While I think there are very serious concerns that advancing technologies, and AI in particular, raise (such as lack of control over these systems with could be a tremendous threat, reduction of agency, and the potential for extreme concentration of power), if we can keep these technologies well under control and pointed at the betterment of humanity (a big if) I don’t think they have to destroy meaning. Here’s why:

While some people do derive a lot of their sense of self-worth from their work (such as myself), and such people could be especially hard hit if they are replaced by technology, there are, thankfully, many things that humans intrinsically value, and therefore, lots of potential sources of meaning. By seeking and then (at least to a reasonable degree) creating what we intrinsically value, we create meaning.

So let’s have a quick look at different human intrinsic values (i.e., things people value for their own sake, not as a means to an end) and how advancing technology, such as AI, may impact each of them:

—

Spirituality and purity: there are no reasons I see that technology would have to interfere with spirituality, religion, or attempts to act purely. So these values could continue being a source of meaning.

Truth and learning: if anything, really effective technology can accelerate the search for truth and our ability to learn. At the same time, technology gone wrong could make the truth harder to discern (e.g., if technology facilitates misinformation outcompeting accurate information).

Achievement: this one could be hard hit by technology insofar as it’s related to doing things that eventually AI may do better than all of us. At the same time, humans find a lot of value in achievements regardless of non-human performance. For instance, people compete in sprints (even though cheetahs could easily outrun us) and find value in achievement in chess (despite AI being able to easily beat the best human). A lot of people also value personal achievement – merely doing the best you can, or improving to do better than your own previous results.

Freedom: while technology could impair freedom (e.g., if it concentrates power into the hands of certain actors, they might choose to limit freedom), there is also potential for technology to expand freedom a lot by allowing us to do many things that weren’t possible before, either because we didn’t know how to do them or because they were too costly before.

Pleasure, non-suffering, longevity: there is no fundamental tension between technology and these values, and technology may be able to improve these by reducing sources of suffering (such as disease), increasing lifespans, and making pleasure more easily accessible.

Happiness (as distinct from pleasure and non-suffering): This is a tricky one, because technology can cut both ways here. For instance, while it’s likely social media has increased some kinds of pleasure, it may well have reduced overall happiness for some people by making them more disconnected or impacting the way they see the world.

Caring, reputation, respect, loyalty, and virtue: these don’t have to be impacted by technology; we could continue valuing these in our relationships with others, even in a world where AI has replaced most work. The main threats I see here from technology are the ways that social media can cause people to spend less face-to-face time together, and the way that AI friends or “relationship” partners could take the place of human relationships.

Justice and fairness: this could go either way. Technology could concentrate power in a way that makes these worse or systematize bias. On the other hand, if the benefits of technology are distributed widely, they could create increased abundance. Technology also has the potential, if harnessed correctly, to reduce (currently commonplace) human bias.

Diversity: globalization tends to reduce diversity, and so technology could accelerate that trend. On the other hand, giving people more freedom through technology could end up increasing forms of diversity (such as how people choose to live their lives).

Protection: technology has the ability to make us safer, so while we may experience more protection (for ourselves and our loved ones), it also could mean that our own role of protecting others is reduced, which could reduce the meaning derived from providing protection. On the other hand, if technology is not developed thoughtfully, the world could feel increasingly chaotic and even become more unsafe, so protection could become even more important.

Nature: technology has a track record of destroying nature, so that trend may continue. However, it’s possible that with sufficiently advanced technology, that trend will go the opposite direction (e.g., cheap green energy makes it easier to protect nature). Technology often destroys nature either as a means to accelerate or as a side effect of acceleration, but sufficiently advanced technology may reduce that effect.

Beauty: technology has the possibility of increasing beauty in the world (making it easier to create and experience beauty), but also runs the risk of filling the world with generic slop.

Overall, while advancing technology may have a negative impact on some things that humans intrinsically value, as long as we don’t destroy the world with these technologies and avoid allowing extreme concentration of power from them, other intrinsic values may not be impacted or even be benefited by technology. As long as we can seek and (to a reasonable degree) create what we intrinsically value, there are sources of meaning available.

This piece was first written on November 16, 2025, and first appeared on my website on December 22, 2025.

1) Narcissistic deceivers: they don’t track or even consider whether what they are saying is true; they say what feels good to them. This relates to what philosophers call “bullshitting” (as opposed to “lying”).

Some well-known politicians fall into this camp.

2) Psychopathic deceivers: they know they are saying false things but don’t care and are just saying whatever best serves their own agenda. They don’t experience guilt about lying.

Some popular media personalities fall into this camp.

3) Motivated deceivers: they know they are lying and feel bad about it (when they think about it), but they think it’s worth lying because the cause is too important or there is too much to be lost if they don’t lie, or there’s something important to them to gain by lying.

Some leaders of organizations fall into this camp.

4) Delusional deceivers: they have lost touch with reality, usually due to mental health problems (such as psychosis) or extremely heavy drug use. They are often paranoid.

Some famous authors fall into this camp.

5) Believing deceivers: they’ve been convinced of false information through propaganda, idealism, cognitive dissonance, trusting unreliable sources, or social forces/pressures and genuinely believe it’s the truth. They aren’t delusional or evil, just (potentially very) misled.

Many people on all political sides are like this. This is, in my view, by far the most common reason individuals spread misinformation, though it may not be the most common reason that public figures spread misinformation.

Whether you are working to combat misinformation or just trying to understand it, it’s useful to know what you’re dealing with. Spreaders of misinformation come in very different forms and have very different reasons for doing so.

This piece was first written on March 22, 2025, and first appeared on my website on April 22, 2025.

(1) Two groups have a small (but meaningful) difference in their average value of some trait, with heavily overlapping distributions.

(2) Some people (“Dichotomizers” or “Oversimplifiers”) observe this difference (in their everyday life or media reports) and turn this small average difference into a (sometimes very harmful) oversimplification: “A’s are like this, B’s are like that.” They also fairly often make it seem like this difference is large (or applies to almost everyone in the group), important, and fundamental (e.g., inherent and unchangeable).

(3) Other people (“Difference Deniers”), often acting with good intentions, criticize this oversimplification, which they correctly perceive as harmful. But instead of saying some combination of:

• “the difference in averages is small”
• “the distributions are heavily overlapping”
• “judging an individual based on a small difference in group averages is a poor way to make predictions, as well as unjust”
• “we shouldn’t judge people for differing on that trait” (if it’s not a trait one should be judged on)
• “if we want to remove the difference in averages, we should consider implementing policy XYZ”

they say “the difference in averages does not exist.” After denying the difference and seeing those they respect deny it, some of them become convinced anyone who believes in the existence of this (actually existing) small average difference is nefarious (and lump such people in with those who harmfully oversimplify people into “A’s are like this, B’s are like that.”) Others among them know the average difference exists but pretend not to because they want to fit into the group that adamantly denies the difference, or because they feel guilty about believing it (even though they are right about it existing).

(4) Oversimiplifiers from (2), who remain totally convinced an average difference exists (and are correct about its existence but exaggerate its magnitude), assume that the Difference Deniers from (3) must be either stupid (for not realizing there is a difference), or untrustworthy liars (for denying what they must see is true), or cruel lunatics (for getting enraged at people for believing in “the truth”).

Queue endless fights between the Dichotomizers and the Difference Deniers, both of which are misrepresenting the actual reality of the situation and demonizing each other.

The problem with turning small averages into “A’s are like this, B’s are like that” is that it is an inaccurate oversimplification and often unfair to A’s or B’s or both.

The problem with denying the existence of average differences that, while small, really do exist is that you end up believing falsehoods, or you end up lying, or both, and you may end up unfairly misjudging people who are (without malice) reporting on real average differences.

To avoid the weaknesses of both the Dichotomizers and the Difference Deniers, I think the best way to handle these cases is to:

1) Avoid pre-judging people based on their membership in broad groups – learn about people as individuals before coming to judgments about them.

2) Avoid language like “A’s are like this, B’s are like that” so that you aren’t a Dichotomizer.

3) Avoid denying that an average difference exists when it really does exist, so that way, you aren’t a Difference Denier.

4) When relevant, remind people that small average differences are not a good basis for judging individuals (epistemically and morally), and point out that the distributions between the two groups are heavily overlapping (when they are) to combat people using differences in the average as a justification for stereotyping.

5) Point to (when relevant, helpful, and accurate) policies that may help close the gap between the two groups (keeping in mind that some gaps in averages are fine if the trait in question is merely a difference and not something “good” or “bad”)

6) Point out (when the difference in question is not something people should be judged for) that this attribute should not be a basis for judging people, i.e., that having different values of that trait is completely okay.

Another approach that can be taken when the group differences in the average are small but meaningful is well described by Guy Srinivasan in the comments on an earlier draft of this post: “Can we agree to make decisions as if there were no average difference, since usually all such decisions would turn out the same, and usually when they wouldn’t it’s perpetuating systemic problems to make the decision differently?”

Of course, as with any binary categories, some people will only be partial Difference Deniers or Dichotomizers – people are absurdly complex, and this model I present here is purposely simplified in order to help communicate this dynamic clearly.

Okay, but are there cases where the Dichotomizers or Difference Deniers are actually just right?

Absolutely, there are some.

When a group difference is SO huge that the distributions are nearly non-overlapping, then it’s reasonable to say, “A’s are like this, and B’s are like that.” For instance, it makes sense to say that “blue whales are big, mice are small.” In such cases, the Dichotomizers aren’t really oversimplifying. But when we’re talking about human groups, this kind of situation is very rare.

And in situations when the difference in averages between groups is so small as to be essentially insignificant for all purposes, the Difference Deniers aren’t actually denying reality. For instance, if it turns out that right-handed people are 0.001% better at school than left-handed people, that difference is so small as to not be meaningfully different from zero for all purposes, and so saying there is “no difference” is an extremely reasonable thing to do. There are, in fact, many attributes along which human groups differ so little that “no difference” is an accurate way to describe it (even though the difference is not literally zero to the 10th decimal point).

Healthy vs. Unhealthy Emotional Validation 

I would say that the main difference between the healthy validation of emotions and the unhealthy version is that the healthy version is based on genuine compassion, caring, authenticity, honesty, and interest in the other person’s experience, whereas the unhealthy version involves a willingness to sacrifice those things in an attempt to make the other person immediately feel good.

At a more detailed level, I think the healthy way to validate other people’s feelings involves expressing the following ideas (but ONLY when these ideas are true).

Healthy Emotional Validation

1) Care: I care about you.

2) Willingness: I’m totally okay with you feeling this emotion right now in front of me.

3) Acceptance: I don’t think badly of you for feeling what you’re feeling.

4) Interest: I am interested in learning more about what you are feeling and why you are feeling it.

5) Compassion: I have compassion and/or empathy for your suffering and want you not to suffer (unless you want to suffer right now, in which case I want you to suffer only insofar and in the ways that seem appropriate to you, such as the suffering that most people feel is right to feel after the loss of a loved one).

6) Understanding of facts: I understand the facts of what happened in this situation (and if I don’t, I’m going to ask open-ended questions in an effort to understand it).

7) Understanding of feelings: I understand why you’re feeling this way (and if I don’t, I’m going to make an effort to understand it).

8) Legitimization of feelings: I think it is totally reasonable that this combination of your situation, your beliefs about this situation, your thoughts, and your past experiences causes you to feel this way right now (and if I don’t see how the combination of your situation, beliefs, etc., lead to your emotion, I’m going to make an effort to understand it).

While some of this is helpful to say aloud when a friend or loved one is upset, much of it will typically be expressed through body language, attention, attitude, presence, tone of voice, and so on. The main thing is that these ideas get expressed in a way that the other person receives them, whether that expression is verbal or non-verbal, explicit or implicit.

On the other hand, I think that it’s usually unhealthy to attempt to validate emotions when it’s done expressing the following ideas.

Unhealthy Emotional Validation 

1) Disingenuousness: you say things that you don’t really mean or believe, such as supporting their claims about what happened when you don’t believe those claims are true.

2) Emotional reasoning: you support the idea that whatever their emotional response is to the situation is a perfect guide to what actually occurred (e.g., if they feel angry at someone, that implies the other person must have done something objectively harmful, or if they feel they’ve lost someone they had a fight with, that means that person is gone forever).

3) Justification: you support or encourage harmful or self-destructive actions they took or are considering taking as a consequence of their negative feelings (e.g., normalizing them taking revenge on the person they are angry about or justifying why it is okay that they did so).

4) Absolving: you encourage the idea that they made no mistakes or behaved perfectly or that someone else is 100% to blame for the situation (unless, of course, you really believe this to be true). On this point, it is often the case that victims of crimes did nothing at all wrong, but this is much less commonly the case when it comes to, for instance, interpersonal conflict between romantic partners, which usually involves both parties having behaved imperfectly, though not necessarily to the same degree.

To recap, people often want emotional validation from their friends and loved ones when they are feeling upset. People are often confused, though, about what this means exactly. There are both healthy ways and unhealthy ways to do emotional validation. 

The healthy version is not always easy to do, but I think it is what we should aspire to when a friend or loved one wants emotional validation. 

To do the healthy version, aim to imbue your responses to their emotions with genuine compassion, caring, authenticity, honesty, and interest in their experiences. And avoid sacrificing those things just to make the other person feel good.

This piece was first written on October 1, 2023, and first appeared on this site on October 11, 2023.

Lately, I’ve been trying to accept a bit more awkwardness (rather than reflexively avoiding it) in cases where I think doing so can produce value.

Here are four areas where I’m leaning more into awkwardness:

1. When asked for feedback on a project (and I think it will fail), I’m usually tempted to focus on what I like about it. 

I’ve now become more likely to explain what challenges I expect it to face (while suggesting routes to improvement).

I think that, usually, more value is produced by trying to help them succeed at their goals than by trying to help them feel good about their current plans. Ideally, though, this feedback is given in a way that is encouraging and not demoralizing.

2. When someone annoys or frustrates me (e.g., makes a request in a manner that bothers me), the easy thing is to ignore it. 

I’ve become more likely to gently tell the person that it bothered me and explain why – while trying to avoid making them feel attacked.

This gives others the opportunity to learn and improve, and also, I think, tends to strengthen your best relationships (by making them more open and honest, and by preventing you from feeling worse about your friends due to behaviors they were doing that they didn’t even realize were bothering you)

3. When I think someone is making a false claim, it reduces tension by just letting it go. 

Instead of letting it go, I’ve become more likely to tell them that I don’t agree with their point and explain why.

This gives us the best chance of arriving at more accurate beliefs together.

4. When there is something that I value, but it requires making a somewhat awkward request, the path of least resistance is to give up on it. 

I’ve become more likely to make the request while doing what I can to make it very easy and non-awkward for the other person to decline.

Often we can set up a situation so as to at least minimize the awkwardness for the other person (e.g., by giving them a simple way out of the request and making it clear you won’t be offended if they decline). By not making such requests at all, we end up missing out on opportunities that others would, in fact, be happy to provide for us.

I’m certainly not perfect at this. I still avoid awkwardness at times when more value is produced by pushing through it. But I’m getting better.

While awkwardness is certainly not a good thing, if you are too motivated to avoid it, then – much like with other forms of anxiety – you and others may miss out on a lot of value.

Of course, some people need the opposite advice – they put others into awkward situations too often or lack awareness of the awkwardness they create. And I think you should try to reduce awkwardness whenever there is not a good reason for it.

But if you (like me) tend to avoid awkwardness, it may be better to strategically lean into awkwardness in cases where more value is lost by avoiding it.

This piece was first written on September 25, 2022, and first appeared on this site on September 30, 2022.

1. Narratives Serve Power – powerful groups do tend to have a substantial influence on narratives, beliefs, and what’s “normal.” Something “obvious” or “objective” or “a fact” may just (invisibly) be a part of the narrative you’re immersed in and subtly be serving those in power.

2. Categories Bleed – just about any dichotomy or grouping will be leaky and imperfect (e.g., male/female, straight/gay). Some won’t fit any categorization, and there’s a subjective choice of where to draw boundaries. Yet we often treat categories as reality, forgetting their arbitrariness.

3. Intersectionality Can Matter – being perceived to be part of two categories can cause different treatment/perceptions than the sum of the effects of each category alone (i.e., there is non-linearity). A Chinese woman’s experience isn’t just Chinese experience + female experience.

4. Truth Is Elusive – many assumptions are baked into our interpretations. The truth is incredibly complex; epistemic modesty is warranted. Many have attempted to (or claimed to) use “science,” “objectivity,” or “rationality” yet have come to conclusions that were incorrect and harmful.

5. Values Differ – it’s very hard to argue in a principled way that one set of common intrinsic values is superior to another. For instance, if one culture values honesty and loyalty more than other values, and another values freedom and happiness instead, who’s to say one of those cultures is “right”?

6. Word Choice Can Have Consequences – for instance, suppose person P takes action X, and person Q dies. It matters if society calls that action “murder,” “manslaughter,” or “an accident.” Beyond legal questions, it matters socially (for the victim’s family and the perpetrator).

7. Universals are Rare – people claim to find universals (in economies, societies, individual psychology), yet almost none of them stand up to scrutiny as being actually universal. Truth turns out to be contextual with lots of variation. Even our theories of physics get supplanted.

8. Normal Is Not Better – what’s “normal” is often considered superior, and yet normal in one place and time may be weird in another. Much of human behavior is trying to fit in/be normal/be in fashion, which can help you to be liked, but normal is in flux and is not inherently better.

9. Art Is Arbitrary – stories tend to be linear and to follow the hero’s journey, architecture has a certain look based on location, and paintings in one era tend to be in a similar style to each other. But stories, art, etc., can still be compelling when fragmented, non-linear, convention-violating, or subversive. A much broader range of things can produce the effects of art than the limited array we usually see created.

10. Our Qualia are Unique – it is genuinely extremely hard to know what it’s like to be another person or to have had their experiences. We tend to overestimate our ability to relate. Those who have had an experience often do have unique information critical for understanding it.

11. The Oppressed Should Be Helped – some people continue to be oppressed, and those who are should obviously be helped. It’s important to remind ourselves of this oppression and try to stop it.

12. Context Often Matters – knowing who was saying something, what point in history they were saying it, who the audience was, the history of people saying similar things, and so on, can substantially change the meaning of what was said.

13. Some Things Are Said Without Being Said – meaning can be implied without saying something directly (e.g., through dog whistles, euphemisms, and by hinting at something). Even the omission of an idea that one would expect to have been said can imply a meaning.

The elements I listed above related to postmodernism are those that I find most helpful or useful. On the other hand, while I’m far from an expert on the topic, my perspective is that a number of aspects of postmodernist thought are quite unhelpful or mistaken.

Here is what I most dislike about the postmodern way of thinking (and related ways of thinking, like through the lens of critical theory):

1. It can ignore genuine progress made towards truth and a better society.

2. It can assume that word usage/language choices are more powerful than they are.

3. It can deny useful categories.

4. It can be self-undermining (if you apply its critiques to itself).

5. It’s not (I think) that effective at changing the problems it points out (since its proposed solutions to these problems seem, in my opinion, unlikely to achieve their own aims).

6. It can overemphasize the importance of certain problems over other equally or more important ones.

7. It uses obscure language/complex sentence structure that makes it confusing or even impenetrable.

8. It can be overly cynical about society and human nature.

9. It can seem to be in denial that many valuable things were discovered using reason, rational thinking, science, etc., and some of these have greatly improved people’s lives.

10. It can view society through too much of a zero-sum lens, not sufficiently acknowledging the importance of the many opportunities for positive-sum interactions.

11. It can overemphasize the value of information gained from the personal experience of individuals relative to aggregate information and scientific evidence.

12. It can treat large groups as monoliths, as though there really is an “X” perspective (for some large group, X).

13. It sometimes uses non-standard definitions for common words in a way that leads people to draw confused conclusions (assuming the conclusion applies to the common-sense meaning when it only applies to the non-standard one).

14. It can sometimes come across as idealizing those who are oppressed, creating weird incentives for some people to emphasize (or, in extreme cases, exaggerate) the oppression they experience in order to gain social points, or it can even create competition over who is more oppressed.

15. It can act as though feelings are facts, and that person A being upset by person B’s actions or words implies that A was wronged by B.

16. It doesn’t do a good job of summarizing itself, meaning that it can take a large time investment to begin to have a sense of what it even is.

17. It can fall into moral relativism and so runs the risk of being too reluctant to condemn harmful cultural practices of some societies (e.g., a practice of sometimes killing people for having premarital sex).

Overall, while I think that postmodern thinking contains some important ideas, I also believe that reliance on it tends to make things more confused rather than less and that many of its proposed methods and solutions don’t stand up well to scrutiny.

This piece was first written on March 29, 2021, and first appeared on this site on July 2, 2023.

Here’s my list of some weird but potentially really valuable roles in society that don’t exist but maybe should:

Role 1: Truth Teller

They wear a special, very noticeable hat. When wearing it, they are not permitted to say anything they know to be untrue (they are punished severely and may be suspended or lose their license if they do, plus the incident becomes public). They can also get punished for clear lies of omission or for making misleading statements. At all times when being worn, their hat records time-stamped, watermarked 360-degree video whenever it is worn. Anyone who is caught on camera can request the segment of the video (and accompanying audio) of the portion they are a part of.

Training: practicing telling people very difficult truths (e.g., breaking the news to parents of military vets that their child isn’t coming back), answering difficult personal questions fully truthfully, speaking very carefully about what they know and how they know it, etc.

Some uses:

• When you need an opinion, you can count on them being TOTALLY honest

• As an eye witness to prove what occurred (e.g., at protests or high-stakes negotiations)

• Observing voting recounts and lottery drawings

• When needing an eye witness to later prove to others very credibly (e.g., in court) that something did or didn’t happen

Role 2: Evidence Evaluator

They provide an impartial, apolitical, thoroughly researched, unbiased, and fallacy-aware perspective on any topic. When they use their official title in writing or speech (e.g., “Signed, Evidence Evaluator Jane Doe”), they can be suspended for falling into even minor fallacies or biases, and they can lose their license for significant ones.

Training: extensive practice with argument and evidence evaluation, avoiding rhetorical fallacies & cognitive biases, and calibration training for making predictions; extensive learning about Bayes’ rule, probabilistic and nuanced thinking, research best practices, statistics, summarizing evidence, scientific thinking, etc.

Some uses:

• When you want to know what’s known on a thorny topic, you can hire them to interview experts on all sides of the issue, or read papers on all sides, giving an impartial account of the evidence (e.g., what is known about how much human behavior is increasing global temperatures, and how certain this information is)

• When it’s helpful to find weaknesses or flaws in any perspective

Role 3: Unconditional Aide

They can be hired by the hour, and during that time, they are required to look out SOLELY for the interests of the person that hired them (as long as the health, property, or safety of anyone else is not at risk). In other words, they are fully and completely your supporter and your team member for the time you are paying them and will help you with ANYTHING you choose. They do, however, have the right to maintain a public list of activities they are not willing to do, to refuse clients who they would prefer not to work with, and to quit at any moment (by notifying you that they are quitting – in which case you would still owe them payments for any hours logged thus far). They also may have a price list (i.e., their hourly rate can fluctuate based on what you are asking for their help with). Credible reports that they are not acting on behalf of the client’s interests can lead to suspension or complete removal of their title.

Training: practicing active listening, practicing eliciting a person’s underlying goals, and real-world training where they have to help many different people with many different kinds of requests and goals (and then get assessed by the people they helped with qualitative and quantitative feedback). 

Some uses:

• You are going into an emotionally difficult situation and would like a supporter there with you (but don’t want to ask friends/loved ones)

• You are trying to carry out a difficult activity and need someone’s help with it

• You are in a serious pickle and need another person’s help (e.g., your child had to suddenly go to the hospital, and you need someone to show a potential buyer around your house, then walk your dog, then bring something from your home to the hospital)

The established roles we have in society (doctors, judges, etc.) are very useful. Perhaps we could do with a few more of them.

This piece was first written on November 18, 2020, and first appeared on this site on October 21, 2022.

• 1+1=2 (true) vs., the Illuminati controls our planet (false)
• viruses (bad) vs. puppies (good)
• a fedora is a hat; a fedora is not a bat

But when it comes to important, complex topics (and especially ones that are political or emotional or that relate to our identity), dichotomizing often impairs our ability to figure out what’s what. It’s hard to be accurate when you’re thinking with just 1 bit of information. Hence the need for Nuanced Thinking.

There are at least three types of dichotomization that we easily fall into, and three types of Nuanced Thinking that you can use to combat them. I’ll describe each of them below.

—

Dichotomization 1: The Truth Binary

The Truth Binary is when we view a statement as simply true or false, correct or incorrect. But on complex topics, simple viewpoints are often partially true and partially false, or true some percent of time and false the rest of the time. Furthermore, our knowledge of truth is limited, so we should have degrees of confidence, rather than certainty. If we want to be right more often, we should have thoughts like “I’m 90% confident that…” and “I’m 60% confident that” rather than “I believe that…”

Examples of complex topics where people often fall into the Truth Binary:

• I believe/don’t believe that the government is incompetent
• I believe/don’t believe that harsh prison sentences for violent crime make society safer
• I believe/don’t believe that the people of the U.K. benefit by leaving the E.U.
• I believe/don’t believe that we should end the COVID-19 lockdowns as soon as possible
• I believe/don’t believe in the effectiveness of western medicine
• I believe/don’t believe that Trump will win the next election
• I believe/don’t believe that are going to see a decline in the power of America

The antidote to the Truth Binary is Probabilistic Thinking, where we consider our level of confidence in our beliefs, avoid having 100% confidence in anything, and consider in what situations a view will be true vs. in what other situations it could be false.

Probabilistic Thinking helps us be right more often.

Probabilistic Thinking involves asking ourselves questions like:

• What do I think the percentage chance is that this viewpoint is correct?
• How often do I expect that this viewpoint correct, and how often would I expect it to be wrong?
• Would I be really surprised if it turned out I was mistaken on this issue, or only a bit surprised?
• Would I bet a meaningful amount of money that this view is correct, only a little or none at all?

—

Dichotomization 2: The Goodness Binary

The Goodness Binary is when we view things as either good or bad, positive or negative, moral or immoral, when in fact, on complex, hotly debated topics, most often there is a mix of good and bad (even if, all things considered, one side really is better).

Examples of complex topics where people often fall into the Goodness Binary:

• The U.S. Democratic (or Republican) Party is good/bad
• Anyone who voted for X is fundamentally good/bad
• Nuclear power is good/bad
• Capitalism is good/bad
• Socialism is good/bad
• China is good/bad
• The United States is good/bad
• Technological progress is good/bad
• Antidepressants are good/bad to take if you’re depressed
• Religion is good/bad
• That public figure I love/hate is good/bad
• That book is good/bad

The antidote to the Goodness Binary is Grey Thinking, where we accept that good things usually have some bad elements, and that bad things usually have some good elements, and that many things lie somewhere in the middle.

Grey Thinking makes us more effective at improving things (because it allows us to better consider necessary tradeoffs), and it helps us avoid accidentally harming the world through misguided good intentions.

Grey Thinking involves asking our questions like:
• What are the pros and cons of this?
• Who benefits from this, and who is harmed?
• What value does this thing I dislike create, even if this sort of value is not the kind of value I most care about?

—

Dichotomization 3: The Identification Binary

The Identification Binary is when we view things as either a member of a class or not a member of that class, when in fact, almost every categorization admits edge cases that lie between categories, or fails to categorize some cases.

Examples of complex topics where people often fall into the Identification Binary:

• You’re on our side, or you’re against our side
• You’re male, or you’re female
• That’s a cult, or it’s not
• She’s right-wing, or she’s not
• He’s a criminal, or he’s not
• You’re gay, or you’re straight
• He’s a terrorist or he’s not
• She’s racist, or she’s not
• They’re an American, or they’re not

The antidote to the The Identification Binary is Multi-factor Thinking, where we consider the degree to which something has different factors.

Multi-factor Thinking helps us see people and things as they really are, rather than oversimplifying them or misjudging their characteristics.

Multi-factor Thinking involves asking our questions like:

• In what ways is this case similar or different from these categories?
• Is that example better thought of as lying between two (or three) categories, rather than as being right in the middle of one category?
• If I ignore labels for a second, what traits does this case have?

—

So with all of that in mind, I would urge you to use Nuanced Thinking to better figure out what’s what.

More specifically:

• if you want to figure out what’s true in the world, avoid the Truth Binary on important, complex issues, and use Probabilistic Thinking instead. Ask yourself how sure you are, and how often this thing is true, and avoid 100% certainty.
• If you want to improve the world (and not accidentally cause harm), avoid the Goodness Binary, and use Grey Thinking instead. Ask yourself what the pros and cons are, considering both what’s good and bad about each thing.
• If you want to see people and things as they really are, rather than oversimplifying or misjudging, avoid the Identification Binary, and use Multi-factor thinking instead. Ask what ways this thing is similar or different to a category, and how it might blend multiple categories, and consider what traits it has irrespective of categories.

To add some extra nuance to this post: Nuanced Thinking of course shouldn’t be used all the time. For simple things, binaries can be good enough. And some things aren’t important enough to spend the time getting nuanced. Finally, there are times when you just need to get along with your group, rather than trying to see shades of grey/probability/factors in everything.

But when a topic is important and complex, and you care about having accurate beliefs, Nuanced Thinking will help.

Nuanced Thinking also helps with decision-making more broadly, producing what I call “Nuanced Decision-Making.” This is where you select an objective, and then you apply Nuanced Thinking in order to choose the option that appears to be best, on average, according to that objective.

The framework divides things that are sometimes claimed to be “true,” or that we might say “exist,” into seven different realms (or “spaces”) in which they might be said to be true or to exist.

I’ll introduce the framework and show how it can be used with some example applications. Note that this framework is intended merely to provide useful language and categorizations for thinking about these sorts of philosophical questions; it is not itself intended to make any metaphysical claims about what’s true.

The seven realms of truth (brief overview):

There are a number of ways that something can be claimed to be “true” or different “realms” these truths can be about. To make it easier to clarify thinking, I divide these truth and existence claims into different “spaces”:

(1) Some things “exist” in the sense that they are in physical reality, like atoms (in “Matter Space”).

(2) Other things may “exist” in the sense that they are real experiences conscious beings have, like the taste of pineapple (in “Experience Space”).

(3) Other things may “exist” in the sense that they are shared constructs across multiple minds, like the value of money (in “Consensus Space”).

(4) Other things may “exist” in the sense of being conclusions derived from frameworks or sets of premises, like consequences of economic theories (in “Theory Space”).

(5) Some may “exist” in the sense that they are represented in systems that store or process information, such as the information in a database (in “Representation Space”).

(6) If universal moral truths “exist” (e.g., objective facts about what is right and wrong), then we can talk about moral rules existing (in “Morality Space”).

(7) Finally, if supernatural entities “exist,” such as spirits (meaning that not all beings inhabit Matter Space), then these beings are in a different realm than us (in “Supernatural Space”).

To further explain the spaces themselves, we can use the consistent example of atoms:

(1) It is true that atoms exist (Matter Space).

(2) It is true that I have internal experiences that are caused by the existence of atoms (Experience Space).

(3) It’s true in English that “atoms” are constituents of matter (Consensus Space).

(4) It’s true that the existence of atoms is a consequence of the standard model of physics (Theory Space).

(5) It’s true that Wikipedia contains information about atoms (Representation Space).

(6) Many people think it’s true that moral claims are not just claims about whether atoms have a particular configuration (Morality Space).

(7) If supernatural entities exist, it’s true that they are not merely made of atoms (Supernatural Space).

But if you say “it’s true that atoms exist,” do you mean “true” in the same sense as when you say “it’s true that in English “atoms” are constituents of matter?” Are these notions of truth identical? What about when you say, “it’s true that murder is immoral?” Is that the same meaning of “true”? Or when you say that “atoms exist,” does the word “exist” as used there mean the same thing as when you say “numbers exist”? If we have a claim that something is “true” or is “real” or “exists,” then having these “seven realms of truth” in mind allows us to follow a process of clarification.

So suppose that we are considering a particular philosophical claim about what is true or existent.

1. First, ask yourself about which “space” this claim is being made. For instance, does the speaker mean “murder is wrong” as a claim about Experience Space or about Morality Space, or about some other space?

2. Second, consider what we mean when we say that something in that Space is “true”/”real”/”exists.” For instance, we may think that claims about Morality Space are true in a very different sense than claims about Experience Space or Matter Space. We might even think that there are no such thing as true or false claims about some of these spaces.

Once you have determined what Space the claim is about, and you know how you think those sorts of claims should be interpreted for that Space, you now have a way of evaluating that claim!

A few very important points before continuing:

• I do not intend to imply that all these spaces actually “exist” or are “real,” and I especially don’t intend to imply that they all “exist” or are “real” in the same sense as each other. For instance, it could be that some of these spaces don’t exist at all, and it could be that some of those that do “exist” do so in very different senses of the word “exist.”

• I also don’t intend to imply that these spaces are necessarily all different from each other or that they don’t subsume each other (e.g., someone might think that space X is just subsumed into a combination of spaces Y and Z, which is fine).

• This post is NOT intended to make metaphysical claims about what’s true; rather, its purpose is to provide a simple “language” and process for clarifying thinking and communication around difficult-to-think-about philosophical questions. For instance, with this language of “spaces,” you can ask yourself questions like, “do I think that Experience Space is just a part of Matter Space, or is there an important sense in which they are different?”, or questions like, “do things in Theory Space actually exist in the same sense that things in Matter Space do?” This language of spaces is intended to provide concise mental categories that we can then ponder and discuss.

• There are many (perhaps an infinite number) of such “spaces” one could imagine adding to this list. This list is merely intended to be pragmatic: it is designed to cover many of the cases that non-philosophers tend to debate with each other. I sought to include the most important cases only.

• Another use for the concept of these “spaces” is that they can help you disambiguate your beliefs. For instance, you can ask yourself, “when I say that it’s true that 1+1=2, do I mean that it’s true in the sense of Theory Space, or do I mean it in some other sense?”

Let’s now dig into each of these seven realms of truth more thoroughly.

The seven realms of truth in detail:

(1) Matter space: the realm of what physically exists, such as atoms, waves, and photons.

It is true (in Matter Space) that hydrogen atoms can be divided into subatomic particles and that electrons have a certain amount of electromagnetic charge.

A claim like “this painting is not art” is not a claim about Matter Space.

If someone claims “everything is subjective,” a natural clarifying question to understand their claim is to ask whether they are saying this applies to Matter Space: “do you mean that the question of how much electrical charge an electron has is also subjective, or do you only mean to claim subjectivity for cultural beliefs (Consensus Space) or internal experiences (Experience Space)?”

Physics (as in the theories that humans have invented about reality), being a set of ideas, are not part of Matter Space directly, but they attempt to describe Matter Space.

(2) Experience space: the realm of what we experience internally, such as emotions, colors, and sensations.

It is true (in Experience Space) that the ocean is blue (as experienced by me), that food tastes good (to me), and that being pricked with a pin hurts (me).

A claim like “French fries are not a French food” is not a claim about Experience Space.

If someone claims that a particular painting is not “art,” a natural clarifying question to ask is whether they mean this only in terms of Experience Space: “do you mean that your own experience when you view the painting is not the experience you would require to call something art, or do you mean that you don’t think this painting satisfies the shared cultural understanding of what art is (Consensus Space), or something else?”

If there were no conscious beings in the universe, then Experience Space would be empty.

(3) Consensus space (i.e., “intersubjective facts” ): the realm of shared ideas whose truth depends on a simultaneous belief by multiple minds, such as cultural, linguistic, and societal constructs.

It is true (in Consensus Space) that money can be used to buy things, that the U.S. is currently a country, that “man” is the singular form of “men,” and that murder is illegal. If only one person in the world believed these things, they would cease to be true in Consensus Space. So their truth is inextricably linked to some form of consensus across minds.

A claim like “the player moving first in the game of Connect Four has an advantage” is not a claim about Consensus Space.

If someone claims that “some rights exist, but healthcare is not a right,” you could ask a clarifying question regarding whether they are making this claim purely about Consensus Space: “Do you mean that there is no societal consensus that healthcare satisfies the properties of a right, or do you mean that according to a specific theory of morality (Theory Space) healthcare is not included as a right, or maybe you mean that when you reflect on healthcare you don’t get the same feeling (Experience Space) about its universality and importance that you do about other things that you’d say are rights?”

If conscious beings were unable to communicate with each other (that is, there was no language, even in rudimentary form), then Consensus Space would be empty.

(4) Theory space: conclusions that are implied by a set of premises (or modeling assumptions, or rules), such as implications of theories and frameworks.

For instance, it is true (in Theory Space) that in standard economic theory, the price of a good will be exactly the price where the supply and demand curves intersect (even though this is not precisely true of real markets in the physical world). And it is true, according to Newtonian mechanics (i.e., the simplified/approximate theory of physics, but not necessarily precisely true in actual physical reality itself), that if you start exerting a constant force on a stationary billiard ball, it will accelerate with an acceleration inversely proportional to its mass.

A claim like “my social security number is stored in some government database” is not a claim about Theory Space.

If someone makes a claim like “increasing the minimum wage does not increase unemployment,” you might follow with a clarifying question like: “are you saying that standard economic theory (Theory Space) does not imply that increasing minimum wage will increase unemployment, or are you saying that you think that, due to inaccuracies in theory, in the real world (Matter Space), measured unemployment does not rise when the minimum wage is increased?”

Even though human minds can invent and remember theories, Theory Space does not hinge on the existence of human minds. If, for instance, all humans were to die out, but one day an intelligent alien race were to invent a theory mathematically identical to Newtonian mechanics, truths about the consequences of that theory would be identical to truths about the consequences of our version of it (since those truths merely follow from their premises).

(5) Representation space: truths about systems that store or processes information, such as truths about what’s stored in (or available to be experienced in) video games, VR worlds, databases, books or websites.

For instance, it is true (in Representation Space) that in the game Minecraft, there are six kinds of “wood” you can make stuff out of, or that Wikipedia has more than five million articles in English, or that the book Moby Dick contains discussions of whales, or that my computer has files on it.

A claim like “animals have souls so go to heaven when they die” is not a claim about Representation Space.

If someone makes a claim like “it is impossible for software to ever be conscious or feel pain,” you might ask a clarifying question like “do you mean that it is impossible for software to store the same information and do equivalent information processing as a human brain (Representation Space), or do you mean that even if the software were to store the same information and do the same information processing as a human brain, it still wouldn’t be conscious and capable of feeling pain (Experience Space)?”

Representation Space encompasses questions about what information is stored or what ways information is processed, regardless of the storage or processing medium (e.g., software running on silicon, writing on papyrus, or neurons in a rat or human brain).

(6) Morality Space: the Space for moral “facts,” if such facts “exist” or are “true” in any meaningful sense.

For instance, many people think that moral claims like “murder is always wrong” can be objectively true or false, much like it is objectively true or false whether you are reading this right now.

A claim like “the more accurately you measure a particle’s position, the less accurately you know its momentum” is not a claim about Morality Space.

(7) Supernatural Space: where non-physical spiritual and religious entities would exist (not the idea of them, but the entities themselves) if they were real.

For instance, if you believe in God/heaven/hell/ghosts/spirits etc., then you think they exist (in Supernatural Space) unless you think that, say, hell is literally inside the center of the Earth, or, say, heaven is literally on a particular planet. If you are completely non-spiritual and non-religious, then presumably, you’d say that Supernatural Space is empty (i.e., there is nothing in Supernatural Space).

A claim like “it is wrong to lie” is not a claim about Supernatural Space.

If a person were to claim that they believe in souls, you might try to clarify their belief by asking, “by that, do you mean that you think that after we die, there is a place we continue to exist in that is not the material world (Supernatural Space), or that there is a physical part of us that is our soul that is in principle detectable scientifically (Material Space), or something else?”

If we want to say that supernatural entities exist, but they never reside in Supernatural Space, then, by definition, they either (a) don’t exist or (b) are merely physical entities (in Matter Space), not actually supernatural ones. A “spirit” that was in our world permanently and completely made of atoms (obeying all the known physical laws) would be not so much a “spirit” as an animal or form of human or physical phenomena that scientists just haven’t yet developed an understanding of (just as it once was that we had no scientific understanding of clouds).

What about beliefs?

You may wonder: where do beliefs fit into these seven spaces? The answer is that they can be perceived in many different ways, depending on which Space’s perspective you are adopting. So the different spaces can provide different perspectives on the same phenomena.

Through the lens of Matter Space, beliefs are patterns of molecules in our brains which, if removed or sufficiently altered, would cause us to no longer have those beliefs. From the perspective of Experience Space, beliefs are those thoughts that come with a feeling of “I believe this” or that produce a memory of our believing them when we access them, or that are immediate and obvious consequences of other things about which we experience the feeling of “I believe.”

Through the lens of Consensus Space, we note that there is a subset of beliefs that can only be true by virtue of them being believed by multiple parties. For instance, some might argue that you cannot “be in a relationship” with someone who doesn’t (on any level) know you are in a relationship with them. If you buy this, then the truth about your belief that you are in a relationship hinges on this belief persisting across multiple minds. Consensus Space is about those beliefs that can only be true if they are shared.

Through the lens of Theory Space, we note that some of our beliefs are merely beliefs about the consequences of sets of premises; for instance, we may believe that given the rules of the game of checkers, if both players play perfectly, it will always produce a tie.

The perspective of Representation Space, I think, tells us most fundamentally what beliefs are: information coded in our brains in a certain way. Much like a database may contain facts, our brains have information stored in them that corresponds to what we believe. We decode this information when we think.

From the view of Morality Space, there is a special class of beliefs that are claims about what is moral. For instance, if you believe that it is morally right to do a particular thing in a particular situation, it may be that you’re expressing beliefs about Morality Space.

Now that you have an understanding of the “7 realms of truth” framework, I can more succinctly describe to you a number of things I believe regarding complex philosophical questions (whether or not you agree with my conclusions).

For instance, here are some of my tentative beliefs about reality.

(1) I do not think that all of these spaces “exist” in the same sense. For instance, I think that Matter Space exists in a very different (and much more “real”) sense than the way in which Theory Space “exists.”

(2) When people take psychedelics leading to experiences that they consider spiritual and profound, I think these experiences can only be helpfully understood as being in Experience Space, not Matter Space or Supernatural Space.

(3) I think morality can be best understood in terms of both Experience Space (an evolved sense we have that is then programmed via culture), Consensus Space (a set of norms adopted in societies), and Representation Space (beliefs encoded in our memories about what we consider good or bad) but I don’t think morality can be made sense of via Matter Space (i.e., I think there is no objective morality in the sense of it being a property of certain configurations of molecules, analogous to the way that particles have mass).

(4) I think that Supernatural Space is empty.

(5) I think that math, like theories of physics (but not physical reality itself), is best placed in Theory Space. By that, I mean that “1+1=2” is true only in the sense that “1+1=2” follows as a consequence from the premises of our mathematics (or as a model of certain aspects of physical reality, like putting one ball in a bag and then another in the same bag). Plenty of philosophers and mathematicians disagree with me on this. There is also, of course, a shared cultural consensus that “1+1=2” (Consensus Space), but what’s interesting and useful about math is usually not the consensus aspect (and highly complex mathematical statements don’t have this consensus property because nobody remembers them).

(6) I think the question “what is beauty” is a lot easier to answer if we ask it about each space one by one. If we consider ONLY Matter Space, beauty can’t be found. In Experience Space, beauty is whatever causes the experience of beauty to conscious beings. In Consensus Space beauty is whatever we agree to apply the word beauty to, as well as whatever properties are required for beauty according to cultural consensus. In Representation Space are our beliefs about what things are beautiful (not because we are experiencing them at that moment, but because somewhere in our brains, the information about what things we believe are beautiful is stored). Beauty, in Theory Space, only exists as the consequence of logical theories about beauty (“something is defined to be beautiful if and only if it has properties X, Y, and Z”). And, some people associate god with fundamental beauty (e.g., “that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in his temple.”), which could place some beauty in Supernatural Space.

So the next time you’re wrestling with a philosophical question about what is true, what exists, or what is real, I suggest you consider the problem from the perspective of the seven realms of truth: Matter Space, Experience Space, Consensus Space, Theory Space, Representation Space, Morality Space, and Supernatural Space. These realms do not necessarily actually “exist,” and if they do “exist,” they may not exist in the same sense as each other. Nor are they necessarily all distinct from each other. What this “space” approach does, though, is it provides a language for thinking about and discussing tricky philosophical topics, to hopefully make it easier for you to figure out what you believe and why.

This essay was first written on March 25, 2019, and was first released on this site on August 29, 2021.

Click here for the talk slides.