That was about you, not them
from the book “Useful Not True”:
All of the chapters until now have been about other people. It’s so easy to see their faults. So full of nonsense, thinking they’re so right, with their weird beliefs. It’s much harder to find fault in yourself.
Only after I see mistakes in others do I realize that I make those same mistakes. That’s why I put the chapters in this order. First I pointed at other people, so you could clearly see their faulty thinking. Now let’s remember that you make those same mistakes.
Almost nothing you say is true.
You focus on one angle of the whole picture.
Your brain makes up explanations.
Your perspective feels like a fact.
Your certain future is just a prediction.
Your thoughts are theories, open for improvement.
Consider what incentives made your beliefs useful.
This book, start to finish, is entirely about you. Maybe you’re full of nonsense, thinking you’re so right, thinking your beliefs are actually true.
Derek, I've followed your work for years and find much to admire. But the book “Useful not True” gives me pause, and I think the reason is structural. Your entire framework operates on propositions — statements that can be reframed, inverted, tested for usefulness. That's a powerful tool inside language, but it heory juxtaposed and played around with. Lived visual experience doesn't arrive as a proposition and can't be corrected by substituting a better sentence. For those of us whose work and thinking are grounded in the non-verbal, or who live inside cultures like Japan where you are expected to "read the air" — a culture that subtly suggests rather than says — your epistemology feels like a map drawn entirely from the inside of a library. The territory it describes is without blood, and only a fraction of the territory that exists. It's the wisdom of somebody who lives almost entirely inside language — which means it's wisdom with a significant blind spot built into its foundation.
And from that perspective, "choose the belief that is useful to you" becomes hard to defend: useful to whom, and for what?