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PRETTY_TRUE

                                                    June 6, 2004

    "Pretty true"?

    I have no idea
    what was supposed      Did I just think it
    to go here.            was a good title?         (A pretty one?)


We might work over the infamous
Yeats quotation, from
"Ode on a Grecian Urn":

      When old age shall this generation waste,
      Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
      Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
      "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
      Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

   It's difficult to take
   an equation between
   Truth and Beauty                  STRANGE_EQUATIONS
   seriously, without
   using unusual (radical?)
   definitions.

   DEFINITION_GAME              Can you do
                                anything
                                with it?


We know about
ugly truth.
                                     GENTLER
Certainly, there are truths
that people want to ignore.

                   It's a common technique
                   of persuasive rhetoric
                   to point out that you
                   are making a case for            UTOPIA
                   something ugly.

                   That makes
                   it more        You get points for
                   believable.    pragmatic realism.


                                               (Nov 28, 2001)
It's a common syndrome
to presume that bad news is
more plausible than good news           Perhaps not a bad
("too good to be true"),                rule of thumb:
                                        probability/           ENTROPY
   You shouldn't fall into              thermodynamics
   the trap of assuming that
   the negative and the real
   are synonymous.

            Some times things that
            "seem too good to be                    GENTLER
            true" really are true.
                                               SCREWTAPE


   Theoretical physicists
   like to talk about
   "elegant" theories,
   and their perception
   that for them beauty            This causes a lot
   and truth are                   of confusion.
   equivalent.
                                                OBJECT
   ELEGANCE


                                   While philosophers have tried
                                   very hard to put things like
                                   Truth on a solid footing,
                                   they have run into tangles.

                           Objective Truth can
                           start looking like a
                           delusion of the naive.

                                               A "view from nowhere".
                  However, if you take
                  that seriously, you
                  can totally go off
                  the rails...

   E.g. with the extreme postmodern
   take that it's all just words,
   and no words deserve to be
   privileged over any other; and                             GARDNER
   all of Science is just a
   collection of stories.

Really, (practically?) you need to
assume an ability to know something
about the external world.

   It may not be possible                      TRUTH  OBJECT  SOCIAL_REGISTER
   to know something that's
   absolutely true.

   But you can know something
   that's pretty true.


   As well as you can know                A day without
   what's truly pretty?                   double-meanings
                                          is like a day
                                          without labored
                                          attempts at
                                          witticism.


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