Seek knowledge, not the truth

Knowledge does not protect against illusory truth.

In daily life, we frequently encounter false claims in the form of consumer advertisements, political propaganda, and rumors. Repetition may be one way that insidious misconceptions, such as the belief that vitamin C prevents the common cold, enter our knowledge base. Research on the illusory truth effect demonstrates that repeated statements are easier to process, and subsequently perceived to...

Funding Games: The Truth but Not the Whole Truth

We introduce the Funding Game, in which m identical resources are to be allocated among n selfish agents. Each agent requests a number of resources xi and reports a valuation ṽi(xi), which verifiably lower-bounds i’s true value for receiving xi items. The pairs (xi, ṽi(xi)) can be thought of as size-value pairs defining a knapsack problem with capacity m. A publicly-known algorithm is used to s...

Truth & Knowledge in Logic

Actual Truth, Possible Knowledge

Simplicity is Not Truth-Indicative

In this paper I will argue that, in general, where the evidence supports two theories equally, the simpler theory is not more likely to be true and is not likely to be nearer the truth. In other words simplicity does not tell us anything about model bias. Our preference for simpler theories (apart from their obvious pragmatic advantages) can be explained by the facts that humans are known to el...