Socrates Was Right: We Need Friends To Find The Truth

A Group Truth-Seeking Strategy 2,400 Years In The Making — a Guest Post by Andrew Perlot

Publishing note: while I’m working on part 2 of the Psychiatric Evaluation for Non-Psychiatrists, which is due out by end of weekend, please enjoy the following guest post.

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The following is a guest post written by Andrew Perlot.

Andrew stumbled on Meditations at age sixteen, and Marcus Aurelius and Socrates took up residence in the back of his brain soon after. He’s a former journalist interested in ancient history, philosophy, and partner acrobatics.

You can follow him at his Substack, Socratic State of Mind

Socrates can come off like a masochist.

“No man is wiser than Socrates,” the Oracle of Delphi is supposed to have proclaimed, but the Athenian philosopher didn’t think much of his own ideas. He remained committed to truth-seeking through conversation, an often frustrating endeavor that begs the question: why did he put himself through it? 

If he was wisest, why not explore the truth in the comfort of his own mind?

Plato and Xenophon left us dialogues full of Socrates colliding with sometimes hostile, sometimes deluded, sometimes egotistical interlocutors of all stripes. Many had reputations for wisdom and accomplishment. Some weren’t pleased when Socrates laid their ignorance bare with a few insightful questions.  

But there’s a friendly, effective, and considerably less contentious form of collective wisdom-seeking that Xenophon and Plato show us, perhaps best conveyed by their “Symposium” dialogues. In them, we see a group of friends gather for drinks while collectively muddling their way toward the truth on a particular topic. 

Ancient philosophers relied on this group truth-seeking for good reason. 

Individuals Are Foolish

Our species is called “Homo sapiens”, or “wise person,” but we’re equipped with such a vast suite of cognitive bugs that this sometimes seems like a jest. 

Over 150 “cognitive biases,” have been identified. You’ve probably heard of
“confirmation bias,” which leads us to latch on to facts that confirm our belief while ignoring or discounting anything contrary. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. 

Cognitive biases cause doctors to make medical mistakes that cost lives, cause engineers to build shoddy planes and design inadequate industrial equipment. It causes crime witnesses to change their memories when presented with more information. Cognitive bias costs investors billions and contributed to the 2008 stock market crash because investors resisted signals that didn’t confirm their beliefs. 

In short, our cognitive biases are disastrous and we’re not great at getting past them. At least not individually. 

The Power of Collective Truth Seeking:

The echo chamber of our own heads is seductive. The stories we tell ourselves there seem to make sense, but logic that passes muster in the mind often falls apart when exposed to the light of external critique.

Modern laymen and experts underestimate the ability of argument and discussion to ferret out the truth. Yet a growing body of evidence suggests groups are better at it than individuals.  

Groups Are More Logical:

In one study, only 9% of individuals given a challenging logic problem arrived at the correct response. However, 75% of five-member teams found the correct answer. 

“The superior performance of the groups was due to collaborative reasoning rather than to imitation or peer pressure,” the researchers concluded. “Groups typically co-constructed a structure of arguments qualitatively more sophisticated than that generated by most individuals.”

It's tempting to think that brilliant group members did the heavy lifting while free riders benefited. But study after study shows there’s a synergistic effect in group truth-seeking. For example in this study, the average team performed significantly better than the best-performing individuals.

Group Truth Seeking Has Several Benefits: 

• While we’re often blind to our own cognitive biases, humans are pretty good at spotting the biases of others, and can point them out.

• Individual doctors asked to diagnose cases were right 62.5% of the time, but groups of nine individual physicians were correct 85.6% of the time. 

• Regardless of how confident a person is, if their argument is logical and true, they’re usually able to convince others in their groups of the rightness of their argument.

• Less capable and motivated individuals become more motivated and active in small constructive groups, leading to further synergy. 

• When asked to detect both white lies and big lies, groups did far better than individuals:

“This group advantage does not come through the statistical aggregation of individual opinions (a “wisdom-of-crowds” effect), but instead through the process of group discussion. Groups were not simply maximizing the small amounts of accuracy contained among individual members but were instead creating a unique type of accuracy altogether.”

Strong Groups Produce Strong Individuals

The advantage of group truth-seeking doesn’t end when the task is done. The expanded perspectives individuals experience in groups leak into their personal decision-making. 

“...we observe significant knowledge transfers from team decision making to subsequent individual performances that take place up to five weeks later, indicating that exposure to team decision making has strong positive spillovers on the quality of individual decisions,” one group of researchers noted.

The Myth Of The Lone Wise Man

We laud the lone genius who retreats into himself to think great thoughts. Perhaps this is how we imagine Socrates (who did meditate in solitude), Marcus Aurelius, or Plato. But ancient Western philosophy was usually a team endeavor.

Philosophers usually belonged to schools of like-minded thinkers that constantly debated rival schools. Synergy resulted, and cognitive blind spots became glaringly obvious and had to be addressed. 

Somehow, we’ve strayed from this ideal. 

Physicist Richard Feynman wrote about the isolationist thinking tendency he observed in the 1950s and 1960s, and concluded that minds wasted away in solitude. In his book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he wrote:  

“I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever,” Feynman wrote in “These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get an idea for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come…So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never.”

Feynman recognized the power of other people to bring human thinking to the next level. The act of teaching — and having questions asked of you — forces you to know the material more thoroughly than you otherwise would. 

He suggested that if you want to master a subject, you must be able to simplify it enough to teach it to a sixth grader. If you can’t, you don’t really know it. 

Teachers aren’t the only beneficiaries. Merely imagining your argument will have to pass muster with group of peers or young students will improve your clarity.

The same goes for writing. Nebulous thinking won’t fly if spilled on the page. We’re forced to develop and concretize our arguments until they’ll hold up in reader’s eyes. 

Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve. The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach.

—Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, VII)

An Imaginary Socratic Friend Group Has Power Too

A friendly group of truth seekers might be our best bet for seeing clearly. But they’re not always readily at hand. 

Luckily, some of antiquity’s most popular philosophical exercises attempted to bring in the expanded perspective of wise friends when none were around. 

The ancient journaling technique of illeism, which many people encounter when they see Marcus Aurelius using it in Meditations, interjects an objective outsider’s perspective into our thinking. Researchers have found the technique improves introspection and reasoning. 

Recent research suggests that conspiracy beliefs are correctable when we have a patient and knowledgeable interlocutor. But that role requires time and an interest in studying the minutiae of conspiracy theories, which is a big ask.

A philosophical AI, which has infinite patience and a store of factual information no human can match, might just fill that friend gap, though I think we need way more research to be certain about this. 

Finally, many of the ancient philosophical exercises Pierre Hadot outlines in Philosophy as a Way of Life seem to have, at their heart, the goal of interjecting expanded perspective — exactly what we hope our friends might bring to the table. 

Thinking Better Together: 

Whether through actual friend groups like those meeting in Socrates’s symposiums, or artificial ones found in your journal or mind, we’re better off through the give and take of dialogue.

Which brings up the possibility that our species is slightly misnamed. We may not be “homo sapiens,” — the singular — at all. But the plural, “homines sapientes,” seems like a perfect fit.