#truth matters

Donald Trump completely detaches from reality. He hallucinates a bizarre conspiracy theory that Barack Obama literally emptied every single bank in three states of physical cash. The US President is in severe cognitive decline and entirely unfit for office. Delusional.

With children standing around him. Oh, that's right...CHILDREN!!! The Epstein Files.

And all his accomplices just stand around behind him, acting as if all of this is perfectly normal. It’s anything, but.

Among all the races of Dungeons & Dragons, elves are perhaps the most misrepresented in fanon discourse. While human players often project their own cultural assumptions onto them - ranging from casual promiscuity to polyamory - the actual D&D sourcebooks paint a very different picture. Elves are not flighty nor shallow in love: their romances are slow to bloom but eternal in depth. This essay examines canonical material across editions, from AD&D to 5th edition, to establish how elves approach love, marriage, and fidelity.

📖 Elven Longevity and Its Impact on Courtship

Elves live extraordinarily long lives, often exceeding 700 years (Player’s Handbook, AD&D 1e, 1978; PHB 3.5e, 2003). Because of this, their approach to relationships differs radically from humans.

The Complete Book of Elves (AD&D 2e, 1992) states: “Elves do not rush into marriage. They wait until they are absolutely certain, for when they marry, it is forever.”

Races of the Wild (3.5e, 2005) echoes this: “Elves mate for life. Their courtships are long and often filled with song, poetry, and shared experiences that may last for years before vows are exchanged.”

Thus, elven courtship is slow, patient, and deeply aesthetic - often involving music, dance, and nature, reflecting their soul’s affinity with beauty and eternity.

💍 Marriage and Soul-Bonding

Elves believe in the concept of a true soul-bond - a single partner for life. Divorce or casual separation is virtually unheard of in elven culture.

The Complete Book of Elves (2e, p. 45): “Elves marry for love, and they marry but once. The bond they form is eternal, a union of spirit as much as body.”

Races of the Wild (3.5e, p. 157): “The loss of a spouse is devastating to an elf. Many elves never remarry, holding faith with their lost partner until their own lives end.”

Elves of Evermeet (AD&D novel, Elaine Cunningham, 1994): while technically a novel, it was TSR-published and lore-approved. It portrays elven marriage as sacred and permanent, often tied into ceremonies with gods such as Corellon and Sehanine.

Thus, canonical lore firmly establishes marriage as lifelong and spiritually binding.

🌱 Family and Children

Elves rarely have many children due to their long lives and natural caution. This is not due to disinterest but reverence. Each child is considered a gift of immense importance.

Races of the Wild (3.5e, p. 157): “Because of their longevity, elves bear children rarely. To them, the birth of a child is a momentous occasion, celebrated by the entire community.”

Complete Book of Elves (2e, p. 46): “Elven children are precious. They are raised not only by their parents but by the entire community, for the continuity of their people rests upon each one.”

This makes procreation a spiritual act, not a casual indulgence.

🕊️ Fidelity and Exclusivity

Canon paints elves as intensely loyal once they give their heart. They are slow to choose, but once bonded, they remain steadfast.

Complete Book of Elves (2e, p. 45): “An elf may spend centuries alone after losing a mate, unwilling to seek another bond.”

Races of the Wild (3.5e): emphasizes again that elves do not take new spouses lightly, and remarriage is rare.

Adultery, casual flings, or polyamorous arrangements are never described in any core sourcebooks. Such ideas appear only in isolated novels or fanon, not in canonical D&D design.

⏳ Do Elves Marry Quickly?

The opposite is true. Because elves live so long, they take their time in choosing. Courtships can last decades.

The Complete Book of Elves (2e): “Time means little to elves. They may wait years before declaring love, for they wish to be sure.”

Thus, elves value certainty and patience — love is not rushed.

🌙 Cultural Rituals Around Love

Elves often celebrate love through festivals tied to moonlight and nature, echoing their bond with Sehanine Moonbow and Corellon Larethian.

Marriage is typically a public, sacred event, sanctified by song, dance, and divine blessing (Forgotten Realms lore, Evermeet; Races of the Wild).

🔥 Contrast With Larian’s “Crackfic” Take

Modern media adaptations (such as Baldur’s Gate 3) have at times distorted this. Halsin’s polyamory in Act 3, for instance, contradicts decades of canon that portray elves as lifelong monogamists once bonded. Even Larian developers admitted Halsin was a “last-minute” addition shaped by fan demand (Baudelaire Welch, Develop: Brighton 2024), turning him into more of a fan-service “crackfic” figure than a lore-faithful wood elf. Act 1 and 2 showed us REAL Halsin - a Halsin that pulled people in with his canon-aligned persona.

⚖️ On Drow and Distortion

Sometimes people bring up the drow as a counterpoint, saying “But they’re elves too, and their sexuality is chaotic and poly.” That argument actually proves the opposite.

Drow are not the template for elven love - they are its distortion.

In Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes (2018), drow are described as “corrupted reflections of what elves were meant to be.”

Their society was shaped by Lolth’s betrayal, where “sex is power, and loyalty is an illusion” (Drow of the Underdark, 3.5e, p.10).

Fidelity and lasting partnership are virtually absent because their entire culture is built on domination and fear.

By contrast, surface elves - wood elves, moon elves, high elves - are written consistently across editions as constant and lifelong in their unions:

Races of the Wild (3.5e, p.157): “Surface elves mate for life, their bonds as eternal as their souls.”

So when people cite drow as an example of elven polyamory, they’re actually pointing to the curse and perversion of elven essence - not the design of elves themselves. The contrast between drow and other elves underlines the truth: True elves do not love lightly and are not promiscuous.

🌟 Conclusion

Across every edition of D&D, elves are depicted as slow to love, but eternal in fidelity. Their marriages are lifelong, their children sacred, and their lovesongs echo through centuries. Far from being capricious or promiscuous, elves embody constancy, patience, and depth - traits that set them apart from shorter-lived races.

Rememberising … in hindsight the writing was on the wall.

*nitter link below for those who can’t access the twatter. simply copy and paste to your preferred browser to watch the video and read the comments

By: Michael Shermer

Published: Jan 27, 2026

Do you believe global warming is real?

Do you believe in the germ theory of disease?

Do you believe masks work and should be mandated?

Do you believe Jesus was resurrected?

Do you believe the Holocaust happened?

Do you believe there are objective morals and values in life?

As a public intellectual who engages in debates and conversations on a wide range of subjects, I am often asked questions such as these, which I found puzzling at first until I figured out that my interlocutors were confusing the meaning of beliefs and facts. 

For example, I don’t “believe in” the germ theory of disease. I accept it as factually true, and as we’ve seen in the recent pandemic, a germ like the SARS-CoV-2 virus is not something to believe in or disbelieve in. It simply is a matter of fact and it can cause a deadly disease like Covid-19. 

Whether or not vaccines and masks slow its spread is also a factual question that science, at least in principle, can answer, although whether or not vaccines and masks should be mandated by law is a political matter that differs from scientific questions. But asking you if you “believe in” the SARS-CoV-2 virus would be like asking you if you “believe” in gravity. Gravity is just a brute fact of nature. It’s not something to believe or disbelieve. 

As the science fiction author Philip K. Dick famously quipped, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Objective Truths and Justified True Belief

What we’re after here is knowledge, which philosophers traditionally define as justified true belief. That is, we want to know what is actually true, not just what we want to believe is true. The problem is that none of us are omniscient. If there is an omniscient God, it’s not me, and it’s also not you. Or, in the secular equivalent, there is objective reality but I don’t know what it is, and neither do you.

Once we agree that there is objective truth out there to be discovered and that none of us knows for certain what it is, we need to work together through open dialogue in communities of truth-seekers to figure it out, starting by acknowledging our shortcomings as finite fallible beings subject to all the cognitive biases that come bundled with our reasoning capacities. The workaround for this problem is having adequate evidence to justify one’s beliefs. Here are two examples from science:

Dinosaurs went extinct around 65 million years ago. This is true by verification and replication of radiometric dating techniques for volcanic eruptions above and below dinosaur fossils. Since each layer can be accurately dated, we infer that the age of a fossil falls between these two dates. Above the strata dated 65 million years ago, there are no more dinosaurs. Ergo, we can assert with a high degree of confidence that this is an objective fact, and we can be satisfied in the truth of the proposition that dinosaurs went extinct around 65 million years ago, unless and until new data emerge. 

Our universe came into existence at the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago. This is true based on the convergence of evidence of a wide range of phenomena such as the cosmic microwave background, the abundance of light elements like hydrogen and helium, the distribution of galaxies and the large-scale structure of the cosmos, the redshift of most galaxies that indicates they are all moving away from one another in a way that resembles a giant explosion, and the expansion of space-time itself that resulted from such a big bang, resulting in the accelerating expanding cosmos we see today.

The above propositions are “true” in the sense that the evidence is so substantial that it would be unreasonable to withhold our provisional assent. At the same time, it’s not impossible, for example, that the dinosaurs went extinct recently, just after the creation of the universe some 10,000 years ago (as Young Earth Creationists assert). However, this proposition is so unlikely, so completely lacking in evidence, and so evidently grounded in religious faith, that we need not waste our time considering it any further (the debate about the age of the Earth was resolved over a century ago). 

Thus, a scientific truth is a claim for which the evidence is so substantial it is rational to offer one’s provisional assent.Provisional is the key word here. Scientific truths are temporary and could change with changing evidence. 

The ECREE Principle, or Why Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

In his 1980 television series Cosmos, in the episode on the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence existing somewhere in the galaxy, or of aliens having visited Earth, Carl Sagan popularized a principle about proportioning one’s beliefs to the evidence, when he pronounced that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The ECREE principle was first articulated in the 18th century by the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, who wrote in his 1748 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: “a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.” 

ECREE means that an ordinary claim requires only ordinary evidence, but an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence. Here’s a quotidian example. I once took a road trip from my home in Southern California to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, home of all things New Age. To get there I took the 210 freeway north to the 118 Freeway north to the 101 freeway north to San Luis Obispo, where I exited to Highway 1 and followed the Pacific Coast Highway north through Cambria and San Simeon until arriving at the storied home of the 1960’s Human Potential Movement. Weirdly, just past Cambria, a bright light hovered over my car. Thinking it was a police helicopter, I pulled over to the side of the road, fearful that I had been busted for speeding (which I am wont to do). But it wasn’t the cops. It was the aliens, and they abducted me into their mothership and whisked me off to the Pleiades star cluster where their home planet is located. There I met extraterrestrial beings who gave me a message to take back to Earth—we must stop global warming and nuclear proliferation…or else.

Now, which part of this story triggers your insistence on additional evidence? That’s obvious. My claim to have driven on California highways is ordinary and calls for only ordinary evidence (in this case, you can just take my word for it), but my claim to have been abducted by aliens and rocketed off to the Pleiadeian home planet is extraordinary, and unless I can provide extraordinary evidence—like an instrument from the dashboard of the alien spaceship, or one of the aliens themselves—you should be skeptical.

ECREE also suggests that belief is not an either-or on-off switch—not a discrete state of belief or disbelief, but a continuum on which you can place confidence in a belief according to the evidence: more evidence, more confidence; less evidence, less confidence. Consider the extraordinary claim that another bipedal primate called Big Foot, or Yeti, or Sasquatch survives somewhere on Earth. That would be quite extraordinary because after centuries of searching for such a creature none have been found. 

Before we assent to such a claim we need extraordinary evidence, in this case a type specimen—what biologists call a holotype—in the form of an actual body. Blurry photographs, grainy videos, and stories about spooky things that happen at night when people are out camping does not constitute extraordinary evidence—it’s barely even ordinary evidence—so it is reasonable for us to withhold our provisional assent. 

Impediments to Truth and How to Overcome Them

In addition to falling far short of omniscience, humans are also saddled with numerous cognitive biases, including (to name but a few): confirmation bias, hindsight bias, myside bias, attribution bias, sunk-cost bias, status-quo bias, anchoring bias, authority bias, believability bias, consistency bias, expectation bias, and the blind-spot bias, in which people can be trained to identify all these biases in other people but can’t seem to see the log in their own eye.

Then there are the suite of logical fallacies, such as Emotive Words, False Analogies, Ad hominem, Hasty Generalization, Either-Or, Circular Reasoning, Reductio ad Absurdum and the Slippery Slope, after-the-fact reasoning, and especially why anecdotes are not data, why rumors do not equal reality, and why the unexplained is not necessarily the inexplicable.

With such listicles of cognitive biases and logical fallacies identified by philosophers and psychologists it’s a wonder we can think at all. But we can and do, through experience, education, and instruction in the art and science of thinking. What follows are some of the methods developed by philosophers and psychologists to identify and work-around all these impediments to the search for truth.

Practice Active Open-Mindedness. Research shows that when people are given the task of selecting the right answer to a problem by being told whether particular guesses are right or wrong, they do the following:

Immediately form a hypothesis and look only for examples to confirm it.

Do not seek evidence to disprove the hypothesis.

Are very slow to change the hypothesis even when it is obviously wrong.

If the information is too complex, adopt overly-simple hypotheses or strategies for solutions.

If there is no solution, if the problem is a trick and “right” and “wrong” is given at random, form hypotheses about coincidental relationships they observed. 

In their book Superforecasting, Philip Tetlock and Dan Garner document how bad most people are at making predictions, and what skillsets those who are good at it employ. They begin with the results of extensive testing of people’s predictions. It’s not good. Even most so-called experts were no better than dart-tossing monkeys when their predictions were checked. When asked to make specific predictions—for example, “Will another country exit from the EU in the next two years?” and, presciently, “Will Russia annex additional Ukraine territory in the next three months?”—and their prognosticating feet were held to the empirical fire, Tetlock and Garner found that most experts were overconfident (after all, they’re experts), encouraged by the lack of feedback on their accuracy (if no one reminds you of your misses you’ll only remember the hits—the confirmation bias), and are victims of all the cognitive biases and illusions that plague the rest of us. 

The worst forecasters were people with big ideas—grand theories about how the world works—such as left-wing pundits predicting class warfare that never came, or right-wing commentators prophesizing a socialistic demise of the free enterprise system that never happened. Failed predictions are hand-waved away—“This means nothing!” “Just you wait!” Superforecasters, by contrast, practice active open-mindedness, which Tetlock and Garner defined quantitatively by asking experts “Do you agree or disagree with the following statements?” Superforecasters were more likely to agree that:

People should take into consideration evidence that goes against their beliefs.

It is more useful to pay attention to those who disagree with you than to pay attention to those who agree.

Even major events like World War II or 9/11 could have turned out very differently.

Randomness is often a factor in our personal lives.

Superforecasters were more likely to disagree that:

Changing your mind is a sign of weakness.

Intuition is the best guide in making decisions.

It is important to persevere in your beliefs even when evidence is brought to bear against them.

Everything happens for a reason.

There are no accidents or coincidences. 

The psychologist Gordon Pennycook and his colleagues developed their own instrument of measuring active open-mindedness, in which people are asked whether they agree or disagree with the following statements, where the more open-minded answer is indicated in parentheses:

Beliefs should always be revised in response to new information or evidence. (agree)

People should always take into consideration evidence that goes against their beliefs. (agree)

I believe that loyalty to one’s ideals and principles is more important than “open-mindedness.” (disagree)

No one can talk me out of something I know is right. (disagree)

Certain beliefs are just too important to abandon no matter how good a case can be made against them. (disagree)

Active open-mindedness is a cogent tool of reason in assessing the truth value of any claim or idea. As is reason itself, of which active open-mindedness is a subset of rational skills that must be cultivated through education and practice.

Protect and Defend the Constitution of Knowledge

Objective facts in support of provisional truths about the world are determined by tried-and-true methods developed over the centuries since the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment in what are sometimes called rationality communities—scholars, scientists, and researchers who collect data, form and test hypotheses, present their findings to colleagues at conferences, publish their papers in peer reviewed journals and books, and reinforce the norms of truth-telling to their colleagues and students along with themselves. In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, the journalist and civil rights activist Jonathan Rauch outlines and defends the epistemic operating system of Enlightenment liberalism’s social rules for attaining reliable knowledge when people cannot agree on what is true. Although these communities differ in the details of what, exactly, should be done to determine justified true belief, Rauch suggests several features held in common that constitute the constitution of knowledge:

Fallibilism. The understanding that we might be wrong.

Objectivity. A commitment to the proposition that there is a reality and we can know it through reason and empiricism.

Disconfirmation. Challenging or testing any and all claims through peer review and replication (science), editing and fact-checking (journalism), adversarial lawyers (the law), and red-team review (business).

Accountability. We should all be held accountable for our mistakes.

Pluralism. An insistence on viewpoint diversity.

The most important norm of all is the freedom to critique or challenge any and all ideas. Why?

We might be completely right but still learn something new in hearing what someone else has to say.

We might be partially right and partially wrong, and by listening to other viewpoints we might stand corrected and refine and improve our beliefs. 

We might be completely wrong, so hearing criticism or counterpoint gives us the opportunity to change our minds and improve our thinking. 

By listening to the opinions of others we have the opportunity to develop stronger arguments and build better facts for our positions. 

My freedom to speak and dissent is inextricably tied to your freedom to speak and dissent. If I censor you, why shouldn’t you censor me? If you silence me, why shouldn’t I silence you? 

If you disagree with me, it is the norms and customs of free speech and open dialogue that allows you to do so. From those open dialogues, debates, and disputations, in time the truth emerges.

🔥 **Anderson Cooper Delivers a Masterclass in Accountability Journalism!** 📺📰

In a powerful segment, Anderson Cooper meticulously aired **39 instances** where Trump promised an Iran deal, showcasing the stark reality of unfulfilled commitments. This standout moment shines a light on the importance of **truth in journalism** and the responsibility of media to hold leaders accountable.

### 📊 **Key Implications:**

- **Public Trust**: Cooper’s approach reinforces the necessity for transparency, reminding viewers of the need for accountable leadership. In an era of misinformation, this style of journalism fosters trust in the media.

- **Political Accountability**: By using Trump's own words against him, Cooper highlights the importance of scrutiny in political discourse. This segment serves as a reminder that promises made by leaders should be taken seriously and tracked.

- **Voter Awareness**: As the election cycle heats up, this kind of reporting is crucial for voters to understand past actions and promises, ensuring they make informed decisions at the polls.

### ✍️ **The Bigger Picture:**

Cooper’s segment is not just a critique; it’s a call to action for journalists everywhere to pursue truth and hold power to account. In a world where narratives can easily be distorted, this kind of rigorous journalism is vital for democracy.