Simple ain’t easy

Lots of people say we’re in a crisis right now, but for different reasons. Some claim that ‘alternative facts’ are leading us to a ‘post-truth’ world, while others warn about ‘fake news’ turning humanity into ‘sheeple’.

I think they’re all wrong.

It seems to me that the loudest voices on both sides have something to gain from fear and uncertainty. They want to focus on the depth of our differences instead of the breadth of our commonality. They make truth into a competition.

The answer, like much in life, is simple — but not easy: truth is not a binary, either/or condition; it’s a percentage, a probability. When we say something is true, that’s an oversimplification. What we really mean is it’s highly likely to be true, unlikely to be proven false.

Ultimately the decision about what is true is made by a person, and people have feelings. The significance your emotional state has on your decision making process resists overstatement — as anyone who has felt the low blood-sugar state referred to as “hangry” knows, your physical and emotional state can greatly affect what seems true.

But there *are* things that are permanently, unchangably true …aren’t there?

I started trying to think of the truest truths. What can all people, across all times and places agree on? One of the best I came up with: falling.

Everyone understands falling. Nobody can fly. Objects which are not supported by a force equal to their weight fall towards the ground, until they’re supported by a force again. The further they fall, the faster.

Anyone can measure the speed of falling. Since Galileo, it’s been measured millions, maybe billions of times, by students, engineers doing construction, scientists conducting experiments. A baby investigates falling when it pushes things off its high chair.

You’ll notice I mentioned falling, and not gravity. Falling is as close as you can get to an absolute fact. Gravity is not a fact, not a measureable quantity, but an explanation for why and how things fall. It’s a tremendously useful explanation, because it makes accurate and useful predictions about other measurements. But while the measurements never change, explanations can, and do.

Newton invented the modern concept of gravity largely to solve errors in astronomy. You can sum up his invention simply: the same rules that describe falling here on earth can also describe relationships in the heavens.

And for over 300 years, that explanation has proved useful over and over again. The rules Newton used to describe gravity — calculus — can be used to predict other super useful things, like where a cannonball will go when shot from a cannon. The same rules describe launching something into space! If you fire a projectile so far that it falls over the horizon, it keeps “falling” around the Earth, and enters orbit.

So Newton’s truth is enough to get man to the Moon. But if you want to build GPS, Newton won’t cut it. At the speed of light, communication between earth and orbit exposes a deeper truth about gravity: a clock in orbit runs *slightly* slower than one on the ground.

Unlike falling, this truth is super weird, and you can’t really measure it yourself. But it’s also uncontroversial. Relativity has produced the most accurate predictions in human history. If you accept that GPS works, you accept relativity as an explanation.

So is Newtonian gravity false? No. If you’re shooting a cannonball, Relativity is unnecessarily complicated. Simplicity counts. You should always prefer the simplest possible explanation that yields acceptable results.

Einstein didn’t prove Newton wrong, he extended and clarified him. By the same token, it’s unrealistic to assume that nothing about Einstein will be extended or clarified.

That means some thing experts assert as a matter of fact at this moment will someday be found wrong. Galileo thought the tides were caused by water sloshing around as the world rotated. Newton’s other interests included alchemy. Einstein went back and forth about the cosmological constant.

There’s potentially something wrong with everything we think we know, we just don’t know what yet. We usually only find out the wrong parts one by one, over a long time.

Recap: things true in the past have been proven false later. So when we say true, we express our confidence in the likelihood the current explanation will not change. But we have to closely examine our emotional state to minimize the chance of influence and distortion.

Or tl;dr: consider the possibility you might be buying into your own con job.

Nothing has brought me more success, personally and professionally, than the habit of questioning my every action. I can hear some people object they don’t want to feel uncertain all the time, but I find this attitude makes me *more* confident in what I know. I just have to be more flexible about explanations.

When people become emotionally attached to an explanation, they get upset when asked to consider the possibility it isn’t true. It’s hard to question assumptions which make you feel good about yourself. But everything good in life is hard.

Simple ain’t easy. Try harder.