Future, Mathematics, Opinion
Definition and implications of a new kind of epistemology
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We have officially entered the post-truth era.
With the rise of deep-fakes, lying politicians, and Surkovian disinformation campaigns, it’s hard to get a handle on what truth even is.
For a few months I was deep in a skeptical hole where I had truly lost grip on what I considered “real”, and I had to claw my way out by getting real silly and coming up with a formal definition that we might all agree with. Truth, I propose, is given by this expression:
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That’s it. That’s truth.
I’ll define terms shortly and it’ll be clear that I’m abstracting away many messy details, but I will try to convince you that this basic structure agrees with many of our informal intuitions and is useful for decision-making — potentially even serving as an objective function for the automated scientists of the near future. Even better: perhaps it can be used as an objective function for search-systems or newsfeeds, only returning the top results as ranked by their truth-value.