Thank you so much for your critique! In a mild way, it was devastating to take in, but I really needed to hear it. You mentioned Nietzsche’s “brutal question” in your comment—reason versus ego. I totally struggle with that. Truth units is intended as “the pure light of reason” as you put it. But I can’t escape the constant fear it’s one massive ego trip. Below, I will go on to defend the “reason” aspect. I hope for more criticism. I’m very open to discovering “and your father [me] is still perfecting ways of making sealing wax” (“19th Nervous Breakdown” Rolling Stones).

I think most of the problem is with my ability to communicate. I was in marketing roughly 1980-2000. An old marketing/advertising saying goes “Is it dessert topping, or is it floor wax?” When colleagues had trouble with positioning, branding, or messaging a product, we’d quote that saying to say “you better figure that out, because the market can’t tell which it is.” So is truth units dessert topping or floor wax?

You’re 100% right – I’m trying to merge abstract theoretical thinking with practical procedural thinking. As absurd and/or hopeless as that is, I think that is precisely what is needed in this world. I was friends in high school with Steve Jobs (way in advance of his idea of a personal computer) and he was an inspiration then to invent new concepts (we enjoyed introducing each other—mostly him introducing me—to fascinating new “concepts” we were each discovering).

And agreed, truth units definitely veers into individual and social psychology. I worked for a few years with a professor emeritus of psychiatry at an ivy-league-level university. I was blown away by and inspired by his view of how the human mind works over the course of life.

In digesting your critique, the thought arose that truth units is meant as an underlying organizational principle. It’s meant as a foundation for philosophy and inter-personal / intra-social communication. As such, it doesn’t replace, fit in, or participate in any of those things. Thinking of Thomas Kuhn, it’s more of a new paradigm for those other things.

To get a bit more rhetorical or hyperbolic, I think most people don’t think enough about what truth itself is. It’s the foundation of our cognition, but we don’t examine it—things are just true or they aren’t. But what does it mean when we make that distinction? We know what it means in different situations, of course. But I don’t think most people think about what it means in all situations. They don’t look for the common denominator of *all* judgments of truth, which I think is ultimately crucial to understanding any *one* truth.

In terms of its apparent scale, it’s like one missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle. In terms of its impact, it’s like building a house without doing a soils analysis—it might not be necessary, and it might have no bearing on the outcome, but don’t be surprised if cracks keep appearing in your floors. (In San Francisco in the 1989 quake, the houses that were damaged or totaled were remarkably concentrated in the Marina District, which was built on landfill.)

This is just an intuition or hypothesis, but the current amount of information and communication is overwhelming civilization’s ability to process it. Truth units proposes a filter for—a retrenchment of—what we—individually and collectively—recognize as information.