There are Few Hidden, Significant Truths

Truth Isn’t Always Useful

”What’s one important truth you hold that few others do?” is a great question for hiring - because it quickly screens for conventional thinking. Thiel is a great investor, but I’m not sure holding important truths is especially valuable.

I’ve spoken with other investors seeking to emulate - or perhaps cargo-cult - him, who had their answers ready to share. All of the answers ring hollow, and I doubt any of their holders make much in the way of returns.

PvE Hidden Truth and PvP Hidden Truth

When one thinks of “hidden truths”, knowledge beyond man’s current grasp, such as solutions to the Riemann hypothesis, probably comes to mind. These truths stay hidden because nature has rendered them difficult to find.

But in some contexts, these are a small fraction of the important hidden truths. In Stalinist Russia, for instance, basic everyday facts were obfuscated by relentless, malicious propaganda. Perhaps in other eras - Victorian England comes to mind - this is much less so the case, and it’s mostly nature’s meddling that’s in the way. But, as a rule, there are typically more actors interested in keeping important truths from you than there are those interested in gifting them upon you.

For this reason, I think that those of us not living in Victorian England have much stronger incentive to seek PvP hidden truths than those of the PvE sort.

Lies are Unnatural

I might have a different model of the human mind than most. Many believe it to be animalistic, dumb, and inclined to fancy were it not for formal thought. In my experience, the mind naturally gravitates to reality, only departs from the truth when doing so is expedient.

Sometimes, the expediency is mediated by promise - we all know an investor or founder who demonstrated confused optimism vividly in 2021. But much more often, the mind is cowed into accepting lies by powerful fear, guilt or shape. Those lies strangle their victims with unnatural, forced repression.

Repression here doesn’t mean Freud, but a kind of physical contortion and grasping. The lie must be accepted else its victim be made a bad person, a threat that warps the body and mind of social animals like us. It goes further - if one doesn’t spread the lie, that also makes one a bad person. Repeatedly injuring others in this way, too, warps man.

Overcoming Mendaciousness

PvP lies are communicated via damage, and can be undone by undoing damage. Specifically, there are two quite consistent approaches I’ve seen work.

1. Fight the warping. Do meditation, yoga, exercise, massage, whatever it is to undo the warping / tanha wherever it’s stored in the mind-body. If it sounds woo, it is, and it’s not my speed but probably/definitely does happen.
2. Transvaluation. The warping is caused by fear, shame, and guilt. What if you were fine with being bad, guilty, and whichever other charged word liars throw at you? It takes a contrarian/disagreeable streak, but once you’re over the hump, you’re over the hump. Any further ‘If you don’t do X, you’re bad!’ formulae are hard not to sneer at. The great of those I know who are liberated from lies took this path.

So, Dzogchen or Niesztche.

Life After Lies

Lies are specifically designed to disempower you and strip away your agency. It’s not incidental, or collateral damage, it’s what they’re designed for. Liberation is a big change. You trust your mind, body, intuition, and they trust you.

You start making exceptionally good judgements, over and over, and exhibit simple, clear thinking by default. Once you’ve gotten into the strict habit of only speaking truthfully, your brain stops predicting expedient fiction and begins spending its compute on acting on and inferring from reality.

No one - especially not someone living in a society as addicted to lying as ours - can be completely free from lies and confusion. Every additional lie you excise, some fraction of your internal MCMC estimators get unhobbled. Every additional warping undone, another unit of compute free for planning and action in the world.

There might not be much alpha in PvE truths. There’s quite a lot in PvP.