A Higher Authority

How can we best align ourselves with the truth? How can we make it a practice to properly absorb and integrate true information into our minds?

This post is the culmination of a lot of epistemological thinking over the last few years cast in the context of the latest crisis of trust. How do we have confidence that we know true things? Who can we trust and how do we make that determination? It’s a long one, so buckle up.

As I write this, the presidential debate was only 10 days ago and…

I wasn’t terribly surprised by President Biden’s performance (nor by President Trump’s) but I have been caught a bit on my heels with the avalanche that it caused in the news media and among the chattering classes. As Ben Smith put it:

How could we have allowed our audience to be surprised about the basic condition of the number one reporting target in the country, the president?

Prolific and influential tweeter

eigenrobot

has a good piece on the silliness of the surprise expressed by many in the field of journalism and then also the mea culpa from a thinker that he admires. He then explains his own lack of surprise with something that approximates to “well duh”.

I’m not terribly interested in the excuses or explanations of why people were unable to accept or admit certain truths about the president’s condition or why they didn’t feel the need to focus on them or raise louder concerns about them. I am very interested in how we ourselves avoid this trap not just on this topic but as an ongoing life practice.

In short: How can we best align ourselves with the truth? How can we train our minds to sniff out the truth or, at the very least, make a practice of properly interrogating and integrating information?

There is a secondary question embedded in this discussion that is also important to consider. Let’s assume we all have biases and, furthermore, let’s assume that our biases make us more likely to accept certain information that confirms our biases and skeptical of information that contradicts or undermines our biases.

From here, I’m going to jump to the conclusion: If we are to align our minds to the truth of the world, we have to listen to people that we can trust to tell us that truth, even if we are disinclined to hear it. It doesn’t mean we have to take all their opinions and make them our own. But we do need to add their voice to our mental jury of good and honest people who care about the truth. We need to frequently arrange the members of that jury against one another and (importantly) allow their observations and advice to influence our own understanding.

I’ve been writing for a few years now on how to reform institutions who are stuck in an intellectual and ideological bubble of conformism. I’ve been doing it long enough while so little changes that I wonder if the entire project of institutional reform is inevitably doomed.

Fortunately, the project of reforming our own minds is not doomed. We can change and update any time we like and a good time to make those updates is when we discover (to our shock) that something we believed, something in which we had great confidence, was plainly untrue. That is the perfect moment to reselect our mental jury in order to incorporate new people who had the insight that we either ignored or abhorred.

This is a similar process that I recommended when I wrote about post-Covid reconciliation. There is no mea culpa that is meaningful without a re-assessment of why we were wrong and how we are going to be less wrong in the future.

We can’t, under any circumstances, say, “Fine, you got your way. Now can we drop this?”

We can’t drop this because the core of this isn’t about the pandemic. It is about including the dissenters who were ignored and shoved to the periphery even as they were the only ones talking sense in criticizing mandates. They weren’t right because some poll told them to be right. They thought and considered and researched and debated and came to find this truth even as it was labeled misinformation and attacked at the highest levels of power. 

In this, they have earned a place at the table when we discuss next steps. Policy should not be made unilaterally by politicians who ignored the dissenters until they were forced to agree. [And when they were forced to agree], they did not do so through a process of data or scientific investigation, but through the steady grinding away of public patience. Those politicians need to step back and give the floor to the people who now have years of hard-won practical experience in changing hearts and minds.

Who, Exactly, Can We Trust?

In assessing who should be on our mental jury that helps us determine truth, it is easier (and more fun) to start with identifying the people we can’t trust.

High on the list of people we shouldn’t trust are the journalists who saw Biden’s worrying condition and kept quiet about it, either out of a sense of deference or duty. This is the question that was asked of Olivia Nuzzi when she authored a relentless expose on Biden’s condition this week. She stated: “In January, I began hearing similar stories from Democratic officials, activists, and donors who came away from interactions with Joe Biden disturbed by what they had seen.”

Had Nuzzi really been hearing these stories for the better part of a year and simply not said anything about it until now? If so, she is an untrustworthy source. If this is true, she stifled her impulse and duty to report uncomfortable truths in favor of some other ideal.

But here is where the question of trust strikes us to the core. If Nuzzi had ulterior motives to hide this information, why on earth should we trust her now? If she had untrustworthy motives to hide the nature of Biden’s condition, it stands to reason she now has untrustworthy motives to report these revelations. We should not trust her simply because she is writing something that we might think helps our “team”. If she was willing to suppress information to achieve a political or ideological goal, then we should assume that she is continuing this deceptive pattern of behavior. The difference is not that she suddenly became honest. The difference is that her goals have changed. She has not outed Biden so much as she has outed herself as someone we cannot trust.

I hate to pick on her specifically. There are many more cases that I could point to because this pattern of behavior is prevalent. The entire industry of news media has adopted a pattern of ignoring difficult truths while engaging in deception through omission. We couldn’t fully trust them then and we cannot fully trust them now. They are lying to us just as much now, engaging in the same distribution of selective truth for the purpose of narrative advancement. We would be fools to trust the untrustworthy simply because they are now telling us things we agree with.

And if we are willing to tolerate this behavior because we think it advances a narrative we prefer, that tells us that we don’t really hate the liars. We just hate who the liars are working for.

Ultimately we must have people we trust. Or, at the very least, make a list of people in our lives who we respect, even when we disagree. When these people speak up, we need to take a moment and consider. We need to grant them the benefit of a hearing.

But how do we find these people? There isn’t a simple answer to this since the criteria is going to depend on what lines we feel cannot be crossed. I’ve collected a set of friends and experts who I trust not only in their expertise but in their attempts to leverage that expertise to advance truth and understanding. When I think about the people I trust, I come up with the following qualities:

1. They keep their opinions to a narrow expertise they are comfortable speaking to

2. They do the reading (and will happily point you to it)

3. When they build a case, the case is as short and “to the point” as they can make it

4. To the extent that they have a “side”, they take their side to task when they know that their side has gotten it wrong.

5. They speak bravely, knowing they some things they say will be unpopular

6. Even when they speak bravely, they speak kindly. Their goal is not to humiliate or condemn, but to make their case for the truth as they have discovered and understood it.

The difficulty in finding these people becomes a problem of our own judgment. They will not always agree with us. They will not always be right. But they are searching for the truth in an information environment that doesn’t particularly care for the truth. A truly functioning institution would be filled with these people; most of them are not. We cannot force these institutions to value truth, curiosity, and hard-fought investigation, but we can make sure that we do. Maybe that is enough for now.

However impressive our own truth-sensing apparatus is, we need to collect a set of experts and authorities who we trust and whose opinion we hold close. No matter how people act on Twitter, we cannot pose as experts on everything all the time. We must inform our understanding with reason and with trust.

Don't be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you've been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I haven't seen it myself. I couldn't prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so.

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

Let’s all find our collection of reliable people.