We can:

A. Lie to ourselves about them,

B. Avoid thinking about them, or

C. Try to accept the parts we can’t change and change what we can.

If you’re in camps A or B, don’t read this post!

Here are Thirteen Difficult Truths:

1. Irrationality – we humans are not rational, despite the fact that most of us want to believe we are. Our beliefs and behaviors are influenced by nearly-invisible social forces and numerous cognitive biases.

But I believe we can learn to become significantly more rational and that there are important personal and societal benefits from doing so. This is a major part of why I created Clearer Thinking. 

2. Wrongness – we’re wrong about some of our deeply-held beliefs. We don’t know which (being right and being wrong usually both feel like being right). We want to believe that our tribe is right, the enemy tribe dangerously wrong, and the other tribes irrelevant. The truth is much more complex and interesting.

We can be right more often by seeking out the strongest contradictory perspectives, by creating feedback loops with respect to our ideas, and by learning to play devil’s advocate to our own views.

Try, for instance, the “Belief Challenger.” 

3. Challenges – we each will experience big losses, stressors, and setbacks. Some of these could send us into a negative spiral.

This will suck, but we can build up mental health skills that help.

Try, for example, our apps https://www.uplift.app (for depression) and https://www.mindease.io (for anxiety).

4. Aging – as we grow older, we will lose physical strength, attractiveness, and perhaps also cognitive abilities.

However, by exercising regularly and eating healthy food, we can likely slow our decline. We can create hobbies and sources of joy that we can benefit from at all ages.

5. Bereavement – we will lose many of the people we love. Friendships will fray, relationships will end, and the people we love will die.

But we can focus on finding lifelong friends, exert effort to detect and repair fraying, make new friends proactively, and squeeze in all the love we can. We can also encourage our loved ones to engage in healthy habits to extend their lives.

See, for instance, “Daily Ritual: A Habit-Creation Tool.”

6. Mortality – one day, we’ll be gone.

However, by taking great care of your body, you can likely give yourself more years. By being as grateful as you can to exist each day, you may be happier during those years. By funding more rigorous life extension research, we can one day give more years to many.

See, for instance, “Longevity FAQ“.

7. Extinction – one-day, humanity will go extinct.

However, the actions we take over the coming decades/centuries could determine whether humanity lasts only a little more time or a VASTLY longer time. Our wisdom must grow faster than the power of our technology. Support and fund “existential risk” work.

See, for instance, “The case for reducing existential risks“.

8. Randomness – we’re at the mercy of a tremendous amount of luck. Some are born sick orphans in squalor, some healthy, into loving families, in wealthy countries.

We didn’t choose, but we can make the world better for others and give more people good luck.

See, for instance, “Leaving Your Mark on the World.”

9. Rejection – some people won’t like us. And whatever we do or create, some people will think it sucks.

But we can surround ourselves with people who really like and value us, who support us even if they sometimes don’t like our behavior or think our projects are pretty dumb. They help us be better.

10. We will mess up and fail many times.

But by accepting (to the best of our ability) that we (and everyone else too) will fail many times, it frees us to try harder things and to have self-compassion when we do fail. If we learn what we can from each failure, we create a silver lining (“sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.”)

See, for instance, “Learning From Mistakes.” 

11. Uncertainty – there are deep, important mysteries we will never know the answer to and major unknowns we can’t resolve. Major philosophical and personal questions of the utmost importance will go unsolved.

But we don’t need certainty to be happy. We can live with the big unknowns, even while striving as a species – and as individuals – to understand the world as best we can. We can also, at least, learn to be less of a mystery to ourselves.

See, for instance, “Life-Changing Questions.” 

12. Disappointment – we won’t get all the things we want. At some point, we’ll badly want to get a certain job, achieve a certain goal, or be with a certain person, and we’ll never get it.

But we can learn to better accept reality for what it is. And even though we can’t have all that we want, we will get some of what we want, and we can get over the things we wanted and didn’t get.

See, for instance, our article on resetting your psychological baseline.

13. Animality – we are creatures who can reason, speak, understand physics, invent ideas, write stories, think abstractly, transform the world, etc., and yet we are also animals at the same time. We aspire to be something more than animals, and yet we have animal bodies, drives, constraints, reactions, and impulses.

But we can learn to work with, rather than against, our animal nature. When our inner mouse is afraid of something we know is not dangerous, we can learn to soothe it. When our inner dog badly wants something that we know is not in our long-term interest, we can make a compromise by giving ourselves something else we desire that is not so out of alignment with our goals. When our inner bee wants to copy others in doing something that violates our values, we can find other ways to fit in without compromising our integrity, or we can find a new colony that suits us better.

Importantly, since these are difficult truths for all of us, we can face them together, seeking to help one another.

For me, reflecting on the difficult truths that we all face gives new meaning to the idea that we should “be kind because everyone is fighting a great battle.”

It’s tough being a human. But thankfully, we are not alone. Let’s make the best of this together.

This piece was first written on March 5, 2021, and first appeared on this site on October 28, 2022.

There are difficult questions like the blue eyes logic puzzle, which require strong thinking skills to solve. And then there are TRULY difficult questions, that require an extremely honed thinking process, like:

• How can I make so much money in the next five years that I never have to work again?
• Which job should I choose right now to maximize my average lifetime happiness?
• Which charities help the world the most per thousand dollars donated to them?
• What can I do to change our society into a significantly more ideal place?
• What is the greatest threat to humanity as a species, and what can we do now to reduce this threat?

Notice that these important questions are somewhat ambiguous. They also can’t be addressed without gathering and combining information from many sources, and involve factors that are extremely hard to predict. And they can’t be solved unless you can do a reasonable job of estimating difficult to estimate quantities. They all require truly excellent thinking to tackle. Truth discernment becomes a super power when it leaves the realm of puzzles and enters the realm of extremely valuable real world questions.

At high levels, truth discernment ability is not just IQ, though surely is somewhat correlated with it. It is not just the ability to apply logic, though logic is an important component. It also requires certain habits of mind, like regularly asking yourself what the evidence is for your own beliefs. It requires using techniques, like thinking in terms of probabilities rather than thinking in black and white. It requires caring more about getting the right answer than about seeming right or believing what it is convenient psychologically to believe.

The exciting thing about truth discernment is that it is not just a genetic ability (though genetics is surely a contributing factor). It is an ability that we can improve a great deal if we take the time to hone our thinking. We can familiarize ourselves with the logical fallacies to the point where our brain notices them occurring in real-time. We can learn the cognitive biases so that we know the ways our brains are likely to fail us and can consciously correct for these failures. We can learn to prevent unhelpful emotions from derailing our logic too often. We can practice our reasoning by drilling in LSAT questions. And we can learn the methods of rationality, or at least read about another person using them.

Many comic book writers have realized that intelligence is a legitimate super power. Lex Luthor was superman’s nemesis despite being physically inferior to him in every capacity. He could still compete with superman only because of the power of his thinking. But it is not a very high level of intelligence, per se, that is so powerful. Being able to solve the hardest logic puzzles won’t automatically let you solve problems that matter. Truth discernment is the essential skill, the ability to figure out the likely answer to truth claims regarding important real world questions. Will taking this action bring me more happiness in the long-term than not taking this action? Will this regulation, if it passes, improve poverty? Will this business venture make large quantities of money? Is string theory an accurate description of reality?

Being able to accurately discern the truth can be a super power, and with study and practice, it is an ability that we can very substantially improve.

Influences: Eliezer Yudkowsky