Does Truth Matter?

How much truth matters is not constant, it depends on your goal. You can see this connection when you compare consumers and producers. Typically a consumer wants to buy a product that meets her requirements: something that does the job, is well designed, at the right price, and is reliable. To make her purchasing choice, she needs good information about the product. The truth of her other beliefs do not matter when it comes to buying a product. In essence, consumers are free to believe whatever they want to. The same does not hold for producers. When a producer designs and makes a product, first and foremost, she wants to create something that will sell. She needs the creative ideas that go into her product’s design and manufacture to work and a false idea risks breaking the product’s functioning.

One example that demonstrates this relationship is the Global Positioning System (GPS) in your car or on your smartphone. The GPS network needs accurate clocks. If the time they show drifts apart, then the position calculations quickly become less accurate. It is easy to appreciate the problem. Imagine you are standing in front of two longcase clocks; you stop the pendulums and set them swinging again so that they are synchronized. It will not take long before you notice the swing of the pendulums is drifting apart. An accurate 300-year-old pendulum clock will gain or lose less than one minute a week, but this still means that it will diverge from standard time by up to eight seconds a day. Fortunately, timekeeping has improved over the last 300 years. The GPS network uses atomic clocks, which are vastly more accurate. If you replaced the pendulum clocks with two synchronized atomic clocks, you would have to wait something like 100 million years before either clock had drifted even one second from standard time. This precision is more than accurate enough to enable the GPS network to calculate your position to within four meters.

So far, everything is straightforward. However, this is where things start to get a little weird. Most people have an intuitive idea that time is a universal constant. We have all experienced days when time has dragged and other days when it has flown. But we know the clock ticks at the same rate irrespective of how we are feeling that day. We move from the past to the future at a fixed pace. It does not matter where you are or what you are doing. Einstein challenged this intuition. He argued that time was not the same for everyone or constant: it was affected by speed and gravity. Einstein made two predictions. In the first, he said that if one of two synchronized atomic clocks accelerated away from the other, it would run slower. Einstein's second prediction was that gravity affected time. He said that if you had one clock in zero gravity and another on the surface of a planet, then the clock on the planet would run slower.

Einstein's theories sound a little crazy. It is easy for most people to dismiss them because they contradict our intuitive concept of time. However, it is not so easy to dismiss Einstein if you are designing a satellite navigation system. To succeed, you need to create a system that is accurate to within four meters. Anything more than this and the system will be unusable, and people will not buy it. If you think Einstein was wrong, you will design a navigation system based on the assumption the satellite and earth clocks will remain synchronized. However, NASA says your belief is mistaken, "the satellites' clocks [will] tick faster by about 38 microseconds each day." Thirty-eight microseconds does not sound like a big deal, but it is for a GPS network. Assuming the clocks are synchronized at the start of the day, then there is no problem. The position calculation is accurate to within four meters. However, as the day proceeds, time on the clocks drifts apart, and the size of the problem becomes apparent. By the end of a day, the satellite navigation system can only tell you where you are to within eleven kilometers. Worst still, day by day, the accuracy continues to decrease. If you were designing a car GPS, NASA calculated that "position errors would accumulate so quickly that the system would be useless for navigation in a matter of minutes." Thus, you and your design team have a problem. To create a usable system, you need to find a solution. This need pushes you to consider Einstein's theories. They tell you that the time on the clocks will drift apart and allow you to calculate by how much. Now you can add a clock drift correction to your positioning calculations. This correction works, and the world's satellite navigation systems use it.

Switch from the producer to the consumer, and things look different. The consumer is not interested in all the ideas used to create the GPS. His focus is the finished product and whether it does what he wants. He probably never thought about his beliefs about time when he bought the GPS. He can continue to believe that Einstein’s theories are rubbish because there are no consequences. You can see the psychological push toward truth in action if one change is made to the GPS. Imagine the design team wanted to give the consumer more choice. They put a button on the GPS to let the customer switch time correction on or off. Now the consumer has two options and two consequences. If he believes Einstein's theories are rubbish, then all he has to do is switch time correction off. The problem with doing this is what happens. His GPS quickly becomes useless. Fortunately, he can fix the problem by switching on time correction. But this leaves him with a psychological problem. What he believed should work did not and vice versa. How does he explain this contradiction to himself? Of course, there are many ways he can rationalize away what happened. For example, he could claim the button was mislabeled. However, most people in this type of situation start to feel less confident. You might still want to reject Einstein's theories, but now your desire for a usable GPS pushes you to accept them.

In our everyday lives, most people are both producers and consumers. We go to work and make goods or services. We get paid and spend our money as consumers. As a result, almost everyone experiences both the producer's nudge towards truth and the consumer's freedom.

What do you think? Does truth matter more to producers than consumers?