Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - How to Know the TRUTH!

Nov. 16, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

45:53

How to Know the TRUTH!

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	Hi, hi everybody.
	Hope you're doing well.
	So we're having a good debate or discussion on the nature of truth.
	This is coming from a fellow named Bob.
	And the question is, is it possible for something to be accidentally true?
	So if I murmur, what does two and two make?
	And a golfer yells, four, he hasn't even heard me, maybe he yells four, has he accurately answered the question?
	Is his response true?
	I argue that it's not.
	I argue that truth is the result of a process, not an accidental coincidence.
	So Bob is saying, hello, Steph.
	I am listening to show 6162.
	Cursor currently positioned at about 44 minutes.
	And you have been arguing for some time with a gentleman about the meaning of truth.
	Since your argument started, I have been feeling an increasing sense of unrest and active rejection.
	The pinnacle of which happened when I heard you saying that a madman in the Middle Ages ranting that the Earth revolved around the sun wouldn't be making a true statement.
	I felt properly annoyed by that point.
	Yeah, so this is my case.
	If there's some guy, he's got, I don't know, I guess it wouldn't be syphilis because this is prior to the discovery of the new world, which transmitted syphilis back to Europe.
	But if you had a madman in the Middle Ages who ranted that unicorns existed, there were demons in his room and the earth went around the sun, him saying that the earth goes around the sun is not a true statement, but rather the rantings of a madman, the fact that it happens to later coincide with a true statement is a coincidence, but there's no truth in the statement.
	And I sort of mentioned if a blind man hits a tennis ball perfectly, he's not a good tennis player.
	It's just an unusual coincidence.
	All right.
	He said, I soon identified, Bob says, I soon identified this feeling as the reaction to an attempt to redefine a fundamental word in the vocabulary.
	I have been using for my whole life, an attempt which was not made by just anyone that I could ignore, but by Stéphane Molyneux himself, in an argument that was not free from reference to your undeniable, I say, prime skills and debates, almost turning it into an argument from authority.
	Well, that's a minor bit of an ad hom.
	I am not.
	I don't think I've ever said I'm right because I'm me.
	I mean, that would be pretty bad as a philosopher.
	So when people are annoyed, when people are annoyed, they will respond with minor insults.
	So this is not a huge insult, but it is not great.
	So he goes on to say, truth in my vocabulary means corresponding to reality, which you might say is a shorter, less precise version of, quote, relationship between concepts in the mind and things in the real world, a definition which I do not contend against.
	On the off chance that my vocabulary could be wrong, I asked the following to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok.
	And he wrote, does the word truth, this is what he asked the AIs, does the word truth only refer to something that is proven?
	If, for example, a madman from the Middle Ages during one of his random rants described a microbe theory down to the details, could that be called a true statement?
	Or was the first to make a true statement about it Pasteur?
	All of the AI acknowledged the philosophical question and agreed that the madman would have made a true statement just like Pasteur.
	What Pasteur said was not only truth, though, but also justified belief or knowledge.
	And you briefly and rightly touched on this later on when making the analogy of scribbling random stuff on a wall while being blindfolded and producing a haiku.
	Would you then say I knew Japanese?
	So no, nobody in the right mind would say that you know Japanese.
	That's correct.
	But nobody who can read Japanese would say that it is not true that you wrote a haiku just because you are randomly scribbling.
	In other words, it is true that you wrote a Japanese haiku just as much as it is true that you did not have any knowledge or justified belief of it.
	My conclusion being that it is wrong to define truth as only that which is proven, and that it would be indeed a true statement if the madman from the Middle Ages precisely described by pure chance the way the universe works.
	A useless, random, and inactionable statement at the same time, but nonetheless true.
	Sorry, I just dropped the paper.
	He says, I remember you saying you are the first one to have provided a logical proof of secular ethics.
	While UPB is by all means an original approach, and I do not intend to try to deny it, as I reckon that it's not possible to do so, I'd like to know your stance about the ethics of liberty by Rothbard.
	Is that not a solid, rigorously, and deductively logical proof of ethics made before you invented UPB?
	I've read some Rothbard, but I have not read the Ethics of Liberty.
	I will put it on the list.
	Right.
	Okay.
	So, let's go back to the Japanese haiku.
	So, I don't know Japanese.
	I'm blindfolded.
	I'm given a paintbrush or a crayon, and I write randomly on the wall, and then by some completely bizarre coincidence, I write out a Japanese haiku.
	Well, if a Japanese person comes and reads it, then he says, oh, wow, by strange coincidence, Steph, who's randomly scribbling blindfolded, who doesn't know Japanese, has written a haiku.
	All right.
	So where is the definition of haiku?
	Right?
	How do we know it's a haiku?
	Let's further say that the haiku has some scribbles over it.
	Like it's not a perfect haiku.
	That would be so improbable that it would be like once every 20 universes.
	But also, it wouldn't be random scribbling.
	Random scribbling is just wildly moving your arm all over the place.
	This would be more considered.
	But for whatever reason, let's just say that you can make out a haiku somewhere in the random scribbling.
	Okay, so where does the definition, where does the haiku, where does the definition of it being a haiku reside?
	Does it reside in my mind?
	Nope.
	I don't know that I've made a haiku.
	I'm blindfolded.
	I don't know that I've made a haiku.
	Does the haiku-ness, the definition of haiku, the haikuness, does it reside in the scribbling or in the wall or in the crayon or the paintbrush or the blindfold or my arm?
	Nope.
	It doesn't exist in any of those things.
	Where does the definition of haiku exist?
	It exists in the Japanese speaker who has spent years and years learning Japanese, whether as a child or as an adult.
	The haikunas, the poem, the meaning, exists nowhere but in the mind of the person who recognizes that I've accidentally written a haiku.
	This is really, really important.
	Sorry.
	I knew you.
	It all is really important.
	Where does the fact that it's a haiku reside?
	Not in me, not in the objects.
	And also, if my friends come over and look at my scribbling on the wall, and none of my friends speak Japanese, let's say.
	Te o tore ate.
	So my friends come over and look at my scribblings on the wall, and they would recognize maybe there's some odd patterns in there that maybe look vaguely Asian or whatever, but they would not be able to read it and they would not identify it as a haiku.
	So how do I know that I've written a haiku?
	Well, or how do I know that my random script, my random scribblings have produced a haiku?
	I can't know it.
	My friends can't know it.
	And nobody who doesn't speak Japanese can identify that I've written a haiku, and they certainly can't translate it.
	It is random scribblings, obviously not that random if it's producing Japanese characters, but there's no haiku, there's no haiku, until the person who speaks Japanese reads it.
	Then the haikuness and the comprehensibility of what I have created exists.
	Be really rigorous about this.
	Random scribblings on the wall are not a haiku because it cannot be identified as a haiku.
	So the only time that you can identify what I have scribbled as a haiku is when somebody who knows what a haiku is and knows what Japanese is and understands it, can read it, can comprehend it, can translate it.
	Right?
	When somebody does that, then and only then does the identification of my random scribblings as a haiku come into existence.
	Right?
	So let us take another, obviously very silly example, but very illustrative, I believe.
	Let us say that I do this scribbling.
	There's Japanese, kind of you can make out the Japanese and the random scribbling and so on.
	And then we all wake up tomorrow and every book translating Japanese and everybody who knows Japanese is not in the world.
	Let's just do this as a thought exercise.
	We could do this with an ancient language, but we might as well keep continuity with the prior examples.
	So I do my random scribbling on the wall and the next morning, when I show it to people, all knowledge of Japanese has vanished from the world.
	All knowledge of it.
	Even the concept of haiku, right?
	Because lots of people who, you say, what is a haiku?
	And they'll say, bless you, right?
	They think you sneezed, right?
	So let's say I do these random scribblings and show it to people, but there's nobody alive or around and there's no longer any knowledge of how to translate Japanese to English.
	Random scribblings and nobody knows how to translate them.
	Or if you want to take another example, I take a picture of the wall that I've scribbled on, and I take it to a tribe of pygmies who don't even know how to read.
	Let's take that example.
	So I do the random scribbling somewhere in there.
	You can kind of make out some Japanese characters and so on.
	And I take a picture of that and I show it to a bunch of pygmies who don't even know how to read, you know, real savages in the Amazon or wherever, right?
	I don't think are they in the Amazon?
	I went through this years ago, Amazon, Africa.
	Anyway, just, you know, a really primitive tribe that doesn't know how to read.
	Okay.
	So I don't speak Japanese.
	I can't read it.
	I know what a haiku is, but only when translated, I can't read it in the original, right?
	It's like the only reason I would learn Russian is to read Dostoevsky in the original.
	So I take a picture of my random scribblings on the wall and I take it to a primitive tribe that can't read anything and ask them what it means.
	And of course, they won't know.
	They won't know that it's a haiku.
	They won't know that it's Japanese.
	They won't be able to translate anything.
	It will have absolutely zero meaning to them.
	And of course, you can imagine, of course, let's say you don't speak Japanese and there's no translation available and you get a letter in the mail entirely written in Japanese.
	Let's say there's no red lettering, which might indicate danger or something like that.
	You get a letter in the mail, all in Japanese, or occasionally you'll get a spam in Mandarin or Japanese or something like that.
	You get the spam.
	Okay, what does that mean to you?
	It means nothing to you because you cannot translate it, like in the act of reading it, if you don't know the language.
	I guess you could run it through Google Translator or maybe a non-evil translator or something like that, right?
	A non-racist translator.
	So where is the haikunas?
	How is it a haiku, my random scribbling?
	It's not a haiku to me.
	It's not a haiku in the materials.
	It's not a haiku among my friends who don't speak Japanese.
	Ah, but if someone comes along, I don't know, Megumi, it's a Megumi.
	Megumi comes along and Megumi says, ah, that is a haiku.
	How interesting.
	Ah, now it's been identified.
	Now there's meaning.
	Before, there are only scribbles.
	Now there is meaning.
	So I would argue that it is a bizarre kind of time traveling to say it's a haiku before it is identified as a haiku.
	If you leave the picture of the haiku with the primitive tribe in the Amazon, they will never know that it's a haiku.
	They will never be able to translate it.
	I mean, until the Rosetta Stone came along, which had, I think, the same text in three different languages, it allowed them to start translating ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
	So I have not written a haiku.
	I have made some scribbles.
	It being identified as a haiku comes later when somebody who knows what Japanese is and what a haiku is and can translate it, when someone knows what a haiku is, comes along.
	So the haikunas is not in the scribbling.
	It's not in the wall, not in the pen, not in my friends, not in me, because we don't speak any of that.
	We can't identify it as a haiku.
	The haikunas comes into existence when a Japanese speaker sees the random scribbles, identifies them as coincidentally matching Japanese characters and in the form of a haiku.
	Do you see what I mean?
	The haikunas is not in the writing.
	The haikunas is in the comprehension of the writing.
	I have not written a haiku.
	I have done random scribbles.
	My friends have not identified what I have done as a haiku.
	There is no haikunas that exists independent of the comprehension of the Japanese language.
	The haikunas is based upon the knowledge of Japanese, not upon my random scribbles.
	Identifying something as a haiku requires knowledge of Japanese and its poetic art forms.
	This is really, I mean, this is so foundational that this is why I'm spending a lot of time on these issues.
	So when somebody says steph accidentally wrote a haiku, they are taking knowledge from the present or from later and throwing it backwards in time.
	So if I randomly write a haiku while blindfolded, and then someone who speaks Japanese says, oh, that's a haiku.
	I cannot say, I knew I was writing a haiku when I wrote it.
	I cannot say I wrote a haiku because I don't speak Japanese.
	It's random scribblings.
	I did not write a haiku.
	No intention, no thought, no reasoning, no poetic analogies, no metaphors, no artistic goal.
	It was random scribbling, bro.
	I'm emphatic upon this because it is absolutely essential, and I'll sort of tell you why as we continue.
	I did not write a haiku because to write a haiku is a process of understanding Japanese, assuming that the Japanese, yeah, I mean, you could write a haiku, not in Japanese, but we'll just go with the Japanese as the art form.
	I did not write a haiku because I did not write with any intention, it was random scribbling.
	When I take off my blindfold, I may see that there's some, you know, odd-looking squiggles in the middle that look vaguely Asian, whatever, but I can't read them.
	I don't know what they mean.
	It certainly wasn't my intention to write anything like that.
	And I did not write a haiku.
	I made some squiggles that coincidentally later were identifying as were identified as a haiku.
	But I did not write a haiku.
	Let me give you another example.
	Let's say that instead of me writing randomly on the wall, let's say that I am instructed to hold my hand perfectly still and somebody who knows Japanese moves the paper under my pen.
	All they do is tell me when to lift and lower my pen, right?
	And let's say a beautiful haiku is the result of me holding my pen steady and somebody moving the paper under my pen and simply telling me when to raise and lower my pen.
	Or maybe you could do it in the way that Cursive has done.
	But let's just say, right, all they do is raise your pen, lower your pen, and they move the paper.
	I do not move the pen.
	Now, have I, and let's say that what is produced from the person, say a Japanese person, moving the paper while I hold the pen steady, who wrote the haiku?
	Let's say I produce a nice haiku.
	Who wrote the haiku?
	Well, I was holding the pen and I made the marks.
	But, of course, we would understand that it's the person who moved the paper who wrote the haiku, not me.
	I don't know what I'm doing.
	I don't speak Japanese.
	I'm just raising and lowering my pen.
	I don't even am blindfolded.
	I don't know what is moving.
	I don't know what is happening.
	The person who wrote the haiku is the person moving the paper, not me who's holding the pen.
	And if I were to say, I wrote a haiku, I'm thinking IQ now.
	I wrote a haikyu.
	Hey, that's my IQ.
	So if I was blindfolded, Japanese person moved the paper, who wrote the haiku?
	Well, clearly the Japanese person wrote the haiku.
	I did not.
	I did not.
	So I didn't write the haiku when I am holding the pen and somebody else is moving the paper.
	I did not write a haiku when I'm randomly scribbling because it is its haikuness doesn't exist until the Japanese person looks at it.
	And then going backwards, we can say, oh, Steph, and it's an interesting challenge.
	I can't say that I wrote a haiku if it's random scribbles.
	I can say I made some random scribbles that somebody else identified as resembling a haiku.
	I think I've been saying haiku.
	Haiku.
	Haiku, I think it is.
	If I am, if Bob, say Jim, right?
	If Jim is held hostage and Jim is forced, he doesn't speak Japanese, right?
	And Jim is forced at gunpoint to write a letter in Japanese.
	Is Jim responsible for the contents?
	Let's say that Jim is kidnapped by the Yatsuko, what do they call the Japanese mafia, whatever, right?
	So let's say that Jim is kidnapped by the Japanese mafia and the Japanese mafia, Jim doesn't speak Japanese, and the Japanese mafia forces him at gunpoint to write a letter in Japanese, which turns out to be a death threat against the prime minister.
	Did Jim write a death threat against the prime minister?
	No.
	He doesn't even speak Japanese.
	The fact that it is a death threat to the prime minister is not in Jim's mind.
	He doesn't know what he's writing.
	He's just trying to stay alive.
	So, random statements are not truth.
	I do not write a haiku by scribbling randomly because there's no haikuness in it until somebody comes along and identifies it.
	And I have no reproducible methodology for recreating any Japanese haikus.
	I can't go write another one because the odds of me randomly scribbling and producing a haiku are so tiny that it's not going to happen again in another 20 universes.
	Let's look at it another way.
	If you get the right answer by cheating, do you have the right answer?
	Well, no.
	I mean, this is basic basis.
	This is basic to plagiarism and to cheating, which gets you kicked out of university.
	It's a really important question.
	If Bob is writing an exam and it turns out that he cheated, right, he had the answers written on his upper thigh and pulled up his pants or he copied from Sally or like he did not.
	He copied the answers.
	Is he presumed to have knowledge of the subject if he has cheated?
	Is his answer right?
	Well, of course it's not.
	It's not marked as right.
	The exam is thrown out and he is heavily disciplined or kicked out of university and he is presumed to have no knowledge of the subject if he cheated.
	The old play about the guy with the big nose and then the good-looking guy.
	And the guy with the big nose tells the good-looking guy what to say to woo the woman and so on.
	Who's she dating if she falls in love with his eloquence?
	Sherade Depadure played it.
	Cyrano de Bergerac.
	There we go.
	So Cyranot de Bergerac is a story of an ugly guy and a handsome guy.
	The handsome guy wants the pretty girl, but he's dumb.
	And the ugly guy, who's great with language, tells the handsome guy what to say, the handsome dumb guy.
	And so who does she fall in love with?
	Well, she falls in love with the language, mostly of the ugly guy.
	I mean, she likes the looks of the dumb guy, but she wouldn't date him because he was too dumb.
	Who's she falling in love with, right?
	The language does not belong to the good-looking dumb guy, it belongs to the brilliant ugly guy with a big nose.
	Right?
	So does someone have the right answer if they cheat?
	Nope.
	Plagiarism is when you take an idea that is not your own and present it as an original idea.
	Or you take somebody else's writing and either copy it without attribution or adjust it to the point where it seems like yours.
	Do you know something if all you're doing is copying out answers?
	You could get somebody who's illiterate to copy out the entire proof of Einstein's theory of relativity, right?
	All of the magical physics squiggles, right?
	You could get somebody who is illiterate.
	They don't even know what they're writing.
	And you could get them to copy out Einstein's proof of the theory of relativity.
	Does he understand a thing?
	He does not.
	So, the reason I'm saying it's a time slice, let's go back to our madman in the Middle Ages.
	Madman Across the Water.
	Jethro Tull and well, that's Madman Across the Water is Elon John, but Jethro Tull had a song about a madman too.
	Snut running down his nose.
	So creepy.
	Anyway, so let's go back to our madman in the Middle Ages.
	Our madman in the Middle Ages rants a whole bunch of crazy stuff, right?
	The sun is made of toenail sparklers, a whole bunch of stuff that's crazy.
	And he says, and the earth goes around the sun.
	All right.
	Is there truth in that statement?
	Nope.
	No, there's not.
	Absolutely not.
	Why?
	Because it's only proven much later.
	In the same way, there's no haikuness in my random scribblings.
	It is only known as resembling a haiku later.
	So if there's no haikuness in my random scribblings at the time, if I'm a Japanese speaker and I'm a Japanese writer and I'm writing Japanese and I'm writing a haiku, I've created a haiku.
	It may not be good, but I've created a haiku.
	If random scribblings is not a haiku, there's no haikuness in it.
	It's just random scribblings.
	So since there is no haikuness in my random scribblings, there is no truth in the statement the earth goes around the sun.
	Now, I understand this seems counterintuitive, but so what?
	Who gives a rat's behind?
	It's philosophy.
	It's supposed to be counterintuitive.
	Just like physics is counterintuitive, and evolution is counterintuitive, and chemistry is counterintuitive.
	The fact that it's counterintuitive and the fact that it irritates you is has no relationship to whether it's true or not.
	So, a random aggregation of syllables from a crazy person in the past that happens to coincidentally match what the sentence of somebody who understands and has proven something says later on does not throw back in time the truth value of the statement.
	That would be like saying, some Japanese speaker identifies my random scribbles as a haiku, and therefore it was a haiku when I was writing it, but I wasn't writing it.
	They were random scribbles.
	The haikuness of my random scribbles is in the identification of it by somebody with knowledge.
	It is not in my random scribbles.
	I say, oh, that's an interesting coincidence, blah, blah, blah, right?
	But it is in the methodology of the statement.
	It is understanding Japanese and writing with the intention to create a haiku that makes it a haiku in the creation.
	It is not the random scribbles that later accidentally resembles a haiku.
	And we know this.
	We know this because we punish cheaters.
	And of course, if random scribbles or copying things without understanding was the equivalent of its creation, then photocopiers would be the greatest writers on earth because you can photocopy Shakespeare and Dickens in a weekend.
	Does not make the photocopier, which is simply aggregating atoms based on light and dark with no mind, right?
	There is no comprehension in the photocopier.
	It doesn't know what it's copying.
	It can copy the most beautiful sonnets, and it can also copy the secretary's ass at a particularly raucous Christmas party at the business.
	The man who randomly says the earth goes around the sun, there is no truth value in it.
	Say, but what he says is true.
	And then the question is, how do you know?
	How do you know what he says is true?
	Right, let's just take that statement.
	But it's true that the earth goes around the sun.
	It's like, sure.
	And it's true that my random scribbles represent a haiku, but that doesn't mean I wrote a haiku.
	It's only because somebody more knowledgeable is looking at things and coming to that conclusion.
	The haikuness emerges in the mind of the person with knowledge, not in the random scribblings.
	So the fact that we know that the earth goes around the sun is a result of a very strict process of scientific investigation, of skepticism, of reproducibility, of mathematics, of observations collected painstakingly over hundreds or even thousands of years.
	So it is the result of a lengthy process of skepticism, investigation, mathematics, and testing, and reproducibility, the scientific method.
	The guy who's just randomly shouting stuff, there's no truth value in his statements.
	It's an interesting coincidence, don't get me wrong.
	You know, the Nostradamus stuff.
	Hey, it's a fun and interesting coincidence.
	But it's a weird kind of time travel to say, when I was just randomly scribbling, Steph wrote a haiku.
	No, I didn't.
	Because there's no haikuness in what I wrote, scribbled.
	There's no haikuness in all the people who don't speak Japanese who look at it.
	Then someone comes along who speaks Japanese and the haikuna suddenly comes into existence because he identifies it as a haiku.
	But there's no haiku in the origin.
	There's no haiku in the scribbling.
	There's no haiku in the looking.
	It's only later when the Japanese person says, hey, that's a haiku.
	And that's a short form.
	It's a short way of putting it.
	I mean, a more accurate thing would be, Steph didn't write a haiku, but his random scribblings coincidentally looks like one.
	Is it a haiku?
	No.
	It's an accidental recreation of a haiku.
	But I'm sure you can get monkeys to copy things.
	I'm sure you can get monkeys to even make basic letters.
	And let's say you can.
	Does that mean that they're literate?
	Does that mean they understand language, written language?
	If I'm holding the pen and the Japanese person is moving the paper, I'm not writing the haiku.
	The Japanese person is writing the haiku.
	The haikuness is in the Japanese person's knowledge, not in my unknowable or unknown to me actions.
	So somebody who says something that turns out to accidentally coincide with a later proof and truth is not saying something true.
	Any more than somebody who copies the answer of a more knowledgeable person has the same level of knowledge.
	I can write out Hamlet by hand.
	That does not make me Shakespeare.
	Truth is the result of a process.
	Truth is the result of a rigorous process.
	And once you discover something is true, you cannot take that essence of truth and cast it backwards through time to before it was known to be true.
	Lots of people say lots of crazy stuff.
	And it is in the knowledge and the intention that the essence of the thing is created.
	If I know Japanese and I intend to write a haiku, the haikuness is in my knowledge and in my intention in the moment.
	Random scribblings are not knowledge and intention.
	If your intention is to find out the true physics and relationships of solar and planetary and moon and meteor and asteroid and comet objects in the universe, then your goal is to find the truth.
	Your intention, your focus is on the solar system and you work very hard to achieve that.
	And then once you have achieved a true and validated knowledge, which is going to be years, right?
	Once you've achieved a true and validated knowledge of the shape, relationship, and nature of the solar system, objects in the solar system, once you have achieved that, then you know that the Earth goes around the Sun, the Moon goes around the Earth, and the Sun goes around the planets a tiny little bit.
	No, walls on its axis.
	The center of the gravitational wall between the Earth and the Sun is still below the Sun's surface, but it's not right at the center, of course, right?
	Because the Earth has a minor gravitational pull on the Sun.
	So you can't just take truths that are a result of a laborious process and cast them back in time.
	If I spent, I don't know, how long would it take for me to learn Japanese well enough to do poetry, five to ten years of pretty rigorous study?
	I don't have any natural facility for learning other languages outside of computer languages because they're the language of logic.
	Okay, so let's say, let's say I really buckle down, I can do it in five years.
	So after I study Japanese for five years, then I can write a haiku.
	It probably won't be a good one, but I can write a haiku, right?
	If I don't study Japanese, I can't write a haiku.
	I can make a bunch of random scribbles that somebody might say, hey, that's kind of like a haiku or whatever, right?
	But the haikuness is not in anything that I'm doing.
	It is in the intention and the process producing an objective result, not in a mere coincidence of language and things in the world.
	Because the madman in the Middle Ages says the Earth goes around the Sun and the Sun is eternally burning toenails.
	When you say to the man in the Middle Ages, who's crazy, he says the Earth goes around the Sun, you say, okay, how do you know?
	How do you know?
	He can't answer.
	He can't answer.
	If somebody gives me some random Japanese letters or characters, somebody gives me some random Japanese characters and says, what do they mean?
	I don't know.
	Now, if I guess what they mean and I happen to be right, I don't know Japanese.
	It's just a coincidence.
	It's not real.
	It's not true.
	It's not reproducible.
	Now, if somebody knows Japanese, here's some characters in Japanese, and they say, oh, this means this, this, and this, okay.
	And they know, because you can give them another one, and they know, and you give them another one, and they know.
	But somebody gives me a bunch of characters in Japanese and I say, oh, it looks like an order for six Pikachu figurines.
	And it turns out that that is true.
	It's not true.
	I don't know it.
	I've just guessed.
	I don't know Japanese.
	Because if somebody puts another bunch of Japanese characters in front of me, I have no idea what I could guess again.
	Maybe I keep guessing right.
	Of course, the odds of that are so tiny, but I still don't know Japanese.
	I have not correctly identified.
	I've simply guessed.
	Now, if I learn Japanese and then I look back five years and look at the Japanese characters I guessed at and it turns out, oh, wow, that was an order for six Pikachu figurines.
	How, what a strange coincidence.
	But I can't go back and say, I knew Japanese then.
	So let's go through the scenario just real briefly.
	Somebody put some Japanese characters in front of me.
	I randomly guess.
	Turns out that my guess is correct, but it's not based on any knowledge of anything.
	It's just a random chance.
	Right, and then I spend five years learning Japanese and then go back to that piece of paper now that I understand it, say, Oh, it is an order for six Pikachu figurines.
	Huh.
	I would say, what a coincidence.
	I wouldn't say I was right in my guess about the contents of the Japanese characters.
	I wouldn't say that I was right.
	I wouldn't say I understood Japanese.
	I wouldn't say I had any knowledge of what I was talking about or anything like that.
	Not a bit.
	You can't take later knowledge and throw it backwards through time and attach truth to mad ravings.
	And I get, I mean, it's a conceptual order of understanding, but you have to remember that knowledge is a process.
	Truth is the result of a rigorous set of examinations.
	It is not the result of random ravings.
	And don't get me wrong, there are interesting coincidences, and we get these little goosebumps.
	I get other interesting coincidences, right?
	And those interesting coincidences give us goosebumps because we're all about cause and effect and we're all about efficiency.
	And if there's a way to understand Japanese without taking five years full time to study it, that would be kind of cool.
	We all want shortcuts, right?
	Maybe instead of going to therapy or learning about my history, or I'll just pray to God.
	We all want shortcuts.
	And I understand.
	I mean, shortcuts are good if they're valid.
	They're not good.
	I mean, I have a shortcut called recording this rather than going to everyone's house.
	So then the question is, why does it bother people?
	I mean, I'm not speaking to the guy who wrote the letter, and I appreciate the letter other than the minor passive aggression, whatever, it doesn't really matter.
	But the question is, why does it bother people?
	I mean, I think I've made the case as clear as I possibly can.
	In the same way that you don't say a doctor was a terrible doctor in the 15th century because he didn't prescribe antibiotics.
	No, they weren't a thing.
	They didn't exist.
	It's not a bad doctor because he didn't prescribe that which didn't exist.
	And you're not right if you happen to say things that happen to coincide later with what is true.
	The truthness does not go back in time and attach itself any more than the haikuness goes back to my random scribblings.
	The haikuness, the knowledge, the truth, is in the comprehension, not in the statements.
	Just as knowledge is not copying things.
	And that's why we punish plagiarists and we punish cheaters.
	So why does it bother people?
	Well, the reason it bothers people is, and you know, I see this, of course, I'm back on mainstream social media with X since June or July or something.
	So it's now the 8th of November, 9:35 a.m.
	So why does it mother people?
	Because it excludes people from being taken seriously.
	And again, I'm not talking about Bob.
	I don't know what his particular motivations are.
	And I appreciate him being honest about the annoyance and the irritation.
	So, for example, there are people on X raging and railing about Elon Musk is being given a billion-dollar payout.
	And it's like, no, he's not.
	No, he's not.
	He's not.
	This is people who don't understand business.
	They don't understand economics.
	They don't understand options and share prices and all of that.
	The real fact of the matter is Elon Musk has taken $0 in pay since he joined Tesla.
	And in order for his stocks, the granted stocks to go up a trillion dollars, he has to create $10 trillion worth of value, which is like what, half the GDP of the entire United States.
	Like he has to create $10 trillion worth of value.
	And then he could sell a trillion dollars worth of stocks.
	And to sell a trillion dollars worth of stocks, he's got to pay $280,038,000, sorry, $238 million worth of taxes.
	So nobody's giving him, nobody's just giving him a trillion dollars.
	So if we were to have this rigorous standard to say, I am not going to listen to pronouncements, I'm going to look for reproducible expertise, right?
	I'm going to look for reproducible expertise.
	I'm going to look for deep knowledge.
	I'm going to look for deep studying.
	I'm going to look for deep learning.
	In the same way that if you're going to hire someone to translate from Japanese to English, you're going to interview people, look for their history and experience, and give them a test to make sure they know how to translate from Japanese to English.
	You wouldn't take some illiterate person and just say, you know, just do your best.
	Because we would recognize that there's no reproducible knowledge.
	The only way they could possibly get anything right is once in a billion years through random accident.
	So we don't hire them.
	Like, we don't live this way.
	Right?
	If you have appendicitis, you don't just give a butter knife to some random person on the street and say, stab me, fix me.
	You go to somebody who's got deep knowledge, experience, expertise, a surgeon, and they fix it, hopefully.
	So if we were to have this standard that says deep reproducible knowledge is required for truth and validity, what would that do to the majority of people who mouth off and think they're so smart in the world on the internet?
	The braggarts, the noisemakers, the sophists, the people who say, oh, so what are you saying to me that Elon Musk is worth 12 billion nurses?
	Just sophists, right?
	It's like, okay, well, what do you understand about corporate compensation?
	What do you understand about running, you know, what's it, five of some of the most successful businesses on the planet?
	What do you understand about options?
	Dividends.
	What do you understand about someone who creates $10 trillion worth of economic value?
	How much that secures people savings, retirements?
	How much that creates jobs, raising the wages of everyone, even those people who aren't hired, because people who are hired are taken out of the work pool.
	So other people's wages go up a little, or a lot, I guess, in this case.
	So you would ask someone, how do you know?
	What do you know?
	Tell me your experience.
	Show me your resume.
	Show me why.
	I should take you seriously.
	Show me why.
	But it could be accidentally right.
	Nope.
	No.
	If it's accidental, it's not right.
	It's not true.
	It's not valid.
	If someone saw a couple of episodes of Dr. House and miraculously performed a tracheotomy on somebody who was, you needed one on an airplane or something, right?
	We would not call them a doctor.
	We would say they were damn lucky, but we would not call them a doctor.
	No, no, but doctors perform successful tracheotomies.
	This guy performed a successful tracheotomy, therefore he's a doctor.
	Nope.
	It's just blind shots.
	Well, smart people understand that the earth goes around the sun, therefore anyone who ever said the earth goes around the sun is a smart person.
	Nope.
	They could be hallucinating.
	It could be in a fever dream.
	Psychotics say things all the time.
	If you've ever been around a psychotic, they say random word salads all the time.
	And looking for the meaning, as if there is meaning, is false.
	And it's like looking for the haiku-ness or the Japaneseness in my random scribblings.
	It does not exist.
	It does not exist.
	There's no truth in random statements.
	And if you genuinely believe that there is truth in random statements, or truth that can be achieved without any comprehension or understanding, then you should be perfectly comfortable having a man who cheated his entire way through medical school as your doctor.
	But you wouldn't.
	You wouldn't, right?
	You wouldn't.
	Even though he will occasionally get things right, he's probably going to be pretty bad at things as a whole.
	I mean, a blindfolded man could theoretically fly a plane for a while, could even land it.
	Again, the odds of it are tiny, but would you hire a blind man to be your pilot?
	Nope.
	Because he's not a pilot.
	Even if he accidentally lands a plane successfully, he's not a pilot.
	Well, you know, pilots can land planes successfully.
	Therefore, anybody who lands a plane successfully is a pilot.
	For some reason, I always remember there was a Laverne and Shirley from many years ago where they end up flying a plane, and she flicks it, flips a button randomly, and she says, What happened?
	He says, Oh, you just dumped half your fuel, something like that.
	No, it's not a pilot.
	Maybe that's why I remember in preparation for this conversation.
	So, nope, no, there's no truth value.
	There's no truth in the statements of random people, because the only reason you know it's true, you know it's true, or that it coincides with the truth, is because somebody's proven it later, and you don't get to throw it backwards in time.
	Somebody can look at my scribbling and say, Oh, that looks like a haiku.
	But I did not write a haiku, I just randomly scribbled.
	So, I hope that helps, and I'm certainly happy to continue the conversation more.
	But this is, I mean, I'm doing this on X all the time.
	You know, people have the most wild pronouncements, and they're wildly wrong.
	And I ask them, what's the methodology?
	What's the proof?
	You don't understand this, you don't understand that.
	And if you have become a deep expert in something, like I'm really good at philosophy, after 44 years and a real trial by fire, trials by fires, plural, plural, people come in and talk about philosophy, and they don't know what they're talking about.
	They literally will say, you're a philosophy.
	It's a lot of manipulation, a lot of passive aggression, and they don't want to do the work.
	They want to have their opinions, and they don't want to have a rigorous methodology by which to validate those opinions, because it's much more fun and much easier to have opinions than to know the truth, which is why people get kind of riled up when I say the truth is a result of a rigorous methodology that's pretty difficult, at least it is now, right?
	Because we're swimming against the tide or swimming against the current.
	So, when I say there is no such thing as accidental truth, people get annoyed because they have to let go of their opinions and start reasoning from first principles.
	And that's going to threaten their relationships.
	And people want the best of both worlds, right?
	They want relationships based on lies, and they want to believe those lies are true.
	And they also want to believe that they know the truth.
	And people don't know the truth.
	They don't, as a whole.
	They don't know the truth.
	But they don't want to admit that to themselves.
	So then they say, truth could be random because my opinions are random.
	And I'm just going to have a bunch of opinions.
	And if they turn out to be true, I'm right.
	Nope.
	You're not right.
	You're not right.
	It's just a coincidence.
	All right.
	Freedomane.com slash donate.
	If you'd like to help out the show, I'd really appreciate that.
	Have yourselves.
	A lovely, delightful, beautiful, wonderful day.
	I'll talk to you soon.

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