How do you decide what to believe?

You have to believe something. Once you believed a set of ideas because people told you they were true... the ideas we describe with the metaphor "Blue pill". Now, presumably you believe other things. And some of these other things we describe as "Red pill".

But what's the difference?

The "red and blue pills" metaphor was selected to refer to the idea of seeing that which is really there, rather than that just what other people tell you. But how do you know what's really there? How do you know whether you should invest your time and energy in a worldview that someone tries to convince you of?

Understanding the best way to make these kinds of decisions goes back to the metaphor of the red pill...

The red pill metaphor was selected to refer to the idea of seeing that which is really there.

The key word here is "seeing". We get to truth by observation. The way that someone made you swallow a blue pill the first place was that they told you something. Sure, they made a convincing argument, but the world is full of convincing arguments for bullshit. Some people are very skilled at constructing convincing arguments... that skill doesn't alter reality.

The dictionary defines the word "empirical" as "derived from or guided by experience or experiment".

TRP was designed, from the very outset, to be empirical.

But if TRP is empirical, what isn't? What is the anti-empirical stance? And how is it related to the blue pill?

The Blue Pill is our metaphor for anti-empiricism... for the idea that empirical observation is NOT necessary for certainty. The blue pill is the untested stuff that people believe because everyone else does, or because an expert said it, or because somebody made a really convincing and logical-sounding argument.

This is why we must be careful of putting too much faith in intellectuals. An intellectual is someone whose work product is ideas. He comes up with an idea, makes some sound arguments for it, convinces others, and his job is done. It isn't his job to test or prove, merely to persuade. He writes books, tours the lecture circuit, perhaps appears on TV, and lots of people say breathless things about how smart he is.

Is there a problem with this? No. Intellectualism is NOT anti-empiricism. The ideas of an intellectual, if they are testable at all, can be subjected to empirical verification.

The problem lies in being convinced by intellectuals. In losing sight of the intellectual's true role: to start conversations, not to finish them. This problem can exist from both sides: in those who falsely revere intellectuals as producers of truth, and in those intellectuals who demand to be believed upon the strength of their words alone.

I recommend treating intellectuals and their work according to their role... as a source of ideas to try, not as a fountain of truth. And yes, of course this includes me... because the words you are reading now are yet another intellectual idea, without accompanying proof. To truly understand what I am on about, here, would be subject the ideas in this very article to the same suspicion that the article recommends, if that doesn't make your brain hurt thinking about it too hard.

You got blue pilled by listening to rhetoric, persuasion, and popular opinion. Get red pilled by being a skeptical bastard.

Tip Whisper for their post.