Your truth is true but not necessarily TRUE.

Let’s accept that this one number from this one study is accurate: 6.25% of e-commerce transactions are attempted (or successful) fraud.

Now imagine we have three internet consumers:

• Buyer #1 has completed 100 transactions and 6 of them were fraudulent.
• Buyer #2 has completed 25 transactions and 3 of them were fraudulent.
• Buyer #3 has never completed 500 transactions and 0 of them were fraudulent.

Each buyer has a truth about e-commerce. Each of those truths is based on real experiences and real feelings. But only Buyer #1 is likely to have his truth correctly map onto TRUTH. Buyer #2, on the other hand, is likely to have overlearned the lesson that fraud is possible due to his unlucky set of outcomes; if he transacted 1000 more times we would confidently expect his 12% fraud rate to drop by 50%. Sadly, those 1000 transactions may never occur since Buyer #2’s truth blinds him from TRUTH. We can dub him too skeptical, which protects his downside at the expense of his upside. Buyer #3 suffers the opposite fate. After a remarkable string of good luck, Buyer #3 is too trusting, which exposes him to all upside and downside.

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Your truth is true but not necessarily TRUE.

If you had a particularly unlucky run of events, you “overlearned” about risk and probably hold a personal truth that limits downside at the expense of upside. Think of an online shopper who bought five straight fraudulent products and declares he’ll never shop online again.

On the other hand, if you had an extremely lucky run, you have “underleaned” about risk and probably hold a personal truth that maximizes upside by being completely exposed to downside. Think of a person who has never been ripped off or robbed and so stops locking his doors.

One should want his truth to correctly map onto TRUTH. Determining if you are remotely close to the meeting this standard is the challenge of a lifetime.

You think Bob is terrible. This is so incandescently obvious that you can’t help but view disagreers as delusional.

What is most confusing are people who agree with your reasons for hating Bob – he never shows up on time, he fails to pay off debts, he cheated on five girlfriends – and yet who still support Bob. That is, they aren’t so far gone to deny the reality of Bob’s transgressions, but rather they reach a different conclusion from the same set of facts.

The notion of a “same set of facts” can still be true when we consider the matter of Bob’s positives. Everyone – yes, everyone – has positives. The same goes for news sources, politicians, public intellectuals, corporations, etc. To be disqualified, the bad has to so outweigh the good. And in the case of Bob, you’ve run the numbers and there should be no debate. Yet there is. How?

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Blank page so blank. Where do ideas go? Where do they come from? How can I be brimming w/ them in one moment, and then empty in the next? What do you do when you have nothing to do? Being alone with options is quite different than the state w/o options. People are always an option. Sitting with someone is something in a way that sitting alone never can be.

There’s so much time. So much. Hilariously much. How do we ever think there isn’t enough? We schedule our lives so we don’t have to confront that truth. Be alone w/ no options and you are forced to confront it.

Whenever you feel like you have no options, there’s always a lower level to reach, but the level where you are cold, without electricity, and without the ability to anywhere to change those facts is a rather low level indeed.

Suffering is infinitely more bearable when you know the expiration date. 

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I want a vice, because I want something to look forward to. I know, I know: be in the moment and all that jazz. The moment can be just so damn boring. This observation may well be the inevitable byproduct of testing isolation’s limits. Answer: there is a limit, and I’ve found it.

Nope, I can’t be the man who runs a one-man mission to Mars or elsewhere one-man missions are required. I simply don’t have the right stuff. I now know this. But I also now question if that is really the right stuff. Congratulations that you’ve managed to survive all alone, thrive even, but can you ever thrive as grandly alone as in the company of others? I’m tending to think “no.”

then it seems foolish to suggest that the solution rests in expanding the bad practice and objectifying men. Maybe it can be argued that by subjecting others to suffering, they will be motivated to end the suffering, and thus this bad practice expansion is simply one step back, two steps forward. And I can appreciate that when you yourself have been subjected to a bad practice, you may just want to see the world burn. Still, the loss of moral legitimacy – calling something bad and then proceeding to cheer for more of it – is an untenable price: Americans are a forgiving bunch, but not when it comes to hypocrites.

Just because something is optimal or true or right, doesn’t mean that it always yields unequivocally great outcomes. The non-great outcome doesn’t make that something any less optimal or true or right, but does decrease the likelihood that the experiencer of said outcome will strongly adopt that something.

Take something like telling the truth. Everyone basically agrees truth-telling is a good thing, and yet many people don’t practice it. Why? Explanations abound, of course, and they are usually laced with castigation. These judgements are extra juicy for the truth adherents who casually inflate their egos all while failing to grasp that what may be obvious and easy to them is not for others, EVEN if those others echo the same refrain about truth’s goodness.

Let’s say that a behavior yields four scores (-10 to 10): short-term individual flourishing, long-term individual flourishing, short-term societal benefit, and long-term societal benefit. When we find a behavior that, at minimum, scores positively in the two long-term categories, it gets encoded into society’s standards of things a good person does. Stuff in this standard often appear in religions, philosophies, advice parents give to kids, and phrases uttered mindlessly in 2AM discussions. What this wholesale adoption doesn’t do is erase the importance of personal experience, experiences that may well score negatively in categories that usually, on average and among a very large sample size, score positively.

I shall now default to this divergence when I find someone not doing things a good person does. Like, I can shout from the mountains that telling the truth is the only way to be and I can, in fact, be right, but I must appreciate that part of the reason I’m so convinced of my rightness is that my history is littered with broadly positive scores. What if upon revealing my biggest secret I was kicked out of the house? What if I had to weigh being loved against telling the truth? What if I had experience piled upon experience that scored deeply negative numbers? I certainly wouldn’t be shouting from the mountains.

When thrust into a conversation with someone who sees reality in a different way, “progress” or, rather, not-ending-up-hating-this-person can feel impossible. If basic facts can’t even be agreed upon, how can anything positive occur? What this question incorrectly implies, though, is that no basic facts of agreement exist when they do. Or at least agreement on something should exist if you are the open-minded, just calling balls and strikes person you surely claim to be.

First, step back from the toxic issue (TI) and pivot to a place of shared condemnation. How to find such a place? Well, apprehend the reasoning error your counterpart is making re: TI. A quite common one is making an unfalsifiable claim¹ or making a claim that seems falsifiable only to perpetually change the falsifying metric whenever the thesis appears falsified,² but any error will do. It’s important to appreciate that your counterpart almost certainly agrees that reasoning errors are, in fact, errors, but that his own biases will prevent him from easily witnessing his mistake re: TI.

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Censorship concerns aside, tech companies labeling/blocking/slowing “misinformation” seems almost certainly to be ineffective in the same way parental advisory stickers are ineffective: by attaching such a label, the people you most hoped to “save” will be, counterproductively, MORE attracted to the content than they otherwise would be.

You so badly want to help. Plus, you have very real knowledge that can assist those you care about. But, you know that advice is so rarely followed. What to do? Suggest measurement.

Consider the Fitbit craze. Everyone, from the most obese down to those possessing visible ribcages, knows that walking is healthy. Yet, almost nobody walked enough in a given day. Action, not information, was the issue.³ Then these same allegedly unmotivated, uncompetitive, and lazy folks were give a simple step counter. No advice. No instructions. And BOOM! neighborhoods were suddenly overrun with walkers striving to reach the arbitrary figure of 10,000 steps. Better still, these walkers were now truly open to receive advice since health tips no longer carried the burden of something to put off and feel guilty about, but were instead genuine methods to be added to the self-started and already underway lifestyle transformation.