The Value of Veridical Information

Introduction I’d like to share information that is worth sharing. So I ask the question—what is valuable information?With the ubiquity of search engines and Wikipedia, much factual information can be found very quickly. However, in this era it is easy, even encouraged, to create “fake” information, including text, audio, video, and any other type of media that can be consumed by the use of computational devices. It is increasingly important that we can routinely discern whether the information we are seeing or writing is of any value.To this end, I put forward a specific theory. It may be wrong or incomplete, but I find it is usually worthwhile to specifically test my ideas, by trying something that I at least do not know is wrong.Valuable information could be any of:true,valuable, regardless of its truth,both true and valuable,useful, regardless of value and truth,useful and true,useful, true and valuable,valuable, regardless of both truth and usefulness.We will start with as a background prop the paper Objects of Consciousness, which says that evolution tunes perceptions toward fitness, rather than truth. Fitness being better expressed as a complete absence of unfitness, ie., smoothness of niche, round-peg round-hole and square-peg square-hole. Fitness is not universal, but a relation of an object or person and its environment together.We have good reason to believe that the process of evolution does indeed solely tune perception for fitness, because it does so with everything else. Then for our purposes, if you want fitting and valuable and true and useful perceptions, there is only one possibility:You must apply the Principle of Multiple Explanations, ex Epicurus, c. 300 BC, and strictly consider all and only the hypotheses not yet known to be incompatible with evidence, discarding with abandon those that do not, and then you may apply importance sampling to choose the order in which you consider their truth, value, or usefulness (or any other property or combina