Re: Why believe the truth?

From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Thu Jun 19 2003 - 11:53:42 MDT

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     rhanson@gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) writes:
    >In my paper proposing betting markets as as the factual input to a form of
    >government (http://hanson.gmu.edu/futarchy.pdf), I suggest that people who
    >do not want to face uncomfortable truths can probably successfully avoid
    >paying much attention to such markets, just as people today who want to
    >believe in the virtue of politics manage to avoid seeing how the sausage
    >is made. Bet in the markets the few minutes a day you are rational, and then
    >go back to your blissful ignorance.

     Before reading this message of yours, I had mostly completed writing this
    response to an earlier message:

     It seems to me that truth is needed to achieve cooperation in a wide
    enough variety of circumstances that we would all better off if we could
    make a binding agreement to be as close to truthful Bayesians as our
    computational powers allow.
     Special interest political pressures depend on voters misunderstanding
    the effects of the policies they promote. Corporate salesmen cooperate
    with customers if they are sufficiently commited to the truth, but harm
    customers if their claims are far enough from the truth. Managers plan
    better if their employees accurately forecast what they can deliver. Charities
    can be of net benefit to society if their function is accurately known, and
    can be wasteful otherwise.
     Without simple rules concerning when we agree to be truthful (e.g.
    always demand the truth except in cases that are clearly distinct from
    normal interactions, such as bluffing in poker), there is little hope of
    determining whether people are living up to that agreement.

     But after noticing that you seem to disagree with this last sentence, I have
    to admit that I'm not very certain about it. But I'm still guessing that I'm
    right.
     It is harder to have disgreements with stock market prices that persist
    for years than it is to have persistent disgreements about how legislation
    is made, because market prices allow much less room for ambiguity and less
    room for selective use of evidence than descriptions of the legislative
    process do.
     Likewise, betting markets make cognitive dissonance expensive, so I expect
    that to the extent they improve society it will be more by causing widespread
    increases in truth-seeking than by enabling us to rely on specialized
    expertise to perform that function.

     And of course, none of this says much about whether people should place
    an unusually high value on truth when the relevant recipricators probably
    won't be. It only says that people who don't support the creation of more
    institutions such as idea futures markets that promote truth-seeking are
    failing to live up to the standards of social responsibility that we ought
    to be setting.

    -- 
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Peter McCluskey          | "To announce that there must be no criticism of
    http://www.rahul.net/pcm | the President, or that we are to stand by the
                             | President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic
                             | and servile, but morally treasonable to the
                             | American public." - Theodore Roosevelt
    


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