How do you decide when the whole truth stays out of reach?

I work with the subjective truth and say out loud that it is subjective. What sits inside me keeps working even when the facts lie elsewhere, so I treat that first. The question about the objective version stays open beside it, and I keep asking it without waiting for the answer. In November 2019 I took this apart in three videos within two weeks. The occasion was banal and unsolvable at once. Two people tell the same story differently, both of them honest, and the version that holds cannot be had, because nobody sits down together. Back then I badly wanted to give objective truth the higher value, because I was trying to think scientifically. The video in which I meant to present all four only gets to the first one. The battery was nearly empty, ten per cent, and then the recording breaks off. What survives is the part that carries most: the crossing from my reality to yours.

Four kinds of truth

The video in which I meant to present all four only gets to the first one. The battery was nearly empty, ten per cent, and then the recording breaks off. What survives is the part that carries most: the crossing from my reality to yours.

What you did I interpreted as this. Maybe you meant something else.

That one sentence builds the bridge. It claims nothing about the other person and still puts on the table what arrived on my side. After that I can ask what really happened over there, and we talk about two realities instead of about blame. It is the order Stephen Covey describes as seeking first to understand and then to be understood.

  • Subjective truth: what is certainly true for me. It steers my behaviour even when it is wrong.
  • Objective truth: what holds independently of me. The goal of all science, and rarely available in finished form.
  • Relativistic truth: what holds only in relation to a reference point. Move the point and the sentence tips over.
  • Absolute truth: what holds without any condition. The least can be said about it and the most argued.

The schoolyard

The example in the video is as old as school. A few people are laughing behind you. You are certain they are laughing at you, and a whole complex grows around that certainty over years. Objectively they may have laughed about something that had nothing to do with you. Even if you get the proof, it changes little, because it does not reach the place where the thing sits.

You have to work with your subjective truth even though it may not have happened factually.

Why your own version sounds so convincing has a name. In konfabulation the head invents a reason for your own behaviour and afterwards takes it for the real one. That is why looking inward alone is a weak tool, as Why is looking inward not enough to know yourself? shows. And that is why I treat world-modeling as work: the picture in your head is never the world, and the only way is to sharpen it piece by piece. The whole book on that lies open at World Modeling.

The place where it gets dangerous

Two weeks earlier I had said the same thing once already, in a long recording about money and goals. There I recommend building beliefs that serve you, and in the same breath I say that I do not trust myself with it. The case behind it is well documented: whoever sees themselves as attractive behaves differently, and other people react to that. So the belief is useful. That does not make it true.

The same video holds the counterargument I have not shaken off since. It came from my family and runs like this: whoever builds truths that serve them may be hiding from a pain they have not resolved. I left it standing back then without smoothing it over, and I leave it standing today. The two sentences win on different days.

What I do today

The ground under that is first-principles. I ask what is certainly true and what follows from it, instead of adopting what everyone says. With a subjective truth the certain part is often small and still load-bearing. It is certain that I experienced it this way. It is equally certain that I can be wrong about it. Those two sentences are enough to act on.

For groups the same holds one level up. A group does not get closer to the matter because everyone thinks harder at the same time, but through the order in which people speak. That stands in Does thinking harder make a group smarter? And with machines it is the hardest version of the same question: a model that only reassures delivers a comfortable subjective truth. How you get it out of that stands in Do you have to teach an AI to tell uncomfortable truths?

  • I say which level I am speaking on. What I feel, or what I can evidence.
  • I ask the other side for their version before I defend mine.
  • Useful beliefs I treat as a working assumption with an expiry date.
  • I keep looking for the objective version, even when I cannot get it today.
  • Once a year I let a red-team go at my favourite assumptions.

This note keeps growing

2026-09-03: Planted from three videos of November 2019.

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