we try
to overcome self-deception, the more we give in to the fundamental
deceptiveness of our own motivations.

Despite these paradoxes, we can't allow ourselves to fall into
philosophical paralysis.  We have to make decisions, adopt policies,
and take actions on a day to day basis.  My approach is essentially
to play the hand I'm dealt.  It may well be that my desire to avoid
self-deception is ultimately fraudulent, but nevertheless this is what
evolution has presented to me.  And so I will pursue it.

There is another reason as well.  Robin doesn't push it very hard,
but the idea is that in the modern world, with all its complexity,
self-deception is no longer an affordable luxury.  We can't rely on simple
evolutionary instincts as a guideline any more.  Dealing with political,
social and technological issues of a complexity far greater than those
faced by our cave man ancestors, we need clear sighted, hard-nosed,
rational decision making.  Self-deception means bad decisions.  At a
social level, and possibly even at an individual level, we have entered
an era, for the first time in history, where seeing the truth has greater
survival value than lying to ourselves.

In the ancient past, it didn't matter that I might wish to be
less self-deceived, because there wasn't much I could do about it.
(Anything I could do, evolution would have eliminated as an option,
because self-deceivers are more successful.)  But today the world has
changed, and it is going to continue to change.  This is where Robin
sees new possibilities.  For the first time, people may genuinely become
able to reduce their levels of self-deception.  Robin suggests a number
of possible mechanisms, some relatively mundane like standardized test
scores, and others exotic, like futuristic mind alterations.

I would like to see a pragmatically focussed "how to" document on
overcoming self-deception.  Robin describes a number of technologies
which could help, but in relatively general terms.  For example, he talks
about the increase in documentation of our lives, with surveillance
systems and similar technologies.  It is theoretically possible to
carry a device which records all of our conversations, and in the
future, to record video of everything we do.  This may well decrease
self-deception about things that happen to us.  That's the description.
The practical advice would be, get and carry such a gadget.  Ideally it
would do automatic speech recognition so it could save the data as a
text transcript, for searching purposes.  Review the data periodically.
Use it to resolve disagreements where possible.

I used to fantasize about having something like this.  When I was younger,
I would often get into arguments about what was said, by who, and when.
I wished I could play back a recording and prove to the other person
that I was right!  Yes, I was that naive.  Well, I'm a little more
mellow these days, and so is my wife, and we hardly ever have those
kinds of disagreements any more.  Both of us have learned to respect each
other's memories.  But a device like this would probably have helped me
to discover the truth much sooner.

One idea along these lines Robin mentions is that your
documentation system could allow you to note how happy you are
at various times.  Since he wrote this, a new study came out
which used a similar idea and found some very surprising results,
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/306/5702/1776 ,
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1294028/posts.  People liked
watching TV more than taking care of their kids, exactly the opposite
of what previous studies had shown.  This is an terrific example of
reduced self-deception.  I'll bet most of those people would have said,
and believed, that spending time with their kids was the greatest joy
in their life.  This study proved otherwise in exactly the way that
Robin predicted.

Robin also talks about Idea Futures as a mechanism to come up with
unbiased consensus estimates about various factual situations.  But again,
how do we use this to reduce self-deception?  One answer may be, simply
believe what the market is telling you.  That's not always easy, though.
Maybe another answer is, if you disagree with what the market says, play
the game, bet on your beliefs, and if you're right you'll be rewarded.
It's one thing to debate politics, when it doesn't matter a whit if
you're right or wrong.  But once you have to bet on your beliefs,
self-deception becomes extremely costly.  Faced with the prospect of
putting real money down, the hope is that your mind will shift gears and
let the truth shine more brightly through the layers of self-deception.
I don't know for sure if there is such a mental mechanism, but if so,
this should bring it out.

What are some other ways that we can work to reduce self-deception?
An important first step is of course just to convince ourselves that
the problem is real.  I have found that studying the literature on the
topic is helpful.  Once you see how widespread and deep the phenomenon
is, it's hard not to suspect that you are doing it too.  That's a major
hurdle to get over.  I also have found that the whole complex of papers
by Robin and others about the paradoxes of disagreement are useful as
well, although they are hard to understand and really need a book-length
treatment.  Understanding these arguments requires adopting an impersonal
perspective where our own prejudices and beliefs are equated to those
of others.  This helps to break free from the intuitive notion that we
are each free of these errors even though we are convinced that other
people suffer from them.

Another pragmatic technique that Robin mentions is to take a lot of
standardized assessment tests.  I haven't really tried this one, but
I believe there are some web sites that have batteries of tests that
people can take.  You might be able to get numerical rankings for your
intelligence, creativity, leadership ability, and other psychological
traits.  You could also engage in various competitive activities, such
as sports or games.  You can't lie to yourself about your golf handicap.
However there is a danger that you will remember your more successful
results, so it would be a good idea to keep a thorough record of all
your matches and scores, and then to calculate averages over different
time periods.  That would help to keep you honest.

Geopolitics is a big area of self-deception IMO.  I think the answer
here is simple.  Just accept that the problems are complicated and
you don't know the answers, and be grateful that it doesn't matter,
because no one is depending on you to solve the problems of the world.
You've got your hands full running your own life, you don't need to be
running everybody else's.  Politics is, for most people, a waste of time
because you're not in a position for your political beliefs to make a
measurable impact on the world.  All that energy can be better spent
on things that affect your own life.  The mere fact that politics seems
important is a transparent example of self-deception.  Once you can get
yourself to recognize that fact, it will be a big step forward.

This brings up another topic, which is dealing with the down side of
abandoning self-deception.  It can have negative impacts on people you
are close to as well as on yourself.  We have these habits for a reason,
and not all of the reasons are gone.  We still have many family and
social interactions which are much the same as in the ancient tribal
days where self-deception evolved.  Taking off the blinders may have a
variety of negative effects, and the truth seeker needs to be aware of
this potential and be prepared for it.  I don't have that much experience
with this but it is clearly a major issue to consider.

Hal