Making Something Social Destroys the Truth of It

Making something social destroys the truth of it because social groups need consensus to survive. Otherwise, they fight; they can't get along. Consensus is all about compromise, not about truth-seeking. Science was this unique discipline, at least in Natural Sciences, where you could have individuals truth-seeking on behalf of the rest of society. Other individuals would verify that they did indeed have the best current model of how reality works, and then that could be spread out through inventions to rest of society.

But the social sciences were this virus that entered Academia and have taken over. Social sciences themselves are completely corrupted. Firstly, they need to appeal to society for funding, so they are actually politically motivated. Then, they themselves are influencing society because their studies and models are used to drive policy, so of course that ends up corrupted as well.

But now, even the Natural Sciences are under attack from the social sciences, and they're becoming more and more socialized. The more groupthink you see involved, the further from the truth you actually are. Yes, the more you're getting along, but you can have a harmonious society while still allowing truth seekers within that society to find truth and to find the means to alter and improve reality for the entire group.

Even historically, most of the scientific breakthroughs didn't come from scientific institutions. The big ones came from individual natural philosophers who were very independent thinkers, who were reviled in their time, often persecuted. They fought against the rest of society on the basis of their truths, and it took decades or centuries, often after their deaths, before those truths were accepted.

A lot of these academic theories don't actually stand up either to replication if you look at what's going on in psychology or even to reality. Rory Sutherland had this great quote where he said something along the lines of, "Marketing is the knowledge of what economists don't know." Economists assume perfectly rational behavior, but humans are obviously wetware biological creatures, so you can hack around that using marketing.

Nasim Taleb would go even further and say they assume a false rationality, whereas humans are pricing in the risk of ruin, the risk of going to zero. The academics are making mistakes about erotic reasoning; they're assuming that what's good for the ensemble is good for the individual, and it's not. Because an individual doesn't want to go to zero, doesn't want to die, so they will not take risks of ruin, and they will not take risks of bankruptcy.

Whereas a group should be willing to take a risk of bankruptcy because that's spread out among so many different people.