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Why Truth? And…

readthesequences.com · 1,158 words · saved by 1 readers

Some of the comments on Overcoming Bias have touched on the question of why we ought to seek truth. (Thankfully not many have questioned what truth is.) Our shaping motivation for configuring our thoughts to rationality, which determines whether a given configuration is “good” or “bad,” comes from whyever we wanted to find truth in the first place. It is written: “The first virtue is curiosity.” Curiosity is one reason to seek truth, and it may not be the only one, but it has a special and admirable purity. If your motive is curiosity, you will assign priority to questions according to how the questions, themselves, tickle your personal aesthetic sense. A trickier challenge, with a greater probability of failure, may be worth more effort than a simpler one, just because it is more fun. As I noted, people often think of rationality and emotion as adversaries. Since curiosity is an emotion, I suspect that some people will object to treating curiosity as a part of rationality. For my part

Why Truth? And… Source Markdown · Talk Home About Search Contents Why Truth? And… ❦ Some of the comments on Overcoming Bias have touched on the question of why we ought to seek truth. (Thankfully not many have questioned what truth is .) Our shaping motivation for configuring our thoughts to rationality, which determines whether a given configuration is “good” or “bad,” comes from whyever we wanted to find truth in the first place. It is written: “The first virtue is curiosity.” Curiosity is one reason to seek truth, and it may not be the only one, but it has a special and admirable purity. If

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