Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile, Black Swans, etc.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written a trilogy of books about the sort of human tendencies (and/or tendencies of our culture) that helped  bring about the financial meltdown and the current recession.

Feel free to order from these links. Doing so will help support Truthology 101 / Practical Epistemology

Truth-seeking, Human Nature, the Big Ideas, and the little observations.

Something in human nature draws us towards promises of great truths, or what at least seem to be great truths, like how it all began, or great unifying truths that promise to reveal all people as alike in some way, or that all of matter, movement, and space have a set of unifying rules brief enough to be put in a book.

One great discovery of the Enlightenment, which put us on the road to modern science and technology, was that the key to accumulating vast storehouses of useful knowledge was for many people to seek many small truths, even consciously resisting the urge to sum up the "big picture".

The Social Epistemology of Alvin Goldman and others

Far from dismissing academic epistemology, I have been spending a lot of time with it lately, to the point of attending a graduate workshop on social epistemology after doing much preparatory reading.  Social epistemology as practiced by Alvin Goldman and his colleagues squarely faces the fact that we know all but a tiny amount of what we know through the testimony of others, and through our ability to distinguish reliable and unreliable sources of information.

Truthology or Epistemology?

To the students and professors of philosophy who may look at what I'm doing (and I hope there are some), why even consider an undignified sounding made-up word like truthology rather than epistemology?

Short answers: (1) I would like to foreground the word "truth". (2) After  years, my wife still asks "Remind me which is epistemology and which is ontology?"

Is there a "New Rationalism"? CFAR or Center for Applied Rationality, LessWrong.com, etc.

From time to time the discovery is made that most people think pretty irrationally.  Often too, people have gotten the idea that some kind of new emphasis on rationality will put an end to the horrors of despotism, warfare, and much more.  Perhaps it will work out some day, but experience suggests caution, and I doubt we have seen the last of the false hopes raised by such thinking.  I don't want to attack CFAR (see below) and its siblings, but I do approach them skeptically.

Why I got started on this path (The Real Truth Project, then Truthology 101)

A "good enough" grasp of reality is necessary to our very survival.  Having an inaccurate view of reality can easily kill you. Winston Churchill was nearly killed in New York city because of a very simple misconception of reality he "knew" cars drive on the left side of the road.

Something ideological opposites can agree on

If there is one thing that people of the most opposite political opinions can agree on, it is that an alarming number of people are wrong about the plain facts regarding very important issues.

It may sound like a joke to call this a shared concern, when each side is pointing accusingly at the other's wrongheadedness, but is there any way to turn this agreement into a movement or project to raise our national "Truth Quotient"?