Many Truths


Take these lines from Hector Macdonald’s book, Truth: How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape Our Reality:
“On most issues, there are multiple truths we can choose to communicate.”
Your instinctive reaction was either disgust at the everything-is-grey stance or a resigned it’s-not-true-but-this-seems-to-be-the-common-belief-these-days shrug.

But wait, and consider all the too common scenario where a company has to drastically change the way it operates. The need can (truthfully) be presented in two ways, writes Macdonald:
1)      “Golden opportunity”: Incredible potential, money to be made etc;
2)     “Burning platform”: Either we change or we perish.
Both reasons are probably true in such cases, but they leave very different impressions in the minds of employees (excitement v fear). So managers rarely go for the balanced both-reasons-apply presentation; they go with only one truth based on which incentive would work better.

It gets even more complicated, writes Macdonald. The one among many truths that gets presented can be for different reasons:
1)      Advocates sincerely believe the one they present;
2)     Misinformers repeat what they heard from others, but without malice;
3)     Misleaders deploy (only) one truth to deliberately create a wrong impression or to influence others.
Notice all of the above cases involve telling the truth, but not the entire truth. This is different from the cases where people lie or, even worse, tell half-truths, as Tyrion Lannister observes in Game of Thrones:
“Half-truths are worth more than outright lies.”

The problem isn’t limited to the linguistic side; it applies to numerical “truths” too (remember “damned lies and statistics”?). Identifying “only one” truths in numbers is even harder, because, as Tim Harford writes:
1)      We need to stop and think. That takes effort, and it doesn’t come naturally;
2)     I’ll just quote Harford on this reason:
“Schools focus too much on “engineering maths” - the calculus required for physics and engineering — and not enough on the statistical skills needed for epidemiology, economics, and social science”.

The one among many truths problem probably also explains why we can rarely persuade people with differing beliefs. Because they believe a different truth; or they are aware of some of the other truths but give them a lower weightage…

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarJuly 22, 2019 at 12:44 PM

    Points are good.

    If Macdonald suggests ways to deal with, "What is our defense when half-truths or veiled falsehoods are directed at us?", that deserves another blog!

    We all know there are people who wish to propagate ideas which are not objectively true. And, the propagators have their own reasons and means to somehow make other people believe/accept. To reiterate the question, "What can listeners do, who are pushed like that?"

    Is Macdonald's answer is also what Calvin got from his father, "The world is not and cannot be fair!" At least Calvin could retort to produce a Watterson masterpiece, but we?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more