{"id":6959,"date":"2017-07-05T10:02:05","date_gmt":"2017-07-05T17:02:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=6959"},"modified":"2018-03-29T12:55:31","modified_gmt":"2018-03-29T19:55:31","slug":"bootstrapped-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2017\/07\/05\/bootstrapped-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"Gri-Gri, Money and Bootstrapped Truths"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why does money have value? After all, if I went with some colorful feathers and tried to use them to purchase a hamburger, I\u2019d get laughed right out of McDonald’s. Then, why do colorful pieces of paper and metal work instead?<\/p>\n

According to Yuval Harari in his book Sapiens<\/a>, the answer is that the value of money is a shared myth. The value of money works not by getting you to believe money has value, but by convincing you that other<\/em> people value money. Since other people value it, you will value it and thus a stable equilibrium forms where people share the useful hallucination that paper and coins mean something.<\/p>\n

This fascinates me because it\u2019s an example of bootstrapping truth into a false idea. Money doesn\u2019t have value, unless you believe other people think it does, which causes it to have value for you, which causes it to have value for everyone. Weird.<\/p>\n

Which brings me to gri-gri<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Can Shamans Make You Bulletproof?<\/h2>\n

Apparently, in South Kivu of Congo, local elders have been forging magical spells which make the bearers immune to bullets.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more interesting, is that it actually seems to work<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Those who have the magical spell, known as gri-gri,<\/em> are able to overcome armed thugs and attackers. In regions which are prone to violence, this has had a positive effect, allowing locals to resist attack and establish peace. Since the spell only works if the bearer adheres to certain moral codes of conduct, gri-gri<\/em> can\u2019t be used by the bad guys.<\/p>\n

What seems to be happening here is that gri-gri<\/em>, like money, bootstraps truth into itself. The armed attackers are greatly outnumbered by the unarmed civilians. Even with a weapon, a group of unarmed people could quickly overpower someone with a gun. However, most people are too afraid of being shot to stand up and do something. With gri-gri<\/em>, however, groups of people aren\u2019t afraid to collectively work to disarm the attackers.<\/p>\n

A myth in being bulletproof allows people to become less likely victims of violence.<\/p>\n

Bootstrapping Truth<\/h2>\n

There doesn\u2019t seem to be a good word for what\u2019s going on with gri-gri<\/em> or money.<\/p>\n

Saying the ideas are false is plainly wrong. Money clearly has economic value. While one can debate the importance of such value, nobody practically denies that money can be used to buy things and that other people value it. Gri-gri<\/em> may not make people bulletproof, but combined with a shared belief in local magic, it has had at least partially the effect of reducing such types of violence.<\/p>\n

But saying these ideas are true is also more complicated. Money is just paper, coins and, increasingly, the direction of spins of electrons on large ferromagnetic discs somewhere. Make tiny changes to those spins and the value disappears.<\/p>\n

Instead, these ideas are true, but only within a particular background context and communal beliefs. Gri-gri<\/em> isn\u2019t true in suburban North America. Money has no value in isolated, hunter-gatherer societies.<\/p>\n

True by Convention?<\/h2>\n

Money and gri-gri<\/em> aren\u2019t the only examples of bootstrapped truths. Seemingly much of what we know is at least partially defined conventions rather than facts on the ground.<\/p>\n

The meaning of words is such a conventional truth. Everything I\u2019m saying right now only makes sense because we agree on the meaning of certain strings of symbols.<\/p>\n

Truths about our institutions are also created by convention. Everyone agrees George Washington was the first American president. But to do so, we all have to agree on what it means to be president, that there are things called nations and the United States is one of them, and even on ascribing names such as \u201cGeorge\u201d to temporally extended masses of flesh and tissue.<\/p>\n

Even scientific theories are also true by a sort of convention. We know that Einstein\u2019s equations for relativity is the \u201ctruth\u201d of gravity. But scientists also know that these equations are currently incompatible with quantum physics in a way that suggests the former are probably not the final word on the matter. Therefore, we agree that in some sense Einstein\u2019s equations are \u201ctrue\u201d even though we know that they will probably be replaced by something more \u201ctrue\u201d when science advances.<\/p>\n

And all of this is beginning to sound like a typical conversation between second year philosophy students who\u2019ve smoked too much pot.<\/p>\n

Expanding Vocabulary<\/h2>\n

The point of all this isn\u2019t to cast doubt on everything in reality. The vertigo from realizing that many facts are as much collaborative creations as they are derived from objective circumstances only lasts a little while until you realize just how amazingly stable those truths are.<\/p>\n

Fake news is still fake news. When people lie, in a conventional sense, there\u2019s an important way in that they\u2019re really lying, and not that everything just boils down to some kind of confusing postmodern relativistic soup.<\/p>\n

However, what I think is the value of this shift in thinking is that it shows the paucity of the English language. It would be really nice if we had different words for different types of truths, which are true in different ways, rather than just the typical set of \u201cfact,\u201d \u201clie,\u201d or \u201copinion.\u201d<\/p>\n

In particular, I would propose:<\/p>\n