Would you rather stay where you are and get the most out of your current situation, or move ahead to put yourself in a different situation from which you could get more out of? We face this question in many areas of life: In learning, we can choose to either specialize in a certain field and hone specific skills to become a masterful expert, or broaden our horizon and explore unknown territories to become a well-rounded generalist. (We know from artificial intelligence that the best approach … [Read more...]

In addition to my prior post on the marketplace of ideas, here is another decidedly non-epistemic reason why some ideas are more successful as memes than others: I am thinking of the ease at which a person can say something (seemingly) smart for or against it. An idea with no epistemic value might still spread in the marketplace of ideas, merely because it is easy for people to debate on it, and to signal their intellectual abilities in doing so. A prominent example is the irritatingly boring … [Read more...]

A word is a way to point at a concept. Let's say you want to communicate the concept of a cat. You can say 'cat', say 'meow', write 'cat', draw a cat, or point at cats with your finger. These are different ways to point at the concept cat. Technically speaking, you could use any string of letters to label that concept. 'Braufani', 'katze', 'eztak', or even 'dog'. Still, there are good reasons why you can't just define words however you like: Words have communicative consequences. They … [Read more...]

Think about the last time you listened to a lecture. Asked later about the ideas presented by the lecturer, what would you answer? Would you quote the best, most truthful ideas presented in the lecture, or would you talk instead about whatever happened to have been communicated the most effectively or stuck with you for some other, perhaps more idiosyncratic reason? At least about myself I can say, and not without a feeling of shame, that I tend to share ideas that got stuck in my head … [Read more...]

Logically, truth is a property of sentences. For example, "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. All this requires is that we mean the same things by the words we speak and that snow actually is white when we look at it. But what about perceptual illusions? If a stick dipped in water looks bent, is it true that it is bent? No, it is true that is looks bent, but when we touch it at the seemingly bent spot or pull it out of the water, we find that, in fact, the stick is not … [Read more...]