We owe the major ideas in this essay to Keep Your Identity Small (2009), Speculation in a Truth Chamber (2017), and What is Your Dangerous Idea (2006). I highly recommend reading all three original pieces.
Motivation
We are capable of being truthful. We can look at the world and make real attempts to see it as it is, and to say what we see. Our capacity for truthfulness is nonetheless often compromised by motivated cognition; without noticing, we selectively process information in ways that suit ends unrelated to the truth.
We protect our own interests, and the interests of people close to us or who seem to be like us. We defend our image of ourselves and our standing in a community. We avoid friction with people we like or depend on. We look for ways to undercut the arguments of people we dislike, distrust or fear. And we shield ourselves from facts that, if admitted, would set our values and commitments against each other.
This habit often helps us. It would not have evolved otherwise. It helps because in many areas of life reality does not enforce itself immediately. Politics, law, sales, media, religion: in each of these, what settles things is usually who persuades best and who leaves people feeling the right way. Consequences are not imposed for describing reality badly.
Speculation
Speculation is the one major area of life where what is true is of utmost importance. I mean the word broadly: staking something you care about (money, time, effort) on a belief. The stake is usually money, but it does not have to be. Get the belief right and you are paid. Get it wrong and you pay.
Speculation (i.e. betting) sharpens our focus on the truth. We are incentivized to go through the evidence more than once, looks for the hole in our own argument and allows that we may be the one who is mistaken. We typically do none of that anywhere else in our lives (this fact perhaps is itself worthy of reflection).
It therefore appears that to get more honest about a question, we ought to always attach a wager to it. In trading culture, it is typical for us to invite others to bet on their beliefs when they say something we disagree with. Outsiders see this as recklessness, but fail to appreciate how the exercise forces us to think truthfully.
Identity
The worst case of motivated cognition is identity, and the clearest place to see it is in arguments about sports, politics, and religion. Bring up religion or politics on almost any internet forum and the thread eventually degenerates into insults.
Why do we not see a similar pattern for debates about particle physics, quantitative easing, or LLM kernel optimization?
One difference is the bar for joining. To comment on any of the previous topics, you need some degree of specialization. Yet to comment on religion or politics you need only strong feelings, and everyone has those.
Another tempting explanation is that these subjects deal in questions with “no real answers”. Yet that is simply not true. Some political questions are perfectly precise, such as what a new policy will cost taxpayers, and yet the arguments over those go just as badly as ill-defined questions.
The better explanation is that politics and religion become part of who people are, and nobody can have a useful argument about who they are.
Two inferences follow. First, many political, religious, or ethical questions that people view as “having no correct answer” are not necessarily so. It is merely proclaimed that these questions cannot be resolve to protect the feelings and identities of the majority of people who feel attached to a particular religion, political tribe, or set of ethical heuristics and intuitions. It is possible to have fruitful discussions about these topics when we do not attach ourselves strongly.
Second, to think clearly, we ought to keep our identities as small as possible. With some people you could very much have a useful conversation about politics or religion. With others you could not safely discuss pickup trucks. Whatever I fold into who I am, I lose the ability to reason about clearly. So the fewer things I let in, the better I think.
Most thoughtful people already go as far as tolerance: I am an x, but I am willing to put up with y. There is a step beyond that, which is not to think of myself as an x at all. Every label I carry makes me a little dumber about whatever it covers. In general, we are able to think more clearly when we perceive things as “not that deep.”
Truth
A thought experiment makes this concrete. Take a question you want to think about honestly and imagine three things.
The question will be conclusively resolved. How it gets resolved does not matter. If you cannot imagine any such resolution, then the question may be too loose, in which case tighten it, or it may be a question of taste, which makes no claim about how the world is.
You vote in private. You are taken into a booth to vote on the question, and nobody will ever find out which way you went. That includes your future self, because your memory of the vote gets wiped.
Everything you value is at stake. You name the things you want more of in life: money, relationships, health, achievement, for you, those you love, and perhaps just other people in general. A correct vote gets you those, and a wrong vote gets you nothing.
Now ask yourself two questions. Which way would you vote? And how uncertain would you be about your vote? The two questions represent your real belief, as well as your real confidence.
Consider soundproof chambers that audiologist use. With the room silenced, we can pick out tones that ordinary noise would bury. The Truth chamber does the same for motives: it silences every one of them except the wish to be right.
The rest of the time we settle lazily on whatever picture of the world suits our interests. Inside the chamber we probe, check and challenge, because for once being right is truly all we care about.
Danger
A few years ago, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker put together a collection of question that he referred to as “Dangerous Ideas,” which may well be correct but that most of us consider too offensive, threatening, or immoral to think deeply about. These questions are a good test case for us to use to experience the mental shift that takes place when we approach questions truthfully.
Pick a few of the questions below, tighten their phrasing until they can be answered definitively by either an infinite sequence of experiments or some higher-power, and compare two experiences.
First, consider how you would feel normally if they were posed to you; then, consider how you would answer them from inside the Truth Chamber, where your whole future turns on being right. Abstaining is NOT allowed, so you are pushed to think in probabilities and go with whichever answer feels most likely true.
Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?
Were events in the Bible fictitious, not miracles, but those involving kings and empires?
Has the state of the environment improved in the last fifty years?
Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer no lifelong damage?
Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape?
Do men have an innate tendency to rape?
Did the crime rate go down in the 1990s because two decades earlier poor women aborted children who would have been prone to violence?
Are suicide terrorists mostly well educated, mentally healthy, and morally driven?
Are Ashkenazi Jews, on average, smarter than gentiles because their ancestors were selected for the shrewdness needed in money lending?
Would the incidence of rape go down if prostitution were legalized?
Do African American men have higher levels of testosterone than white men?
Would abortion be morally wrong if technology allow fetuses to survive independently outside the womb from the moment of conception?
Is morality just a product of the evolution of our brains, with no inherent reality?
Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized?
Is homosexuality a disease? Would it be wrong for parents to genetic alter the sexual orientation of their child?
Is there, on average, different profile of aptitudes among the races?
Would it be moral to give parents the option of euthanizing newborns with birth defects that would consign them to a life of pain and disability?
Do parents have any effect on the character or intelligence of their children?
Have religions killed a greater proportion of people than Nazism?
Would damage from terrorism be reduced if the police could torture suspects in special circumstances?
Would Africa have a better chance of rising out of poverty if it hosted more polluting industries or accepted Europe's nuclear waste?
Will our consumption of meat from living animals, and use of their bodies, be considered morally wrong by future generations?
Is the average intelligence of Western nations declining because duller people are having more children than smarter people?
Is the average intelligence of immigrants into Western nations higher or lower than the existing population?
Would unwanted children be better off if there were a market in adoption rights, with babies going to the highest bidder?
Would lives be saved if we instituted a free market in organs for transplantation?
Should people have the right to clone themselves?
Should people have the right to enhance the genetic traits of their children?
We have certain innate reactions to these questions, and we’re inclined to want to say certain things in response to them. But when we entertain them from inside the Truth Chamber, we realize that we are no longer answering to our peers, society, or even our own values. We are answering to reality, an entity that simply is what it is. Our focus therefore turns entirely to the Truth.
The questions we ask ourselves also change. We ask what is probably the case, setting aside what we hope is the case. We ask whether we know it or only feel it. We ask what our evidence is, and whether our way of reasoning itself is correct. And we ask where we could look to find out more.
The last question is the most important one. Faced with anything on that list, most of us would find we do not know enough to vote reliably, and that a strong view would require further study.
The purpose of that study is different from the usual one. Most research is motivated; we have picked a side and we are collecting support for it. Research done from inside the chamber has no side. You want whichever answer is correct, including the one you were hoping against.
It is curiosity without motive, and it is more fun than it sounds. Some of what everyone accepts in society at any given time will eventually turn out to be wrong.
Application
I am an active investor of my own portfolio, and a founder leverage the money of our investors. I ought to truthfully consider if I am correctly investing my money, and if I am correctly investing the best years of my life building.
In times of intellectual laziness, I question if founders and investors, particularly those who have their own money and time at risk, need a thought exercise at all. After all, we already have aligned financial incentives to be to be truth-seeking.
Yet a trading account does not make anyone less human. Traders hate bad news about their positions, hate reversing a call they have made, and hate losing arguments to those who they deem intellectually inferior.
Second, most of us (be it founders or traders) are mainly managing other people’s money. Our living depends on keeping clients and investors confident, and that contest is generally won on impressions, not accuracy.
Third, even someone trading their own account or bootstrapping their own company has only money and time on the line, and that is not everything.
To get real honesty out of ourselves we have to imagine staking something that matters more: our wellbeing, happiness, and freedom.
The founder’s case is in some sense even harder than the trader. A founder’s daily job is persuasion: of investors, of employees, of customers, and of themselves too. Very little in a young company’s life enforces the truth quickly. The feedback is slow and noisy, and almost any result can be read as encouraging.
In addition, it is easy for identity to creep in. It is easy for me to identify as a techno-optimist who believes in AI, and let being a founder be a core part of my identity. The fact that these questions creep into my identity means I should expect my thinking here to be worse than usual, which is all the more reason that I should consider them carefully in a Truth-seeking way.
Conclusion
We are able to think truthfully, yet most of our reasoning is motivated. Limiting our identities lets us be more truth-seeking in our daily life. Betting on statements which can be resolved quickly among friends forces us to calibrate our thinking. We can also mentally situate ourselves in thought experiments to recall what it feels like to need the right answer.
Yet Truth is not the only thing worth caring about. Being truthful all the time is tiring and inefficient. Auditing a belief is mentally expensive, which is why the chamber is kept only for a minority of questions.
Most of us would also not want to be close to someone who is completely truthful all the time. Accurate answers are not always kind, yet the kind one is usually the right one to give. Tact, encouragement, praise, and a great deal of what makes life good and smooth runs on things that would not survive the Truth chamber.
Some beliefs even work precisely because they are held. A placebo helps the patient who trusts it and an athlete who is sure of winning will do better than one who has to look up the odds. The same goes for building anything worthwhile. The base rates for new companies are terrible, and most founder who weighed them truthfully every morning should stop. Most great deeds were done by people who underestimated what they would cost, and we are better off because they did.
Finally, if nothing is part of me and nothing is sacred to me then nothing is worth defending and little is worth building. Families, communities, countries, and faiths last only because enough people identify with them. A world of people with perfectly small identities would see very clearly and build very little.
Truthfulness is merely one value among several, and it competes with the others such as kindness, loyalty, courage, and hope. I do not believe that tension can be easily resolved. Words have meanings, and I sincerely believe that the truth does clash with other good and desirable things. We ought, at least on this occasion, to be truthful about that.
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