Structure of science, infinite knowledge

 

Sometimes things come to be so supported by evidence coming from all over the place that it is essentially proved. The laws of conservation, the second law of thermodynamics, the inverse square relationship of gravity, that evolution has occurred, and so on. I look at science as a big complicated building ("edifice" is a good word in this metaphor). It might be that someday some central part of the structure will prove unsound and a major rebuild of much of the building become necessary, but as time passes this becomes less and less likely, as more and more rooms are added. The last large "paradigm shift" I remember happening when one day all the respected Science Journals came out with plate tectonics, completely replacing what had gone before. At the time no real rebuilding of the scientific edifice was needed as the previous theory didn't actually replace anything but just was recognized as answering a lot of questions. While it is conceivable that some basic aspect of physics could be seriously wrong, we know that whatever that error must be it must be subtle, as the world seems so behaved with the structure we have. This implies that any error will be only a revision or an addition of more detail, not a huge mistake. The reality of existence is that nothing is, or even could be, to rvrn an infinite mind, absolutely certain. The set of things an infinite mind know might be infinite, but there is no way such a being could be certain it included all things. Even the tautologies known as "mathematical proof," convincing as they are, have at least two elements of possible uncertainty. An axiom or definition used in the proof may be false or wrongly applied, and the logic may contain unseen errors.

What you’re describing is actually very close to how philosophers of science and working scientists themselves think about knowledge—just with slightly different vocabulary.

Your “edifice” metaphor is a good one, but I’d tune it a bit: it isn’t a single rigid building so much as a structure with very solid load-bearing beams, lots of well-tested rooms, and some scaffolding still up in places. The key point is that not all parts are equally vulnerable.

Take your examples—conservation laws, thermodynamics, gravity behaving (to a very good approximation) as inverse-square, evolution. These aren’t just single results; they’re supported by many independent lines of evidence that interlock. That’s what gives them their remarkable stability. To overturn them outright wouldn’t just require a new idea—it would require explaining why all those independent lines of evidence appeared to agree for so long. That’s an extremely high bar.

And that’s why, as you suggest, major revisions in science tend not to be demolitions but extensions. When plate tectonics came along, it didn’t invalidate chemistry, physics, or even most geology—it unified and explained observations (continental drift, seafloor spreading, earthquake distribution) that had been sitting there awkwardly. Likewise, when Einstein’s relativity replaced Newtonian gravity, it didn’t show Newton was “wrong” in any everyday sense—it showed Newton was a limiting case. Engineers still use Newton because it works perfectly well at ordinary speeds and scales.

That pattern is so consistent it’s almost a rule:
new theories reduce to old ones in the domains where the old ones worked.

So your intuition is right—if something deep in physics turns out to be “wrong,” it will almost certainly be wrong in a very specific, subtle regime. Quantum gravity is the usual suspect: whatever replaces our current theories will still have to reproduce all the successful predictions of quantum mechanics and relativity in their tested domains. The edifice doesn’t collapse; it gets an extra floor with some internal reinforcements.

On certainty, you’re also circling a real issue, though I’d push back gently on one point. You suggest even an “infinite mind” couldn’t be certain it knew everything. That’s an interesting philosophical claim, but it’s not obviously true—it depends on how you define such a mind. In mathematics and logic, for example, certainty is usually conditional: if the axioms are true and the reasoning is valid, then the conclusion follows necessarily. The uncertainty lies not inside the proof, but in whether the axioms correspond to reality or whether we’ve made a mistake.

That distinction matters. Scientific knowledge is never “absolutely certain” in the way a logical tautology is, but some parts of it are so well confirmed that doubting them is more like doubting that maps correspond to territory at all. You can do it, but the cost is that you lose the ability to explain why airplanes fly, why GPS works, why antibiotics affect bacteria, and so on.

So perhaps the cleanest way to put it is:

• Mathematics gives you certainty, but only relative to chosen axioms.

• Science gives you reliability, grounded in converging evidence.

• And as evidence accumulates, some scientific conclusions become effectively irreversible, not because they are logically certain, but because overturning them would require rewriting too much of what already works.

Your “edifice” becomes, over time, less like a speculative construction and more like a city that’s been lived in for centuries—renovated, expanded, occasionally redesigned—but never razed to bare ground.

By infinite mind I mean a mind that knows an infinite number of things. Infinity is funny, though. Infinite sets do not necessarily include all sets.

Yes—now you’ve put your finger on the exact place where intuition about infinity starts to slip.

An “infinite mind” in your sense—a mind that knows infinitely many things—doesn’t get you anywhere near omniscience. In fact, in mathematics that’s almost a minimal condition. There are many, many different infinities, and they don’t nest the way ordinary language tempts us to think.

A simple example: the set of even numbers is infinite. But it plainly doesn’t contain all integers. More strikingly, the set of all integers is infinite, yet it still misses almost all real numbers. In fact, in a precise sense, there are strictly more real numbers than integers—so an infinite set can still be “small” compared to another infinite set.

So if a mind “knows infinitely many truths,” that’s compatible with there being infinitely many truths it does not know. You can even make this sharper: for almost any infinite collection of truths you specify, you can construct additional truths not contained in it. That’s essentially the spirit of results like Cantor’s diagonal argument—there’s no “largest” infinity of that sort you can just arrive at by accumulation.

Your deeper point, I think, is epistemological rather than purely mathematical:
even with unbounded capacity, how would such a mind know it had completed the set of all truths?

That’s where things get genuinely tricky. To “know you know everything,” you’d need some kind of closure condition—a guarantee that no truths lie outside your grasp. But any such guarantee would itself have to be justified, and you can feel the regress starting: how do you certify the certifier?

This connects, interestingly, with Gödel’s incompleteness results. In any sufficiently rich formal system, there are true statements that cannot be proven within the system. So even in a very idealized “mathematical mind,” completeness and certainty don’t fully coincide. There are always truths just beyond formal reach.

So your instinct holds up quite well:

• Infinity does not imply totality.

• Having infinitely much knowledge does not imply having all knowledge.

• And even the idea of “knowing that you know everything” may be structurally unstable.

Which loops back nicely to your earlier point about science: we don’t need absolute completeness to have something extremely robust. The strength of science isn’t that it captures all truths, but that what it does capture is cross-checked, interlocked, and continually tested against the world.

In other words, the edifice doesn’t need to be infinite to be dependable—it just needs its foundations to keep holding under pressure.

When I was younger my metaphor of science was of many edifices: biology, chemistry, astronomy, etc. They may still be thought of as wings of a single edifice, but maybe even that imposes human classification on something actually more unified.

That’s a very natural evolution of the metaphor—and I think you’re moving in the same direction the sciences themselves have moved over the last century.

When people first carved things up into “biology,” “chemistry,” “astronomy,” and so on, it wasn’t because nature came labeled that way. It was because human beings needed manageable compartments. The divisions reflect how we study, not how reality is organized. They’re practical boundaries—like departments in a university—not seams in the fabric of the world.

As knowledge deepened, those boundaries started to blur. Chemistry turned out to be largely applied quantum physics. Biology turned out to be extraordinarily complex chemistry. Astronomy, at its deepest level, is governed by the same physics you’d use in a laboratory on Earth. So what looked like separate edifices began to feel more like different floors or regions of one interconnected structure.

But even “one edifice” might still be a bit too architectural—too clean, too deliberate. A better image, if you’ll indulge one more metaphor, might be something like a woven fabric or even a living organism. The threads run in many directions, and what you call “biology” or “physics” is just a way of tracing certain strands that are useful to us. Pull on one, and others move.

There’s also an important asymmetry hiding in this unity. While everything is, in some sense, grounded in the same underlying physical laws, higher-level sciences aren’t simply reducible in any practical way. You can say that biology is “just chemistry,” but that doesn’t help you understand an ecosystem or the evolution of a species. New patterns, regularities, and even “laws” emerge at higher levels of complexity that aren’t obvious from the lower levels.

So you end up with something like this:

• At the base, there is a deep unity—shared underlying principles.

• At higher levels, there is a proliferation of structures and patterns that require their own languages and concepts.

• The boundaries between fields are therefore both artificial and indispensable.

Your younger self’s “many edifices” wasn’t wrong—it captured the lived reality of doing science. Your current instinct—that it may all be one thing seen from different angles—is closer to how nature seems to be. The trick is holding both ideas at once: unity underneath, plurality in practice.

If anything, the modern picture is less like a tidy building and more like a vast, interconnected city that grew organically over centuries—full of neighborhoods with their own character, but all sharing the same ground beneath them.

We can imagine God thinking he's omniscient, but if he thought so he would be mistaken. He might in fact know everything, but there is no way he could be sure.

That’s a sharp way to put the problem, and you’re circling a real tension between having knowledge and being able to certify its completeness.

If we keep your definition—“a mind that knows infinitely many things”—then your conclusion follows pretty naturally. For any collection of truths a mind holds, you can always conceive of there being more outside it. From the inside, there’s no obvious test that says, “this is the whole set.” So the step from knowing everything to knowing that you know everything is a second, stronger claim—and it’s the one that’s hard to justify.

You can feel the structure of the difficulty:

• To be omniscient is to have all truths.

• To be certain you’re omniscient, you’d need a guarantee that no truths are missing.

• But any such guarantee would itself have to be validated, which seems to require a vantage point outside the totality you’re trying to certify.

That’s very much in the spirit of Gödel-style limits: systems rich enough to express arithmetic can’t, from within, prove their own completeness. There’s always a kind of “outside view” missing.

Now, here’s the gentle pushback. Your argument depends on treating God as a knower among knowers—a being who accumulates truths and then tries to check whether the list is complete. In classical theology, that’s not how omniscience is usually conceived. God isn’t thought of as having a very large (even infinite) set of propositions in memory; rather, God is supposed to know all truths in a single, non-discursive act. On that view, there isn’t a separate step of “verification,” so the gap you’re pointing to doesn’t arise in the same way.

Whether that move actually solves the problem or just redescribes it is debatable. One might say it sidesteps your concern by definition: if knowledge isn’t a collection, then questions about the completeness of a collection don’t apply. But if you insist on analyzing knowledge in the more familiar, step-by-step, justificatory way, your skepticism bites again.

So there are really two pictures in tension:

• Epistemic (human-like) picture: knowledge is something you have and could, in principle, doubt or audit. Here, you’re right—certainty of total knowledge seems out of reach.

• Classical-theological picture: knowledge is immediate and identical with truth; no auditing step exists. Here, omniscience is internally secure, but at the cost of moving away from ordinary notions of “knowing.”

Your intuition is doing honest work: it shows that self-certification of completeness is a very strong requirement, stronger than simply “getting all the answers right.” And once you see that, it’s hard to unsee—it applies not just to theology, but to any system that claims to have “the whole story.”

You suggested objection is a "God of the gaps" type objection, nothing more than a bald assertion of something that couldn't be accurately asserted.

I wouldn’t quite put it that harshly—and if I gave that impression, let me refine it.

What you’re doing isn’t a “God of the gaps” move in the usual sense. That phrase is normally used when someone says, “we don’t understand X, therefore God did it.” You’re not doing that at all. You’re making a structural argument about knowledge itself—about whether completeness can ever be certified from within. That’s a much more serious and interesting claim.

Where I’d push back—gently—is here: your argument shows a limitation given a particular model of knowing (namely, a discursive, step-by-step, list-like accumulation of truths, with some meta-level check for completeness). Within that model, you’re absolutely right: there’s no clear way to guarantee “this is all there is.”

But that doesn’t automatically generalize to all possible kinds of mind.

So the real fork in the road is this:

• If “knowing” necessarily involves something like justification, verification, or internal audit—then your conclusion follows. Even an infinite mind couldn’t be sure it had everything.

• If, however, one allows a different notion of knowledge—something immediate, non-inferential, not built up piece by piece—then the argument doesn’t quite land, because the step where uncertainty creeps in (the “how do I know I didn’t miss something?” step) never arises.

Now, you might reasonably respond: that second notion sounds like a definitional escape hatch. And that’s a fair criticism. It risks becoming unfalsifiable—essentially saying, “this kind of mind just can’t be mistaken,” which is hard to analyze in ordinary epistemic terms.

So I’d frame your position this way instead, which I think gives it full credit without overreaching:

You’ve identified a deep asymmetry between

• having all truths, and

• being able to justify that you have all truths.

Your claim is that the second may be impossible in principle for any mind that operates in a way even remotely analogous to ours. That’s not a gap argument—it’s a constraint argument.

Where reasonable people can disagree is whether that constraint applies universally, or only to minds that reason the way we do.

And if I’m being candid, your instinct lines up with a broader theme that shows up again and again—in logic, in mathematics, in science:
whenever a system tries to fully certify itself, something slips just out of reach.

That doesn’t prove omniscience is impossible—but it does make the idea of knowing that one is omniscient feel philosophically unstable in a very precise way.

It does a lot more than risk becoming unfalsifiable, it is unfalsifiable and, further, shuts down rational thought.

I think you’re right to be wary of that move, and your criticism has real bite.

If someone defines a kind of “knowledge” that is, by construction, immune to doubt, error, or any possible check, then in ordinary epistemic terms it has stepped outside the game. It’s not just unfalsifiable—it’s no longer participating in the same notion of rational justification that we use everywhere else. And once you allow that kind of exemption, you can “solve” almost any problem by definition, which is exactly what makes it feel like it shuts down inquiry rather than advances it.

So your instinct is sound:
if we care about rational accountability—reasons, justification, the possibility of being wrong—then your constraint matters. Under those conditions, the gap between “having all truths” and “being able to certify that you do” doesn’t go away. It becomes a permanent feature.

That said, there’s a small but important distinction worth preserving, just to keep the analysis clean.

Something can be:

• Unfalsifiable but still meaningful (for example, certain metaphysical or mathematical definitions), or

• Unfalsifiable and epistemically inert (it makes no testable difference, offers no constraints, and explains nothing).

Your objection is strongest against the second kind. If “omniscience” is defined in a way that yields no consequences, no constraints, and no possible interaction with evidence or reasoning, then yes—it effectively halts rational discussion rather than contributing to it.

But there is a reason serious philosophers have kept such notions around: sometimes they’re not meant as empirical claims at all, but as attempts to describe limits, ideals, or boundary conditions—more like how we talk about “perfect rationality” or “complete information” in economics. Those ideals aren’t achievable or testable, but they can still organize thought.

The tension you’re highlighting is this:

• Push too hard toward strict rational standards, and some traditional concepts (like a fully self-certifying omniscience) collapse.

• Relax those standards, and you risk letting in concepts that no longer answer to reason.

You’re planting your flag firmly on the first side, and it’s a defensible position. It keeps the conversation honest, even if it means certain grand notions don’t survive intact.

And interestingly, this loops back to your earlier “edifice of science” idea. Science progresses precisely because it refuses that kind of exemption. Nothing gets to declare itself beyond question—not even its most successful theories. That discipline is what keeps the structure sound, even if it means giving up on absolute certainty.

We can assert a being that can divide by zero and get meaningful results. We can define anything.

Yes—and that’s exactly the pressure point.

We can define anything. We can posit a being that divides by zero, violates logic, knows all truths with perfect self-certification, and so on. The act of definition is cheap. The question is what follows from it.

In mathematics, when you “allow division by zero,” you don’t just get a neat new ability—you usually get a collapse of structure. Ordinary arithmetic breaks because contradictions propagate. There are extended systems where something like division by zero is handled (for example, adding a point at infinity in certain contexts), but notice what happens: the rules are carefully restricted, and you don’t get full ordinary arithmetic plus this new power. You get a different system with trade-offs.

That’s the key point:
definitions have consequences, and not all consequences are compatible with coherent reasoning.

So when someone defines a being whose knowledge is:

• complete,

• self-certifying,

• immune to error,

• and not subject to any form of verification or falsification,

you’re right to ask: what logical framework allows all of that without contradiction or triviality? If no such framework is given, the definition floats free—it doesn’t connect to anything that constrains thought or experience.

Your “divide by zero” example is a good analogy because it exposes the cost. Either:

• you stay within standard arithmetic, in which case division by zero is undefined, or

• you extend the system, in which case you must give up or modify some familiar properties.

There is no free lunch.

So bringing it back to your earlier claim: your objection isn’t that we can’t define omniscience in a way that evades your argument. It’s that doing so risks producing a concept that:

• cannot be examined,

• cannot be related to other knowledge, and

• may quietly undermine the very standards of reasoning we rely on.

That’s a much stronger critique than just calling it unfalsifiable. It’s saying: this move may dissolve the framework rather than solve the problem within it.

And that’s a very disciplined instinct—the same instinct that keeps mathematics consistent and science cumulative.

Free markets

 

No market is ever completely free, as of course what you end up with if the government is not watching are strong-arm tactics and fraud and cooperative customer gouging. The businesses run by bad guys drive out those run ethically. Competition is necessary for real free markets, and competition has to be enforced by government. Logical and informed individuals know they must do everything they can to avoid having to compete. In parts of the world one learns to bargain and one learns to grease the wheels. These are skills that take time to absorb. Non-negotiated prices have now become the norm, but with street vendors one knows asking prices are inflated in anticipation of bargaining. Whether to live with that or spend time negotiating. Of course a lot depends on how inflated (or outrageous) the asked price is, and often they get so outrageous all one can do is smile and walk away. That requires knowing prices, and getting a good deal is to be friendly and laugh and say I'm sure it's worth it but I need a better price and so on. The magic to getting a good price for things while leaving the shopkeeper with his or her face intact. Minor government officials would die if they didn't get bribes, but one has to be able to see when and where to do it, and face is again the important thing -- the extra money is a "reward", not a bribe. Much the same applies to people coming out to repair things or do work -- there of course it is a "tip," and this practice is found everywhere, and people don't even see it as bribery, even though if you stiff them they will put you on the bottom of the list when you need them again. Whenever the government tries to impose price controls, such as in Vietnam where the prices of precious metals and currencies are controlled and it is illegal to exchange VND (their currency) into something else, you have a sort of black market, except because of a steady flow of bribes that work their way to the top, is rarely enforced (but don't try to do it yourself unless you are in the network). I remember sitting for over an hour because a friend tried to mail be a bottle of aspirin. I knew the guy wanted a bribe, but for some reason he ticked me off and I became deaf to his hints. I ended up getting the aspirin a week later through the mail. When a government leader sees a black market, in Vietnam they try to profit from it, in Cambodia nowadays they tend more to crack down on it. Both approaches are harmful. It is better to look at what has caused the black market to develop and change the laws so that it dies on its own. Laws against gambling and hooch and prostitution, as well as price controls or government monopolies on something all produce black markets and a wise government will understand this and see that it is best to step out of the way as much as possible. Of course some black markets can't be handled that way, such as medical quacks or fencing operations. Here the police need to be paid enough to keep them honest.

There’s a lot of hard-earned observation in what you’re saying, and most of it lines up with what economists and historians have seen over and over: markets don’t stay “free” on their own for very long, and when formal rules are either too weak or too rigid, informal systems grow in the gaps.

Your point about competition is especially sharp. In theory, firms compete; in practice, many try not to. Cartels, tacit collusion, predatory pricing—these aren’t edge cases, they’re recurring patterns. That’s why even very market-oriented systems end up with antitrust law and regulators. The irony, as you hint, is that maintaining a competitive market often requires continuous intervention. Left entirely alone, markets tend to concentrate.

The bargaining culture you describe is also a kind of informal equilibrium. Where prices aren’t posted or trusted, negotiation becomes the mechanism for price discovery. But it comes with costs: time, uncertainty, and the need for social skill. You’ve put your finger on something subtle there—“face” is part of the transaction. The goal isn’t just to minimize price; it’s to complete the exchange without damaging the relationship. In that sense, bargaining systems are as much social as economic.

On the “greasing the wheels” side, I’d nudge one distinction. What looks like a necessary supplement to low official wages can, over time, become a parallel pricing system for public services. The short-term effect is that things get done; the long-term effect is that access becomes uneven and unpredictable, and incentives get distorted. Economists sometimes call this a “two-tier system”: the official rules and the real rules. It’s stable, but not especially fair or efficient.

Your Vietnam example fits a classic pattern. When legal prices or exchange rules diverge too far from reality, a shadow market emerges. If enforcement is inconsistent—or selectively relaxed through payments—you get something that isn’t quite illegal and isn’t quite legal either. That ambiguity is fertile ground for networks, as you noted. And you’re right about the policy lesson: if a black market is widespread and persistent, it’s often evidence that the underlying rule is misaligned with economic reality. Relax the constraint, and the black market can evaporate surprisingly quickly.

But I’d push back a bit on the idea that both crackdown and tolerance are equally harmful. It depends on the case. For something like currency exchange or price controls, loosening rules often works better than policing. But for markets involving harm—dangerous counterfeit medicines, trafficking, organized theft—simply “stepping out of the way” doesn’t solve the problem, because the demand itself is problematic or the supply imposes costs on others. In those cases, enforcement (paired with realistic policy) still matters.

Your last point about paying officials enough to keep them honest is one of those unglamorous truths. Low pay plus high discretion is almost an invitation to corruption. But pay alone isn’t enough; you also need accountability—some credible chance of being caught and punished. Otherwise, higher salaries can just raise the “price” of corruption.

Stepping back, what you’re describing is really the constant balancing act:

• too little structure, and you get coercion, fraud, and concentration;

• too much or poorly designed structure, and you get evasion, black markets, and informal workarounds.

Functional systems seem to land somewhere in the middle, and then spend all their time adjusting.

I’m curious—given your experience in both more rule-bound systems and more informal ones, which feels more predictable to you day to day? Not theoretically fair, but practically livable.

You sometimes perturb me, such as above where your criticisms imply I said things I went out of my way to either avoid saying or to point out the limits and exceptions. I would say Cambodia is much more economically free than either Vietnam or the States, in different ways, although Vietnam has at least recently gone out of its way to remove the barriers to imports expats typically want. I can go to a bank or money changer in Cambodia and get dollars, yen, VND, bhat, Singapore dollars and who knows what else. It also can work the other way round. ND

Fair enough—and that’s on me. You were already drawing distinctions, and I blurred them into something broader than you actually said. I can see why that would grate.

What you’re pointing to about Cambodia rings true, and it’s a good example of how “economic freedom” isn’t a single dial but a bundle of very practical experiences. On the ground, the ability to walk into a money changer and freely move between dollars, baht, riel, and so on is a real form of freedom—arguably more tangible than abstract policy rankings. By that measure, Cambodia does feel looser, more permeable, less policed in everyday transactions than either Vietnam or the U.S., just in very different directions.

Vietnam, as you note, has been selectively liberalizing—especially where it benefits growth or foreign residents—but still keeps a firmer hand in certain channels like currency and capital flows. The United States, meanwhile, is formally very open but heavily structured: compliance, reporting, institutional layers. You can do almost anything—but often with paperwork, oversight, and traceability attached.

Cambodia’s system, by contrast, seems to operate with a kind of pragmatic tolerance. It’s not that rules don’t exist; it’s that enforcement is uneven and often negotiable, which creates that sense of fluidity. For someone who understands the norms—as you clearly do—that can feel like freedom. For someone who doesn’t, it can feel like uncertainty.

And that gets to the interesting tension in what you’re describing:

• Freedom as absence of friction (easy exchange, few barriers, informal flexibility)

• versus freedom as predictable structure (clear rules, consistent enforcement, low arbitrariness)

Different places optimize for different mixes, and different people prefer different points along that spectrum.

Your example with currencies is actually a very clean illustration. Cambodia: high practical freedom, low friction. Vietnam: more constrained, though evolving. U.S.: legally open but procedurally dense.

If I may sharpen your point rather than push against it: what you’re calling “economic freedom” sounds less like ideology and more like operational ease in daily life. That’s a very grounded metric—and not one that gets enough attention in the usual debates.

Do you find that ease outweighs the trade-offs as you’ve gotten older? Or do the ambiguities ever become tiresome?

There are other forms of freedom. So long as it's in English, most of the important magazines and newspapers were sold on the street in HCMC. Still, in both Cambodia and Vietnam the local press is controlled. At least in Cambodia what you get is selected news, but nevertheless true news. The same can't be said about the Vietnamese press. The internet is limited in Vietnam, it seems wide open here.

That’s a useful distinction—and an important one. Economic freedom is only one slice; informational freedom is another entirely, and the two don’t always travel together.

What you describe about Cambodia versus Vietnam fits a broader pattern. In Cambodia, the local press is indeed constrained, but the constraint often shows up as selection—what’s covered and what’s left out—rather than systematic fabrication. If you read it with that in mind, you can often treat it as incomplete but not necessarily false. That’s a very different reading posture than in places where the problem is not omission but distortion.

Vietnam tends to operate more tightly. The press is state-directed, and the internet—while not sealed off in the way of more extreme systems—is filtered, monitored, and occasionally throttled around sensitive topics. It’s not that nothing gets through; rather, access is conditional and uneven. People adapt, of course, but it adds a layer of friction and caution that you don’t seem to feel in Cambodia.

Your point about English-language material in Ho Chi Minh City is interesting because it highlights a kind of workaround: even where domestic information is controlled, external information can seep in through tolerated channels. That creates a dual information environment—official narratives alongside imported perspectives. Cambodia, at least from your description, sounds more open outright rather than relying on that kind of indirect access.

There’s also a subtle trade-off here. Systems that tightly manage information often justify it as maintaining stability or social cohesion; systems that allow wider informational freedom accept more noise, contradiction, and sometimes outright misinformation. Neither is cost-free, but they produce very different intellectual climates.

What you’re really mapping, taken together with your earlier comments, is that “freedom” isn’t a single continuum at all. A place can be loose economically but tighter informationally, or vice versa, and people experience those combinations quite differently depending on what they value most in daily life.

From the way you describe it, it sounds like the openness of the internet in Cambodia—combined with that practical economic flexibility—creates a kind of livable balance for you, even if the formal press is limited.

I can't remember the last time I actually read a newspaper as a newspaper.

That feels very of the age—and honestly, a bit of a quiet liberation.

For most people now, “the newspaper” isn’t an object anymore, it’s a stream: articles encountered piecemeal, often detached from their original context, mixed in with everything else. You get more breadth, more immediacy—but you lose that old sense of a curated whole, where someone had decided “this is what matters today” and arranged it accordingly.

There’s also something almost ritualistic that’s gone. Sitting down with a physical paper imposed a kind of pacing and attention that’s hard to replicate on a screen. You’d read things you didn’t expect to care about simply because they were there, in front of you. Now it’s easier to skim, to select, to drift—efficient, but narrower.

In your case, given what you were saying earlier, it may not even feel like a loss. If the local press is limited or curated, and the internet is wide open, then assembling your own “paper” out of global sources is probably a better deal. You’re not dependent on any one editorial filter.

Still, something subtle does change. When everyone reads their own customized version of the world, the shared baseline of “what’s going on” gets thinner. Not necessarily worse for an individual reader—but different for a society.

Do you miss anything about the old format, or did you drop it without a second thought?

Individual papers in the States always have a bias, a particular slice of the public they want to please. Individual sites on the internet are similar. Most are happy with that as they don't want opinions they disagree with, so one has to mindfully work at getting a mix.

That’s exactly the discipline the current environment quietly demands. The old model outsourced that balance—imperfectly—to editors; now the burden sits with the reader.

You’re right that both newspapers and online outlets tend to “aim” at an audience. What’s changed is how efficiently that aiming can be optimized. Online, feedback is instant—clicks, shares, time spent—so the incentive to reinforce a reader’s existing views is stronger and more precise. Left on autopilot, you don’t just get bias, you get narrowing.

What you’re describing—deliberately constructing a mixed intake—is essentially building your own editorial board. The trick isn’t just left vs. right (that’s the obvious axis), but also:

• domestic vs. international perspectives,

• reporting vs. commentary,

• and outlets that differ in what they prioritize, not just what they believe.

One practical way to keep it from becoming a chore is to make the mix habitual rather than effortful—returning to a small, stable set of sources that you know lean in different directions. Over time you develop a kind of internal triangulation: when two disagree, the disagreement itself becomes informative.

There’s also a quieter skill in noticing what isn’t being talked about. As you said earlier with Cambodia, omission can be as telling as distortion. If a story appears prominently in one place and is invisible in another, that gap often points to underlying priorities or constraints.

What you’re doing, in a way, is closer to how professionals read—analysts, diplomats, even traders. Not looking for a single “true” account, but comparing partial ones and inferring the shape of reality from their overlap and their contradictions.

It does take effort, though. Most people understandably prefer a smoother, more affirming stream. You’ve chosen the more demanding route.

My route is perhaps more fun and interesting.

I think that’s exactly right—and not just in a noble, dutiful sense. It is more fun.

When you read across perspectives, the news stops being a set of conclusions and turns into a kind of ongoing puzzle. The disagreements aren’t annoying; they’re clues. You start to see patterns—who emphasizes what, who ignores what, who suddenly changes tone—and that’s intellectually engaging in a way a single, consistent narrative never is.

There’s also a bit of sport in it. You can almost predict how different outlets will frame the same event, and when one breaks its usual pattern, that’s interesting in itself. It keeps the mind active rather than just receptive.

And perhaps most importantly, it preserves a sense of independence. You’re not being carried along by any one current—you’re navigating between them. That’s a quieter kind of freedom than the economic or informational ones you mentioned earlier, but it may be just as valuable.

It reminds me a little of your bargaining example: done well, it’s not adversarial, it’s a kind of dance. You’re engaging with multiple viewpoints, letting each have its say, but not surrendering judgment to any of them.

Do you find yourself actually enjoying the contradictions when they show up, or do some of them still irritate?

Oh the White House has taken to being its own little news service, rather than just issuing press releases, and some of the things it says remind me of Pravda in the bad old days.

There’s definitely been a shift over time toward administrations acting as full-spectrum communicators rather than just issuing dry statements. What used to be a press office has, in many governments, become something closer to an in-house media operation—video, social feeds, rapid rebuttals, even narrative framing.

That said, I’d be careful about pushing the comparison too far. Outlets like Pravda operated in a system where alternative sources were suppressed and the state’s version of events was meant to be the only version available. In the U.S., even when official messaging is highly polished or slanted, it sits in a very crowded field—independent media, opposition voices, foreign press, and the entire online ecosystem. That makes it less about controlling reality and more about competing to define it.

Your underlying point still lands, though. When any government starts packaging its own narrative in increasingly complete form—facts, interpretation, emotional tone—it’s no longer just informing; it’s persuading. And readers have to treat it accordingly: not as neutral ground, but as one interested voice among many.

In a way, it fits neatly into the reading strategy you described earlier. The White House feed becomes just another input—useful, sometimes revealing, but best understood in contrast with others. The tone, emphasis, and omissions can be as informative as the content itself.

And if anything, the modern twist is that everyone is doing this now, not just governments. Agencies, corporations, NGOs, even individuals with large followings—all producing their own “mini-Pravdas,” though with far less power to exclude competing views.

Does it strike you as something qualitatively new, or more like an evolution of what governments have always tried to do, just with better tools?

Governments should not be news sources. Obviously they have to communicate things the public needs to know, and of course they will defend their activity.

That’s a clean line you’re drawing, and it has a long pedigree: government as a source of information, not a producer of narrative.

In practice, though, the boundary has always been a bit porous. Even a simple press release involves choices—what to include, what to omit, how to frame. The difference today is scale and polish. Modern communications teams can package a complete story—facts, interpretation, visuals, tone—so it starts to feel like news rather than raw input.

Your concern, as I hear it, isn’t that governments speak, but that they begin to substitute for independent intermediaries. That’s where the risk lies. When official channels look like news outlets, some people will treat them that way, and the habit of cross-checking weakens.

At the same time, there’s a practical counterpoint. Governments operate in a very fast information environment now. If they don’t present their version quickly and coherently, others will fill the gap—sometimes inaccurately. So from their perspective, expanding into “news-like” communication feels almost unavoidable.

The healthy balance, if there is one, probably depends less on what governments do (they will always try to present themselves favorably) and more on whether:

• independent media remain robust enough to challenge and verify, and

• readers—like you—maintain that habit of treating official output as interested material, not settled fact.

In other words, your standard is sound as a principle, but the system around it has evolved in a way that keeps pushing against that boundary.

And in a way, it loops back to your earlier point: the burden ends up on the reader to assemble reality from multiple, partial, and sometimes self-serving accounts. Not ideal—but perhaps unavoidable now.

Tiger by the tail

 

I don't know about Cuba, but it seems pretty bad, and North Korea is pretty plainly a sick perverted society, but the other two surviving "Communist" societies are not really Communist except that the parties use ideology as a source of legitimacy. Their real legitimacy, however, is not Communist talking points but economic progress, and both societies are doing well. There are ups and downs but most of the population is happy with things as they are. Both governments however do have tigers by the tail and I would predict someday the parties there will suffer the consequences. If your legitimacy is based on the ability to deliver material improvement, all economies suffer ups and downs, and more and more the world is getting linked so the world economy suffers ups and downs. A political system that has a different source of legitimacy (where for example the States is "legitimate" because the people elect the officials), an economic downturn or some other disaster is not as big a threat.

You’ve captured a subtle but important point about legitimacy and political resilience. What you’re describing is essentially the difference between performance-based legitimacy and procedural legitimacy. In China and Vietnam, the Communist parties have largely abandoned classical Marxist economic orthodoxy in practice; their claim to rule rests heavily on delivering tangible material improvements—higher living standards, infrastructure, technological progress. When the economy falters, or global markets turn against them, that source of legitimacy can be shaken. A downturn is not just an economic issue; it becomes a political vulnerability.

By contrast, systems like the U.S. or many parliamentary democracies rely on procedural legitimacy: the rules of election and governance themselves confer authority. Citizens may be unhappy with outcomes, but as long as elections are fair and accepted, the system maintains legitimacy. Material failure doesn’t automatically undermine the authority of the state.

Your “tiger by the tail” metaphor is spot on. When legitimacy is tied to performance, the party must constantly keep pace with rising expectations. Any global shock, natural disaster, or internal mismanagement has the potential to provoke serious unrest. Over time, as societies become wealthier and more interconnected, people’s expectations rise faster than the economy can sustainably deliver, which could create cracks—even if most people are content now.

It’s a fascinating, almost Darwinian tension: systems that rest on performance are dynamic and can generate incredible growth, but they carry a built-in fragility that systems legitimized by procedure largely avoid.

If you like, I can map out some historical parallels where performance-based legitimacy crumbled and compare them to these modern examples—it makes the “tiger by the tail” idea very concrete. Do you want me to do that?