Truth, Meaning, Fitness, Grace
Eric Weinstein conceptualizes "Truth, Meaning, Fitness, and Grace" as fundamental but often conflicting values or "primitives" that humans must balance in life and decision-making.
- Truth represents objective reality, the pursuit of facts, and an alignment with empirical or logical correctness.
- Meaning refers to a subjective sense of purpose or significance that may not align with strict truth but provides individuals with a sense of direction and motivation.
- Fitness in this context extends beyond biological or evolutionary fitness to include survival strategies and actions that may optimize outcomes even if they deviate from truth.
- Grace embodies a kind of social harmony or respect for others, often requiring the softening or temporary suspension of strict truth for the sake of interpersonal peace or courtesy.
Eric argues that, in practice, these values are often in tension. For example, pursuing truth relentlessly can sometimes undermine meaning or grace in social contexts, while fitness strategies might involve elements of deception or ambiguity. His "No-Pill" approach suggests that individuals should work to integrate these values without necessarily privileging one over the others. Instead of adopting predefined ideologies or philosophical "pills" (such as red or blue pills), people should build their own frameworks from first principles that harmonize these often competing values.
In essence, Eric is advocating for a nuanced, individualized approach to navigating life's complexities, acknowledging that truth, meaning, fitness, and grace are each vital but not always compatible.
There are several things I care about other than truth, and one of them is fitness, in the sort of sense of natural and sexual selection. I also care about meaning, and I also care about productivity. And so I see you as caring much more about truth among those four objectives than I do, I'm more balanced. So if somebody puts a gun to my head and asks me a question, I in general want to give them the answer that will cause them not to shoot me. I assume that would be the same for [Sam Harris]. I think that meaning is a different thing. So when I go full, atheist in that compartment of my mind, I often have some trouble recovering as much meaning as I'd like, I can do more than the religious think that I can do, but there are some problems about, you know, repeated games with boundary conditions and reasons for heaven and hell are not necessarily stupid, even if they don't exist. I think it's important to have often religions that are far enough back that it's not Sam and Eric's New Faith, like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, because it helps to bury it in mysticism so that it's not clear what its origin is. Joseph Smith obviously is pretty recent, that gets a little crazy. I think that fitness is something which Dawkins has really wrong. And the best version of this would probably be something coming from my brother, Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary theorist, but I'll give my version of his perspective or sometimes our shared perspective, which is that it can't be the case that religion is a virus, in some sense, of the mind. It's clearly part of fitness because it's just too expensive in most cases that it would be driven out. So when you have these mysterious things that are not obviously positive, that seem to carry a burden for their for their host, in general, they have to be delivering some kind of a benefit because it would be easy to excise them.
-Eric Weinstein on Making Sense Episode 41: Faith In Reason
There are these primitives, right, that we're sort of embarrassed to say that we trade off against. So in my case, I often say that it's Truth, Meaning, Fitness, and Grace, alright? And so very often, if I just do Truth, and just try to figure out, you know, is the glass here or is it not, I don't find that very fulfilling. I have this concept of Meaningâcertain things feel meaningful. It's very hard for me to say what that is, it just seems to be a primitive that came with, you know, a toggle in my mind. You know, Fitness, if what you're doing isn't successful, your lineage doesn't get to keep playing. So if somebody puts a gun to my head and asks me questions, I try to figure out what answers they want to hear, not what answers are true. You know, and grace is this weird quality where, you know, if I had to take issue with Ben when he talks about, you know, somebody insisting that they use gender pronouns that don't match genotype and phenotype, you know, my feeling is that it's not a violation of truth. It's a violation of grace. I extend it as a courtesy temporarily before somebody takes it someplace where I have to retract it. You know, that's a small difference. And so, you know, fundamentally, when I brought that up on your podcast, there's like all these people on Reddit, like, "Okay, he's just admitting that he's not about truth", you know, and you get into this truth mania without recognizing that you trade off against truth. We all do.
-Eric Weinstein on Making Sense Episode 112: The Intellectual Dark Web
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