truth as a terminal value

a few weeks ago i discovered a journal entry from 2019 where i wrote that my three primary values were freedom, truth, and beauty. that’s held up surprisingly well throughout the last six years, except nowadays i’d probably replace freedom with friendship (at this point i genuinely have no idea what high-school-vincent meant by “freedom” since i don’t think my childhood was particularly restrictive)

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over the past year i’ve become more comfortable with accepting truth as a terminal value and with accepting all the resulting implications. for instance: i used to be upset that i wasn’t as good as my friends at flattery or feigning interest in various topics, whereas now i understand that is simply not how i want to socialize and i would much rather only ever say things i agree with. there are benefits and drawbacks to that choice, like, i deal with less bullshit and end up in higher-trust environments and also will not get along as well with certain types of people, but making the decision means choosing all of its consequences so i no longer complain as much about the drawbacks

some more examples related to other people: i speak slowly, which is great for giving more truthful replies but also means people often find me less fun to talk to. i like both liberal and conservative tweets to diversify my feed, which is great for escaping echo chambers but also means i see a lot of content that upsets me. if i’m curious about someone’s relationships i’ll (politely) ask even if i barely know them, which is great for learning but can also freak some people out and scare them away

one of my major pet peeves is people saying things they don’t believe. i mostly mean big-picture things like someone saying they’ll change and then making no effort to do so, but also small things like white lies that are obviously false. this is exacerbated by the fact that i have very good conversational memory - eg. back when i had zero fashion sense someone told me they liked a shirt i was wearing, and then ~6 months later after i’d gotten better at judging clothes i realized the shirt was awful and now i feel like i can’t trust any of that person’s fashion comments. it turns out white lies are much safer with forgetful people

i spent most of my life worried that my choice of values would make it impossible to be good at tasks like socializing (hence why it took so long to commit to being who i wanted to be). it turns out this was never really a problem with values; it was a problem with role models. what i mean is that every single one of my role models growing up had very different values from me, which created the illusion that different values were necessary for success, and everything became clear once i finally met role models who were more similar to me. i’m starting to understand why it’s important to choose your heroes based on processes and not just outcomes

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some people have told me that i give good advice, which i find hilarious because i actually hate giving advice (or rather, i hate feeling like i’m telling other people what to do). i do really love listening and understanding though, so when people ask me for help i spend most of my time just asking questions i’m curious about and occasionally checking in to see if our interpretations of reality match. luckily this usually works out since most advice-seeking is about not seeing the situation clearly enough, and bringing someone else up to speed often forces you to see more clearly

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one thing i’ve been thinking about lately is what pursuing truth looks like in domains that are extremely subjective. for instance: what does it mean to have a better understanding of another person, given that ground truth doesn’t exist? unfortunately i spend too much time thinking about science and machine learning, so i can give you the statistical perspective, which is that things with more predictive power are closer to truth. i don’t actually think this is the correct framing though? for instance, i would argue that predicting someone’s feelings is a better indication of understanding than predicting their actions, even though the science is much less precise (and in many ways impossible)

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stem training is probably good for practicing critical thinking and truth-seeking, but one of its weaknesses is that you only ever practice on subjects you’re impartial to. so in my case, after spending my childhood solving math problems, i became extremely good at reasoning and discerning but only in scenarios where my own feelings were not at stake, eg. i’ve always been much better at predicting the outcomes of my friends’ relationships than my own relationships. (i think this is a somewhat common problem among non-stem people too, eg. it’s part of why so many people find therapy useful? but i think the gap between reasoning about self vs reasoning about other subjects was much larger for me than it is for most people)

so a lot of my progress over the past year has been about learning to see truth in scenarios where it’s closely entangled with feelings. scenarios like: fear interfering with research, crushes as misplaced ambition, and so on. it’s very much a work in progress. i like how one of my friends puts it - pain means pay attention. truth as a terminal value means you have to run towards the pain instead of away from it