STREET DOGS

From Philosophical Economics:

In many areas of life, the truth doesn’t enforce itself. It doesn’t impose consequences on those who go against it. Examples of such areas include: politics, media, sales, entertainment, law, religion and so on. In these areas, appearances tend to be more important than reality. Outcomes tend to be decided by the question of who does the best job of persuading people and of favourably impacting their feelings, not by the question of who makes the truest statements about the world.

But there is one area of life, near and dear to all of our hearts, where the truth does enforce itself, imposing severe consequences on anyone who dares to go against it. That area is the area of speculation. To “speculate” is to put something of value – usually money, but it can be other things – directly at risk on a belief. When a person speculates, she makes herself fully accountable to the truth. If she speculates correctly, in accordance with the truth, she gains a reward. If she speculates incorrectly, in opposition to the truth, she suffers a punishment. These incentives serve to sharpen her focus on the truth. They cause her to actually care about whether her descriptions of the world are correct. With real consequences at stake, she finds herself closely examining the evidence, carefully checking her reasoning and taking seriously the possibility that she might be wrong – things that she is not as likely to do in other areas of her life.

A simple way to force our thinking to be more truthful, then, is to tie it to an act of speculation — not necessarily in the literal sense, but in the imaginary sense of envisioning ourselves having to place bets on them, and observing how our stances change.

By imagining ourselves in a situation with real consequences we make truth our primary focus.