The Nature of Truth
How cultures contextualize “truth” heavily impacts their members’ daily lives, from the jobs they take to their hobbies. For example, most Quaker cultivars see truth as a light which exists equally within all people at birth and can be slowly eroded over time (by things like sex).[[114]](#_ftn114) Thus if you are a Quaker, cultivating children is one of the most authentic ways you can commune with the truth of reality. This is why Quakers are disproportionately represented in educational careers and disproportionately teach as a hobby (seriously, every single Quaker we know spent at least part of their life as a teacher of some sort). This interpretation of truth also explains why Quaker education historically outcompeted other forms of teaching, as Quaker educators viewed their jobs as cultivating children instead of molding them into a specific outcome (all during a time when that perspective was incredibly rare).
Irreparable cultural schisms can result from new branches of an existing culture choosing to interpret truth differently. Heck, the entire Protestant Reformation was largely just a question of whether truth was better interpreted by the individual or by expert consensus (e.g., the Catholic clergy).
Some cultures trust the assessment of experts over that of the individual. These cultures hold that the truth of a thing is best determined by individuals who spent their entire lives studying that thing. Given this perspective, these cultures often build a central bureaucracy to certify experts’ competency and mediate their work. Other cultures think it is every individual’s responsibility to assess the evidence themselves and that any large bureaucracy that accredits expertise is vulnerable to corruption and misaligned incentives. It is this differing opinion which not only led to the Protestant Reformation but that has resurfaced in how various cultures, including most of the secular descendants of Protestant cultivars, have reacted to COVID-19.
This specific divide exemplifies how through understanding how a culture sees truth, you can better understand and predict world events while nudging them toward your desired outcome. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many individuals were shocked to see that a huge swath of Americans did not trust what “experts” told them to do and instead insisted on “doing their own research.” Then, this shocked group reacted by essentially saying: “Just do as you are told for the good of the greater community and submit to expert consensus!” This was just about the worst thing to say to the United States’ Protestant-descended individualists if the goal was to encourage them to actually wear masks or get vaccinated. These people had literally spent hundreds of years being burnt alive for their unwillingness to bend to “expert consensus.”
David Hackett Fischer provided a great account of Protestant resistance to authority in Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, writing of a preacher who came from the coasts and tried to preach to backcountry Protestants during the colonial period. He was told he would be painfully dispatched if he did not shut up. Thinking he had failed, he was despondent and ended up needing to ask the locals for some hospitality before going back to the coast. Over dinner, he found people happily asking him questions about what he had planned to preach, and he had the opportunity to do the rounds at most of the town’s households. The key to communicating with this kind of culture is not to tell them what to think as an “authority” but to help them think through new ideas as an equal (even if you are convinced from your own cultural background that you are their “better”).
Understanding the various ways people understand truth—and not just demanding that everyone sees it through your cultural lens—can help you better navigate society.
While our first book, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Life, explores this topic, suffice it to say that all individuals have a hierarchy of “truth” relating to how they engage with information in the world. For a more detailed breakdown of this topic, see the Standards of Evidence chapter of that book. As a short summary, people use the following standards of evidence (truth) when determining what to believe:
- Logical Consistency
- Personal Experience
- Personal Emotional Experience
- Cultural Consensus
- Expert Consensus
- Scientific Method
- Doctrine
While most people leverage all or most of the above standards to some extent, people order them differently, with some cultures strictly prioritizing one standard over others.
The Quaker faith, for example, relies more on personal emotional experience as a standard of evidence (determinant of truth) than perhaps any culture in the world. In some Quaker churches (known as meeting houses), adherents just sit quietly, waiting on God to inspire them to say something. Most Quakers see priests (“experts”) as an obstruction of the truth that comes from within.
This can be contrasted with the Calvinists, who also see priests (“experts”) as an obstruction to truth, but instead of holding personal emotional experience as the highest standard of evidence, they hold that truth can only come from individual research and thought (personal experience & logical consistency). Thus, instead of having a bunch of people who are equals sitting in a church waiting on God to speak through them, Calvinists feature a bunch of people quietly sitting in a church individually studying their Bibles.
This minor difference in how the two cultures answer the question: “Does the little voice inside your heart trump logical investigation of reality?” has an enormous impact, not just on the groups’ contrasting historical theologies and lifestyles but also the present-day secular culture of those descended from these groups. For example, our secular Quaker friends are much more likely to search their emotions for guidance regarding what they should think. In some cases, they even believe there is a little voice inside that guides them—despite having a secular worldview.
Cultivars have the potential to create an evolutionary vortex in which members with a specific sociological profile are disproportionately drawn to a certain cultivar and less likely to leave it. This dynamic can produce a snowball effect in which members of that cultivar begin to systematically feature a genetic predisposition to see the world a certain way. Should such evolutionary vortexes exist, there will be advantages to leveraging your cultural and religious heritage when building your own secular theology (should you want to do so), as it may be that not all software (cultivars) are compatible with all hardware (genetic predispositions). Even long after leaving their faith, our Quaker-descended friends still trust their gut at a level we could never stomach even if there were a pile of scientific studies saying intuition was objectively a better way of engaging with reality. We understand it’s offensive to point out that not all humans have the same “hardware,” but it’s worth facing criticism given the outsized benefits one can gain from leveraging one’s “baked-in” predispositions to one’s advantage.
What seems like a small difference in the ways historical Quakers and Calvinists define “truth” leads to a cascade of differences in how they interact with the world. The difference influences everything from the types of careers Quakers versus Calvinists disproportionately choose (teacher vs. inventor) to the differing values they place on human life. If you believe that everyone has an equal spark of truth within them, then you may be more likely to conclude that all life is valuable, whereas if you believe that truth must be extracted from reality but is obscured by authority, then you may be less likely to value the lives of those you see as obscuring the truth. Differing views of truth may even explain why, while both Quakers and Calvinists made up many of the major players in the Abolition movement, the means by which they sought to achieve their goals were radically different, with Quakers being famous for pushing political reform and Calvinists being famous for hunting and killing slave holders (you would never get a Quaker John Brown). (Note: While doing research for this book, our views on the Quakers’ role in the abolition movement have updated slightly. We will get to what we mean by this in just a few chapters.)
Catholic vs. Protestant Standards of Evidence
The Catholic tradition presents a great example of how the way a culture relates to truth affects the life outcomes of its adherents. Expert consensus stands at the core of how Catholic culture understands the world—belief that truth is more efficiently procured by a class of people, authenticated by a central bureaucracy, who dedicate their entire lives to studying truth and disseminating that information to the masses (versus the Protestant belief that it is up to the individual to seek and find truth themselves).
There is logic behind both arguments, which is why questions about the nature of truth are really questions about culture rather than what is correct or incorrect. There is no objectively correct way to best determine truth.
Respecting expert consensus as mediated by a central bureaucracy intrinsically leads to higher trust in institutions. This may partly explain why Irish Catholics historically are stereotyped as being disproportionately represented in the police force.[[115]](#_ftn115) [[116]](#_ftn116) Ironically, this same respect for centralized institutions may explain why Catholic immigrant populations are much more likely than any other immigrant group to form a new central bureaucracy upon immigrating to a new country (these bureaucracies typically manifest as organized crime, but we suspect that is more a product of most immigrants being poor and on the outs with society).
The Mob (Irish), the Mafia (Italian), and Latin Kings / MS-13 / 18th Street Gang (Hispanic) have differentially dwarfed other immigrant organized crime groups like the Triad during their respective heydays, with the only nearly-as-influential counterexample of a gang that consisted mostly of immigrants being the Russian Mob. This counterexample somewhat proves the rule, as while the Russian Orthodox church is not Catholic, it nevertheless uses expert consensus as its primary standard of evidence (the central bureaucracy just happens to be different). This indicates that expert consensus as a standard of evidence bestows immigrant groups with higher odds of developing a bureaucracy designed to help in-group members.
A cultural specialization like this can have a huge effect at the tail end of a field’s achievement distribution (i.e., if you take the ten best people in the world in a field, cultural specialization will affect that composition more than the average person who holds that job). Within the Catholic cultural specialization, this can be seen at the tail end of achievement in the field of law, with only two out of nine currently sitting Supreme Court justices not hailing from Catholic backgrounds (Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer, both of whom are Jewish, another culture with mechanisms that grants adherents a leg-up in the legal profession).[[117]](#_ftn117) Notably, not a single person with a purely Protestant background sits on the Supreme Court. By chance, this would be incredibly unlikely, but it makes sense for a culture that is defined by an intense distrust of bureaucracy and authority.
Catholic-Protestant differences in truth definition even influence the types of governments that the respective cultivars nurture. Historically, most Protestant cultivars’ distrust of authority eroded centralized power structures around them—to a point at which almost every single one of the early European proto-democracies were majority Protestant nations whereas Catholic nations maintained monarchies longer on average.
In modern times, cultivars that use expert consensus as their primary standards of evidence (mostly Catholic and Eastern Orthodox) have been much more likely to become dictatorships and score dramatically higher on corruption scores.[[118]](#_ftn118) In fact, outside of Teodoro in Papua New Guinea, we can’t think of a single majority Protestant country outside of Africa that stayed a dictatorship for longer than seven years. If you don’t include the seven-year qualification, you have Nazi Germany, the 1930s Era of Silence in Estonia, and Kārlis Ulmanis’ 1934 Coup in Latvia.
In addition to Catholic and Orthodox Church traditions, many soft and pop cultures also use expert consensus as their primary standard of evidence. The most common certifying central authority deferred to by pop cultures is the academic bureaucracy (the university system). It makes perfect sense that pop cultures default to expert consensus mechanisms for determining truth, as it is a particularly “low effort” standard of evidence for a new convert.
That said, pop cultures often also use personal emotional experience as their standard evidence for the same reason (converts have to do very little to change themselves if they presume what they are feeling in the moment is backed by some objective truth). While the supervirus uses both expert consensus and emotional experience as standards of evidence, it prioritizes a socially perceived, aggregate emotional experience over both. In other words, its highest truth is the community’s collective intuition, where the contributions of higher-status community members (those able to single they are most offended) are given more weight.
While it may seem like we are derisive of expert consensus as a standard of evidence, we ultimately think it is probably the closest to correct—at least at a societal level. This is doubly true if the bureaucracy certifying experts has some way to “refresh” itself through internal housekeeping. The Catholic Church has successfully done this a few times throughout its history and has evolved unique mechanisms for this process. However, we worry that the current academic bureaucracy, looked to as the primary authenticator of truth by many pop cultures, does not have a stable calibration or cleaning mechanism in place. This means that, should academia become so corrupt that it becomes essentially non-functional at certifying genuine expertise in a specific domain, it will pull cultivars who leverage it as an arbiter of truth further and further from reality. This is partly why we built the Collins Institute, a new model for how the academic system could work.
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You may be thinking: “But what about child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church? Surely, that proves the Church is evil and corrupt to its core.” Well, when you contrast the rates of child molestation in the Catholic Church with those in other large bureaucracies, like the United States public school system, it starts to look unremarkable. Specifically, the American public school system not only has more than 100 times the number of child molestation cases on a yearly basis, but on a per-teacher to per-priest basis, the rate at which teachers molest children is actually slightly higher. The U.S. Department of Education found that 5% to 7% of public school teachers engage in sexual abuse of children per year contrasted with 4% of Anglican priests, as found by a study in Western Canada and backed up by a study of U.S. priests conducted by researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The 2002 Department of Education report estimated that between 6% and 10% of all public school students would be victims of abuse before graduation.
Now you might be thinking: “But the Church covered for priests who sexually abused children and didn’t fire them. Surely, that is proof they are evil!”
Well, teachers’ unions also covered for and continued to employ those found to be abusing students. Actually, teachers’ union lobbying to systematically cover up the amount of sexual abuse that takes place in schools is a big reason you haven’t heard about this. The teachers’ unions in some states made it so hard to fire teachers who molest children that in NYC, they are moved to special “padded classrooms without children” and left on payroll (for example, Aryeh Eller has been paid $1.7M in salary as a teacher with full health and pension benefits since being removed due to inappropriately touching under-aged girls).
Perhaps our constant hand-wringing about the corruption of the U.S. education system and the need to build an alternative makes a bit more sense now. While the Catholic Church has done some really shitty things both now and in history, those acts were not particularly worse than the crimes of other large bureaucracies of their time. From our cultural bias, we would just say all large bureaucracies are evil, and the evil in the Catholic Church does not come from the religion but rather from the bureaucracy.
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This is not to say pop cultures never use independent investigation as their primary standard of evidence. When they do, such investigation is almost always tied to conspiracy theories (QAnon and the flat Earth movement being examples) and as such show that as much as we may espouse the virtues of personal investigation, it has significant downsides. The documentary, Behind the Curve on Netflix, does a great job of demonstrating the flat Earth movement’s obsession with independent scientific research—these people are not science deniers but rather refuters of the academic bureaucracy as a custodian of science. An ideal cultural ecosystem will take advantage of cultivars that rely on expert consensus as well as those which rely on personal experience to cover each other’s weaknesses.
Witch trials exemplify how expert consensus, as a standard of evidence, can produce more morally palatable outcomes than personal experience. The Catholic Inquisition was fairly legalistic and actually much more fair than the cartoonish picture painted by pop history suggests. First, the Inquisition involved not a search for witches, as the experts explicitly did not believe in them, but rather a search for heretics. The process required the prosecutors to have both hard evidence and witnesses, with said witnesses vetted for past “quarrelsome behavior.” This lowered the odds of individuals randomly accusing people they disliked. Moreover, the Catholic Church generally did not recommend death for proven heretics but rather confession, repentance, and charitable work assigned as penance.[[119]](#_ftn119) Humorously, the Inquisition was sometimes both more ethical and civilized in its treatment of “heretics” (those not buying into the dominant cultural belief system) than cancel culture could ever claim to be.
Contrast this with the Calvinist (usually the Puritan branch) method of finding witches, which essentially assumed natural laws of God not written in the Bible could be reasoned from a combination of evidence or logical deduction.[[120]](#_ftn120) For example, an individual may reason, “a witch must have refused the baptism, and therefore, water must reject them, so let’s bind their legs and arms and throw them in a pond.” (Yes, sometimes Catholic trials did these “naturalistic tests” and sometimes Calvinist groups relied on trials, but largely speaking Calvinist witch trials were much less strictly run and less likely to be dismissed when evidence did not align with preconceptions. Also, Calvinists went waaaay further with the insane logic used in naturalistic tests.) Calvinist-run witch trials had a dramatically higher body count than their Catholic counterparts. It is far easier for a group to lose itself to imprudence and biased logic when it regards personal investigation as the highest standard of evidence and lacks a higher authority to rein it in.
The Unique Jewish Standard of Evidence
Having explored some cultures that use standards of evidence we can easily comprehend, let’s investigate a culture that uses a standard of evidence far more foreign to our personal worldview (and thus more interesting) but still very successful: The Jewish one.
If the practice of sitting in a leaderless room quietly and waiting until you are moved to say something is the essence of a Quaker understanding of truth, and if sitting in a room quietly while independently studying the Bible is the essence of a Calvinist understanding of truth, then the Jewish understanding of truth is best seen in the practice known as Chavrusa (sometimes spelled Havruta). In this practice, a piece of religious text is chosen, then individuals are paired in groups of two based on those who would have the most spirited disagreement on the topic, and each pair debates the text (depending on the branch of Jewish tradition, these debate groups can include up to five people). As Rabbi Yosi bar Hanina is quoted as saying in the Talmud, “scholars who sit alone to study the Torah … become stupid” (Berakhot 63b). Truth, as understood in many Judaic traditions,[[121]](#_ftn121) is not an absolute thing that can be found behind the text; instead, truth emerges from the debate itself. In Jewish culture, the ongoing cultural conversation is the highest order of truth.
To an outsider, this can create the perspective that truth within Judaism is essentially a form of ultra-legalism. Not only does the name of their holy book, the Torah, תּוֹרָה, literally translate to “the law,” but their culture’s foundational interaction with God (the ten commandments) was essentially a legal contract between God and a chosen people (though תּוֹרָה can also be translated to teaching or instruction). Moreover, most Jewish households hang a Ketubah on their walls—a Jewish wedding contract that outlines the legal obligations of a wife and husband (it is commonly thought of as an important piece of uniquely Jewish art). The way many Jewish branches interpret truth is legalistic to an extent that no other culture even begins to approach.
You may assume we are overstating things, so let’s look at an example. Christians are told not to work on the Sabbath, and they’re like:
“Cool, a day to focus on worship and rest!”
Jews get told not to work on the Sabbath, and they’re like:
“OK, but what technically counts as work? Let’s divide all work into 39 categories and then divide those 39 categories into 39 subcategories—and then, of course, we need to take into account the intention when an action is performed. Oh, but of course sometimes you may need to do something like carry your baby outside to the park, and carrying something from one type of space to another type of space could be considered a type of work, so we will cordon off a zone with a cord to designate the outside and the inside as technically the same kind of space. Ah, now that we have this cordoned-off zone indemnity, could we perhaps put a cord around an entire city?”
This is why synagogues pay over $100,000 annually to keep a fishing line around a large portion of Manhattan. Let’s be clear: Only certain sects of Judaism have this kind of extreme take—but a number do. Not a single Christian denomination has anything close to this level of legalism (a few have stricter rules, but none have rules so nuanced or systematized). Depending on the perspective you take, Jewish culture either regards technical, legalistic conclusions as the highest order of truth or Jewish culture sees the legalistic debate itself as the highest order of truth.
This is not a new phenomenon and appears to be core to even ancient Jewish culture, as can be seen from The Oven of Akhnai in the Talmud (the “snake oven story”). In the story, three rabbis argue over whether a new oven design is subject to ritual impurity. Two rabbis argue from the perspective of legalistic interpretations of past texts. The third keeps having God perform miraculous acts like making a river flow backward on demand to show them that God disagrees with them.
What is fascinating is that, at the story’s conclusion, the rabbi, whose perspective on the topic is obviously endorsed by God, is expelled from the community. Let’s be clear: This is a story about educated, intelligent, well-intentioned people (not idiots); they know God disagrees with their interpretation of the rules—however, because their interpretation of the rules is “technically correct,” it supersedes God’s “opinion” on the subject. Crazier still (from the perspective of non-Jewish cultures), God ends up essentially agreeing with the legalist perspective, admitting he was acting out of his jurisdiction—as the story says, “it is not in heaven.” He (God) gives props to the two other rabbis for sticking to their guns, laughing while saying, “My children have bested me.”
This story shows that even in distant history, some Jews found the legalism of their tradition grating. Even though it could cause divisions in their community (the rabbi who was expelled ended up killing one of the others with prayers over this slight), legalism is nevertheless an important part of Jewish culture—even more important than the will of God. More critically, for our purposes, legalism is a differentiating part of Jewish culture, which separates most Jewish cultivars from any other extant cultivar.
Perhaps this differentiation can partly explain outsized Jewish success in some areas. Consider the disproportionate number of Nobel Prize winners cited above. It should not be surprising that a culture with a heavy focus on truth as determined through intellectual debate would produce people skilled at intellectual debate and inquiry.
If you think Jewish success is a product of higher average IQs, it is not. The studies showing a large effect are very flawed, and we are quite embarrassed to have believed them without actually reading their methodology before digging into them when writing this book. For a detailed breakdown of every major study in this space and what it actually shows, see: “The Myth of a Large, Genetic Jewish IQ Advantage” on page 485.
To word it another way, the Christian’s relationship with God is often framed in terms of a parent and a child’s relationship, though the power difference in the framing often makes adherents appear more like feudal supplicants (actually, we go into this more later but the way Christians put their hands together when praying may be derived from a vassalage ceremony). We suspect this is why many extremist young Christians fashion themselves as unwavering “knights” fighting for a glorious cause—mirroring a vassal relationship. Come to think of it, we have never heard a Jewish person compare themselves to a knight, yet this analogy is omnipresent in young Christian males.
The Christian lord-vassal relationship heavily contrasts with the Jewish relationship, which is more like a legal contract represented in the commandments. In most Christian traditions, God will show you favor because you love him or supplicate yourself enough to him, whereas in the Jewish tradition, earning God’s favor is more about upholding your side of a contract God signed with your people (as The Oven of Akhnai story in the Talmud demonstrates, directly disobeying the will of God is better than breaking the technicals of the contract).
While it is sufficiently interesting to us that the legalistic approach taken to truth in Jewish culture might partly explain Jewish populations’ disproportionate academic success, we continue to obsess with it because it seems so counterintuitive to us. From a Calvinist perspective, the rabbi who was expelled was obviously in the right and our cultural bias prevents us from seeing how anyone could think otherwise. Surely an all-powerful deity’s will would supersede any contract—right? And, if His will seemed to contradict a contract, then our understanding of the contract, rather than His, must be wrong, right? Isn’t God an all-powerful entity that can see all things at once? It would be like ignoring a bizarre finding in the field of quantum physics because it did not match an earlier understanding of an immutable cosmic force.
We may personally disagree with the Quaker and Catholic views of how to search for truth, but we also “get it.” Their approaches to truth seem logically sound. The Jewish perspective did not make sense to us until we remembered the goal of a culture is not to search for absolute “real” truth but to breed, thrive, and reduce bleed. By creating a mindset in which an individual can’t come out of nowhere and pretend to be divinely inspired while performing magic tricks, the Jewish tradition dramatically lowers its probability of splintering and always allows room for a splinter faction to be recombined into the whole.
This may not seem like a major hazard today, but Jewish thinkers who put on thaumaturgical performances (performing magic or miracles) and had large groups of followers were actually pretty common in early Jewish history and include individuals like Honi the Circle-Drawer, Eliezar the exorcist, and Jesus. (We understand it may seem offensive to frame Jesus this way, but even from the perspective of most Christian traditions, Jesus manifested as a Jewish individual who claimed to have a special relationship with God and demonstrated those claims through thaumaturgical performances.)
In other words, this view of truth ensures all Jewish differences in belief are differences of interpretation, not information. When you consider this from the perspective of culture crafting, the approach is beyond shrewd—it is genius—and it may explain why Jews that maintain this cultural element have not mass slaughtered each other since the Hasmonean Civil War. Moreover, when branches of the Jewish cultivar do drop this cultural element and become open to “revelations” of absolute truth directly from God, they become Christians or Muslims and start killing each other while also losing their ability to be easily reintegrated into broader Jewish branches.
When one branch of Christianity breaks off from another branch of Christianity, it seldom reintegrates, whereas there are ample cases of splinters re-joining larger groups in Jewish history despite Christian cultivars all having evolved out of Jewish ones. In other words, when a Jewish splinter group drops its legalistic approach to truth, it appears to lose this “superpower” of other Jewish cultivars. (Note: Most polytheistic religions facilitate the re-joining of splinter groups as well; only monotheistic ones have nearly totally lost it.)
We feel like jerks for suggesting that any culture only “believes” something because it is advantageous (in terms of increased achievement, stability, and continuity) rather than because they really believe it” and maybe that interpretation is wrong. Perhaps a legalistic approach to truth really is logical.
After all, if God sets out specific laws for a chosen people, it makes perfect sense that those people should give disproportionate precedence to those laws. Deferring to those laws—even in opposition to God’s opinion on a subject—is ultimately a demonstration of respect to God.
Imagine a parent leaves two groups of kids in a room and, to keep them from wandering off and getting injured, tells them not to play outside a playpen. Group A decides to expand the playpen’s size to make sure nobody accidentally breaks the rule while still getting access to more space and toys. Meanwhile, Group B decides the parent’s intent must be that they aren’t supposed to have fun, so they decide to sit and stare solemnly at the wall during the parent’s absence.
While both groups A and B misinterpreted the parent’s intention, Group A, using a more legalistic definition of truth, showed more respect for the parent by not presuming they could understand the parent’s intent. What to outside cultures may look like absurd legalism could really be a sign of respect for God through the admission that God’s wisdom is so great, one would be crazy to presume they can understand the “intentions” behind any of His thoughts.
In addition, God, as depicted in writings like the Ketuvim (think: The Book of Job), can be quite capricious at times. Presumably, when God takes the time to outline hard and fast rules, He is in a more lucid state and properly thinking through important implications, making official, God-given rules more important than randomly expressed opinions. This is not a crazy concept. If the President of the United States were to lay out a new policy through an official Executive Order, people would give it far more precedence than an unrehearsed presidential opinion expressed amid a chaotic press conference. Similarly, a Papal Bull carries a totally different weight than an offhand remark made by the Pope. It is hardly illogical for a group to give precedence to carefully crafted, official mandates.
Finally, it may be that Jewish tradition does not position legalism as the highest order of truth but rather the debate itself. By this reasoning, the process of a culture evolving and advancing is the highest order of truth. In this interpretation, the tradition itself, rather than the individual, is the “unit of consciousness,” and each individual’s role as a neuron within this larger system is to constantly debate the culture’s rules and texts while generating new ones. To use a pop culture analogy, the Jewish tribe is like Earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A supercomputer that will come to the truth so long as its individual components perform their roles. In this view, Judaism is like a supercomputer that will collectively come to the right answers so long as every individual component does not deviate from its script, even when that script seems illogical. This approach makes sense in that it could be the height of arrogance to think a single individual could even begin to understand the ultimate questions they are meant to ask, much less the answers. It is entirely plausible that such weighty subjects may only be tackled by an intergenerational consciousness.
While we suspect that many readers have intuitions about the “correct” way a culture should search for truth, we are ambivalent. Honestly, we see genuine value in all of the methodologies outlined above and see flaws and benefits to each.
How We Understand Truth: Criteria of Authenticity
Having read how some extant cultures determine truth, you might be curious to know what standard we have chosen for our personal House cultivar.
It should be obvious to anyone who has read our other books that the standard of evidence we regard least is personal emotional experience. To us, emotions are merely signals that helped our ancestors have more surviving offspring—but in a completely different environmental context. Emotions are vestiges of our animal selves, clawing away at our humanity, logic, and self-determination. To that end, emotional experience can act not just as the standard of evidence we value least but also as a uniquely dangerous signal that can and often does corrupt logical judgments. For example, before we decided to get engaged, we took a few months apart from each other to ensure that love would not cloud our judgment on such a monumental life decision (we can think of nothing more perverse than a marriage built upon a foundation so dehumanizing as love).
The two standards of evidence we regard most highly are expert consensus and personal research (the combination is essential in our view, as both have irreparable flaws when used in isolation). While the Calvinist concept of radical, independent research was innovative when first developed and often sufficient during a simpler time in history, the obsessive independent study model yields an insufficient picture of reality in a world where successful humans need to understand a broad array of complex domains. Without loads of money and time, independent study is unlikely to yield an accurate perception of reality on even a moderate array of issues.
At the same time, expert consensus is no longer effective on its own either. In our new hyper-connected and fast-paced world, sources of expert consensus are increasingly likely to distribute propaganda as if it was factual information—this is doubly true as previously unimpeachable organizations like the American university and media/news systems are in a state of collapse, having been so infected by the parasitoidal supervirus they are about to pop like a bloated caterpillar whose insides have long since been consumed by worms crawling just beneath its skin.
To resolve this, we developed internal “Criteria of Authenticity,” which allow one to consider expert consensus as the highest form of evidence so long as it meets certain standards (the more Criteria of Authenticity a stated “fact” meets, the more likely that fact is to be true). Think of our Criteria of Authenticity like a sieve that retains truth while letting baseless expert consensus flow down the drain.
Our Criteria for Authenticity are based on the belief that there is too much information for any one individual to process, meaning one must turn to experts who have invested in specialization. Nevertheless, one must be careful, as the world is filled with both trustworthy and untrustworthy experts. One furthermore should not rely on a third-party organization to sort legitimate from illegitimate experts—any organization that gains a reputation for doing this effectively will become a priority target for infection by any number of memetic viruses looking to incept it with their ideology and is living on borrowed time as a non-biased source.
Criteria of Authenticity
The following criteria are common indications that an expert’s assertions are true. Very few facts meet all these criteria. Generally speaking, we are more confident in a fact if it meets more of these criteria (i.e., we’re more confident something is true if it meets three of these criteria than if it only meets one).
The Criterion of Embarrassment: Does the presented information run counter to the aspirational reputation, views, or behaviors of the group presenting it? This heuristic was popularized by biblical scholars studying the historical Jesus, who argue that information presented in a gospel about Jesus that doesn’t adhere to either Christian or Jewish ideals may be considered more credible. After all, it doesn’t do gospel writers any favors to include unflattering details. To present a secular example: An oil company’s internally-generated report stating their drilling is environmentally damaging is more likely to be true than an environmental advocacy group’s report asserting the same.
The Criterion of Multiple Attestation: Also popularized by biblical scholars, the criterion for multiple attestation essentially holds that if several independent sources say the same thing, that thing is more likely to be true. For example, if several peer-reviewed studies report a certain gender is more likely to die in a pandemic, and insurance rates also go up for people of that gender, then it is likely true that one particular gender is at higher risk. The distinct danger of this heuristic in the modern age is that often journalists and publishers repeat untrue facts initially reported in one channel without verifying (or even citing) them, giving one the impression that multiple independent sources have vetted a fact that is ultimately untrue—thus one must reference sources that do not, or cannot, draw from each other (e.g., both scientific studies and insurance rates).
The Criterion of Filtering: If a source has shown that it heavily censors information that supports an ideological perspective at odds with them, all favorably-ideologically aligned information they present should be assumed to be filtered.
For example, when Nature Human Behavior announced that it was filtering out research that might “stigmatize individuals or human groups,” we had to update the manner in which we regard any research it publishes (or conspicuously doesn’t publish).[[122]](#_ftn122) Now, if we see some group claim that a fact is true, and we think it would “stigmatize individuals or human groups,” we cannot use an absence of peer-reviewed studies coming out of journals like Nature to argue against said fact because we know that even (and especially) if they were receiving papers that supported the offensive argument, they would not be publishing them. This type of filtering almost always makes things worse for the agenda of whichever group practices it—never better. (This footnote explains this concept more deeply if it’s not clicking.[[123]](#_ftn123))
This criterion heavily motivated our writing of The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality. When we encountered a study by Buss and von Hippe that surveyed 335 social psychologists and found that more than half of respondents would actively occlude any data that suggested a biological basis for sex differences (a study that obviously passed the Criterion of Embarrassment). Upon digging into the data, we were shocked to find loads of low-hanging fruit with huge implications across multiple fields (like early human tribal structures). The field is rife with unexplored findings that would even be useful to groups advocating for LGBT rights. It was as if serious research in the field just was not being done. This highlighted to us how badly we need an academic reformation and how important independent researchers like Aella are.
- The Criterion of Lies: This sub criterion—a more egregious manifestation of the Criterion of Filtering—states that once it has been confirmed that a source intentionally tried to manipulate you for the benefit of its ideological agenda, it can be ignored going forward. A source that obscured the truth in service of an agenda is different from one that appeared to make a genuine mistake (as all sources make mistakes). For example, if you are on a website dedicated to debunking false information and you run across multiple articles with the same bias that claim to debunk matters that are verifiably true, then the site is not a useful source of information, even if its bias is one that you also hold.
The Criterion of Plausibility: To use plausibility as a criterion for truth, ask yourself if the information in question is logically consistent with related information. For example, suppose someone tells you that there are cures for cancer, but companies are hiding them because they can make more money that way. Assuming you live in a society with multiple pharmaceutical companies in competition, this can be dismissed as unlikely, as at least one of the companies would profit from backstabbing the others with this information (at least after a few decades). This is doubly true if any individual scientist at one of these companies with this knowledge could duck out and start their own company, raise money from VCs or a few angels, and get super rich.
Note: This argument does not hold when the solution is not pharmacological, or it is pharmacological, but the drug is a generic, and it is hard to profit off of it, as is the case with Naltrexone and addictions.
- The Criterion of Decentralized Financial Motivations: The most common way the criteria of plausibility gets violated is through implausible financial motivations. Large organizations will almost always do what is in their financial best interest, so when a number of competing large organizations are all doing the same thing, there is probably a strong reason for it. For example, if all airline companies are routing their planes along paths that would not make sense in a flat or round earth model, that model is likely wrong.
The Criterion of Cohesive Narratives: For evidence tied to events, do less-attested parts of the narrative fit in a logically consistent manner with more-attested parts?
For example: Let’s say it is well-attested that one of the only labs in the world dedicated to studying COVID-19 was in Wuhan, they’d previously had containment breaks, and the first outbreak was in Wuhan. That would mean an article arguing that COVID-19 came from deer populations in the USA can be viewed with intense skepticism.
- The Criterion of Beginnings and Ends: This is a sub-criterion that states that if we know something was true at the beginning of a period and that it was also true at the end of a period, it was most likely true throughout that entire period. For example, if we know that humans’ closest relatives, like chimps and gorillas, regularly practice infanticide by throwing infants at rocks after conquering another tribe, and we know that one of our earliest written records (the Bible) also suggests humans engaged in this practice a few thousand years ago, we can assume it was common among early hominid groups. (We explore this topic in detail in The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality.)
The Criterion of Prediction: The criterion of prediction holds that any source that has reliably predicted future events before they happen should be trusted more than other sources. This is doubly true if most other sources were wrong about the same predicted outcome. If a newspaper says Nation X is likely to attack Nation Y, while most others do not, and if that newspaper turns out to be correct, then their coverage of other events in that region is also likely to be more accurate.
Important: This criterion should only be judged using historical data, and a comprehensive assessment of all bets made rather than a source’sclaim that they predicted future events. It is easy to make a hundred predictions and only mention those which ultimately came to pass. Many scam investors, for example, highlight only their investment wins to prospective clients, when if one were to look at their entire historical portfolios, one would see that the scam investors have, on average, lost people money over time, making more bad predictions than good.
- The Criterion of Shot Calling: An extreme version of the criterion of prediction involves what we call “shot calling.” If an individual successfully predicts a very unlikely outcome when a certain treatment, ritual, or practice is performed, then they may be trusted even with very few points of data. If, for instance, a shaman performs a ritual he claims will make you a millionaire within three days and two days later you win a million dollars in the lottery, you cannot simply dismiss his methods out of hand. Consider the Lazslo Polgar case study around creating genius for a real-world example. While this case features a sample size of only three (Polgar’s three daughters), the fact that this man predicted he could essentially manufacture genius (three of the greatest chess players in human history) indicates he had some insight others lack on how the human mind develops, seeing as the probability that any random group of three children would all turn out to be geniuses in exactly the same way, in the way he said they would be, is astronomically low. (We also know that Polgar did not fabricate his prediction only after succeeding, as we have evidence from the personal ad he used to find a wife in which he states his intentions.)
The Criterion of Memability: Information bearing a similar structure or theme common to misinformation can be strongly discounted. For example, if someone tells you, “Daddy long legs are actually the most poisonous spider in the world but their mouths are too small to bite you,” you should be very skeptical. This claim shares multiple characteristics that cause false information to be extensively shared (it is shocking, likely to come up, and not easily verifiable, making it a very likely claim to spread whether or not it is true). For a comprehensive list of untrue information that is highly memable, check out Wikipedia’s list of common misconceptions.[[124]](#_ftn124)
A case in which this heuristic fell short: During the World War I, there were many false reports of genocide. For this reason, many did not trust the reports of genocide when they first emerged in the World War II, in part because they sounded so insanely over the top and scandalous.
The Criterion of Verifiability: Any information that could be easily verified by other people is more likely to be true than an unverifiable fact. In the Mayan empire, the priest cast would test whether a king was “real” by looking for a sign under his tongue, likely because no one else could get the king to show them that part of his anatomy and the king could not see the underside of his own tongue, allowing the priests to choose a king. Based on the criterion of verifiability, you can trust an easily verifiable claim more than an unverifiable one—even if you don’t plan on verifying that claim. Someone who hands you $100,000 in bills and offers to let you count it is more likely to be telling the truth than someone who does not let you count it, regardless of whether you choose to count the funds.
This criterion is often abused by people attempting to shut down arguments by citing studies. These people often exploit the fact that very few people with whom they speak will actually bother to review the study cited, enabling them to shut down conversations even if verification would ultimately prove their arguments to be shoddy.
The Criterion of Care: Any information from a source with a vested interest in your well-being can be more trusted than one that doesn’t. This can either be in the case of something like an organization that would lose money if you died (an insurance company telling you how not to die has a high criteria of care) or one that has an emotional connection to you (such as your parents).
The Criteria of Fuzzies: This criterion specifically filters arguments in which someone claims: “The data is just too complicated and nuanced for us to be certain of anything.” When the science on a subject is really obvious, and someone wants to argue against it from a position of authority, this is the argument they will use—be that subject climate change or heritable elements of voting behavior. If a body of research backs up a claim using sound scientific methods, “it’s complicated” and “there is more nuance to this than is stated in the research” (where this desired nuance is impossible to succinctly convey) are not arguments sufficient to warrant rejection of the broad strokes laid out in that research.