Expands on "truth" (or the lack thereof) as a way identifying with a social group, especially when that "belief" has no cost -- "believing" in q-anon or that or that covid vaccines introduce nano-bots into your bloods doesn't affect your daily. Also includes a history of call-outs and canceling, and provies suggestions for supporting free speech, particularly at universities. Overall, an argument for the shared truth web that science and civilization depend on. ( )

This is an excellent work defending the search for truth, via mutual criticism, as ideally used in all academic disciplines, along with journalism, and, for some people some of the time, daily life. The idea is that human beings all have blind spots, biases, etc., but we can get closer to truth by getting input from as many others as possible - the more diverse the better - as their biases and blind spots may differ. Hence we have the scientific method, ideally proceeding via peer review, replication, and the whole apparatus many of us learned about in school. But we also have the critical methods of history, astronomy, and many other fields which lack the ability to perform controlled experiments.

The book offers an extended analogy to the way a good democratic political system is designed to work. Ideally no one group can dominate, and there's a never-ending tug-of-war between numerous interests, generally winding up with policies somewhere in between what each extreme would like - and rarely static, as the balance of interests change, or deals are made between them. Hence the title.

It also devotes long chapters to two currently prominent ways that this search for truth is being derailed, complete with many current examples. On the one hand, you have the spewing out and amplification of convenient rubbish, with no concern for truth - whether for lolz, political advantage, or to destabilize a foreign power. On the other hand, you have the requirement that all communication be 100% unoffensive to any possible complainant - or at least any complainant deemed credible by Twitter mobs, university bureaucracy, or groups of eager de-platformers. (Yes, I've bent over backwards not to use the usual labels for these behaviours, as those tend to trigger knee-jerk reactions.)

Perhaps unusually, this author retains epistemic humility, at least in writing. The methods he describes take time to work - sometimes generations. We don't know now what faux truths all the best members of the truth seeking communities all agree upon, so certain that they neglect to consider any criticism they encounter. etc. etc. Like democracy, these methods are presented as better than any alternatives which have been tried, rather than as perfect.

I liked the book so much that I really really wanted to improve it, by talking to the author about what appear to me to be some of his blind spots. Sadly, I imagine that my input would be filtered out, because on the one hand, most of the responses he receives are probably from crackpots, and on the other hand, it would be trivially easy to pattern match my prime concerns with those of more articulate members of one of the groups of trouble maker. (My point would be that these methods may not in fact be best for people in certain situations, who most likely turn up disproportionately represented in one of these groups. The 'constitution of knowledge' needs to adapt to handle what I see as their quite legitimate complaints - or adopt other methods, such as censorship, to shut them up while thereby simultaneously undermining their own claimed goals.) ( )