Lie Detectors

The son of the Yankee player, Miller Gardner, 14, apparently died by asphyxia "after a possible intoxication after apparently ingesting some food," an official with Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigation Agency told NBC News. No child is safe.

***

Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.

The term “epistemology” comes from the Greek words “episteme” and “logos”. “Episteme” can be translated as “knowledge” or “understanding” or “acquaintance”, while “logos” can be translated as “account” or “argument” or “reason”. Just as each of these different translations captures some facet of the meaning of these Greek terms, so too does each translation capture a different facet of epistemology itself. 

Although the term “epistemology” is no more than a couple of centuries old, the field of epistemology is at least as old as any in philosophy. In different parts of its extensive history, different facets of epistemology have attracted attention. Plato’s epistemology was an attempt to understand what it was to know, and how knowledge (unlike mere true opinion) is good for the knower. Locke’s epistemology tried to understand the operations of human understanding, Kant’s epistemology was an effort to understand the conditions of the possibility of human understanding, and Russell’s epistemology was an attempt to understand how modern science could be justified by appeal to sensory experience. Much recent work in formal epistemology attempts to understand how our degrees of confidence are rationally constrained by our evidence.

***

This self-inflicted security breach proves the risks inherent in well-armed nation-states. It is present even in the most publicly cautious of political entities.

***

Lie Detectors

 

"Epistemic vigilance" argues that we possess tools to identify and call out lies. In a seminal paper, Sperber et al. argued that “humans have a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance, targeted at the risk of being misinformed by others.” We have a built-in lie detector.

The problem is that humans have been shown, time and again, to be especially bad at telling truth from falsehood. As Shieber puts it, “Despite many decades of research, the findings are remarkably consistent in demonstrating that humans are quite poor at deception detection.”

One could argue that we humans have developed in the circumstance of an open mind, and that disputes are, by our nature, inconclusive. Debate and speculation simmer to conclusions, and crucial questions are solved by habit, reflex, and prejudice. Reflective gunslingers.

We also aren’t very good at telling whether someone is competent. Two studies — from 1996 and 2005 — showed how people use non-epistemic factors to determine whether someone is good at their job. Looks and posture are relied upon, but deceptive. An entire baseball scouting bias is built into a baseball face, an athletic 'look,' that was overthrown in 'Moneyball.'

Shieber coined the expression “The Nietzsche Thesis,” arguing that “our goal in conversation is not primarily to acquire truthful information… [but] self-presentation.” In other words, we accept or reject statements based on utilitarian goals, not on their truthfulness. In Nietzsche’s words, we will accept and look for truth only when it has “pleasant, life-preserving consequences.” Conversely, we are hostile “to potentially harmful and destructive truths.” We do not have epistemic vigilance, but a Machiavellian one.

Dyson, a renowned genius, once casually suggested truth among homo sapiens, in terms of evolution, had a context. Abstract truth on the savannah was simply impractical, whereas the meaning of a rustling in the bushes might mean life or death. Consequently, the immediate threat had significant truth importance, the cause of storms might be less practical and more likely seen in terms of myth.

And, as Aristotle showed,  we do love a well-constructed story.