[Solstice Speech] No Royal Road to Knowledge; No Mercy for Ignorance

[Daniel Speyer]

[This is a very rough draft. It would benefit from better examples
and tone smoothing, at minimum, but I thought posting it now had
value. This takes the place of Beyond the Reach of God, between Do
You Realize? and A Little Echo.]




There is a true world, that truth wrote, which we perceive with senses
and logic. So far, so good.


And there is the accumulated lore our ancestors wrote, brought to us
by parents and teachers, books and databases. So far, so good.


And we can use them together. To support or compliment each other, or
to provide a sort of parallax. Again, so far, so good.


So we begin our adventure, with perception in one hand and lore in the
other, and we may seem well-equipped to range forth and hunt down the
darkness, wherever it dwells.


Except...


It would be nice to say, “Trust in tradition: it might come up blank
when confronting new things, but at least it won't lead you astray.”
But we can't say that. Not in a world where many generations in many
cultures taught their children that slavery was right and proper, and
taught their students that fever was caused by an excess of blood. Not
in a world where to this day many have inherited relationship dynamics
that are toxic to the point of abuse.


And the fact that I point out other's bad traditions and not my own
doesn't mean I don't have any. My only reasonable conclusion is that I
do. I just don't know which ones.


Or it would be nice to say, “Trust in yourself: it might require
tremendous effort, but you will find the right answer in the end.” But
we can't say that. Not in a world where rationalization looks so much
like rationality from the inside. Not in a world where people very
much like us supported Stalinism as the next stage in human
civilization, with freedom and prosperity for all.


It would be nice at least to say, “When your judgment and tradition
agree, that you can count on.” But you can't. Not when every bad
tradition in history was accompanied by thinkers – smart, diligent
thinkers – who confirmed it with their own thinking.


It would be nice to be able to say something.


Nor can you say, “I will distrust complicated analysis which could be
rationalization, but I will trust what I can straightforwardly
observe.” Not when the ability to tell when someone is glaring at a
video of you shows up with a bayes factor of over ten to the nine.


Nor can you say, “I will trust expert consensus.” Not in a world where
six hundred highly respected professional economists can cosign a
letter recommending a policy, and two months later five hundred other
economists, including four nobel prize winners, cosign a letter saying
the first letter was dead wrong.


Nor can you say, “I will trust my intuition.” Not when your intuition
evolved for a smaller community, and not with global media, and has
not caught up with the fact that a motivated searcher can find endless
anecdotes to support almost any claim. Not in a world where, even
without any malice involved, many people feel more afraid to fly in an
airplane than to make a road trip of similar length.


Nor can you say, “I will trust the good people, or the wise people, or
the people whose position in society allows them to see clearly.” Not
when nearly everyone claims to be good and wise and clear-seeing, and
most of them sincerely believe it.


Nor can you say, “Some things are difficult, but at least I can know
the things that are easy, that are obvious, that everyone agrees on.”
Not when it is precisely the uncontraversial pieces of medicine that
make wise doctors nervous.


Nor can you say, “At least I can casually disbelieve the utterly
absurd.” Not in a world that runs on quantum mechanics. Not in a world
in which metric tonnes of water routinely fall from the sky for no
readily apparent reason.


Nor can you even say, “I will trust the speeches at the Secular
Solstice celebration.” Not when I neglected to fact-check this one.


There is no royal road to knowledge.


And without one, it would be nice to comfort oneself saying, “I don't
need one. Perhaps my mistakes will deprive me of a sandwich, but they
will not get me hit by a car.” But failures of epistemology – failures
to know what cars are coming – underly most gettings hit.


Nor can you say, “I will err, and I will learn, and I will go back and
do better.” Even though often you will, and doing so is one of the
most important traits you can develop. Because sometimes, there is no
going back.


Nor can you say, “My errors will be in obscure, hard-to-learn
subjects, with little real-world cost.” Not when a subtle flaw in
ornithological ecology can generate a famine that leaves twenty
million dead.


Nor can you say, “I don't need to get these things right, because
wiser people than I, and institutions greater than people, are looking
after important matters.” Not when the institutions that are supposed
to be our front line against disease struggle to stick each other with
the bill. Not when our front line against scarier threats is, in
significant fraction, seated in this room.


Nor can you say, “I will do what I can and expect it to work out in
the end.” Not when Rome and Easter Island and the great cities of the
Mississippi whose very names are lost to history surely had people in
them much like us, who did what they could, and it didn't work out.


There is no royal road to knowledge. There is no mercy for ignorance.


All you can do is your best.


No.


You can try your hardest to make your best better. And join with
others to create a collective best that's better still. And you can
keep trying, and keep joining, and keep doing...


Until either you don't have to anymore.


Or until you can't anymore.


Either singly, or all together.

[Raymond Arnold]

Thanks for getting this out there. I have some nitpick questions/comments about specific examples listed in this draft, but the main issue will have to be finding really resonant examples and fleshing them out in a more emotionally evocative way, and possibly rejiggering the structure slightly to accommodate whichever examples you find.

I think it might be better to discuss fewer things, but to delve into them more deeply. i.e. with a 2 sentence example, I don't have time to actually process what it means and what it feels to live in that world. I think the long list of ways-truthseeking-can-fail is fine for a written essay where I have time to think about each thing being said, but as a spoken word piece a smaller number of points, fleshed out with more story, is usually more effective.

I also think it may be useful to read Brienne's post on Sentiment Shaping (which may have a dependency on reading her Becoming Poems piece and her Solstice story from last year). I haven't actually explicitly used her technique much but I think that is to my detriment.

http://agentyduck.blogspot.com/2016/12/sentiment-shaping-and-tuning.html

One structural thing - the current version of this doesn't seem to point especially towards Little Echo, which isn't especially about epistemology (depending on what you emphasize could be about death, explicit cryonics, relationships and saying good bye). I think the idealized version of "This speech followed by Little Echo" would have the speech centered around examples emphasizing BOTH epistemology and some particular relationship and/or life-and-death of a person.

(It's not the worst if the story/speech don't connect that strongly, but insofar as they're able to that seems better)

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