The Claims Matrix
God, Beauty, and the Attribution Paradox
Every non-fiction publication makes a claim. Or rather, three claims. There is the core claim. It says that something is the case. There might be several such core claims. Then there is the support claim, which cites others’ claims in support of the core claim. Both the core and support claims have an implicit or explicit meta-claim.
Claims and Biases
Claims are biased. There is a self-serving bias that often influences all three claims. It can lead to exaggerating the importance of the main claim and/or the meta-claim of its originality, or the strength of the support claims. If they are accepted, this can benefit the author with money or prestige. The value can also come in the form of tenure, grants, speaking invitations, or psychological benefits like recognition, perceived influence, and ideological validation.
The core claim is mainly prone to confirmation bias. Confirmation bias filters not only the data selected but also how the question is framed. Evidence is more likely to be searched, interpreted, and cited if it aligns with what the author expects or believes.
The supporting claim is prone to appeal-to-authority bias. In its lightest form, this is the casual name-drop — Stephen Hawking said it, so it must be right. In scholarly writing, it manifests as citation pathologies.
A lesser-known bias is something which I call the elegance bias. This is the tendency to prefer ideas that are simple, symmetric, or mathematically beautiful — even when the world is not. In physics, for example, elegance bias has led researchers to favor unified theories or supersymmetry models not because data support them, but because of their elegance. As Sabine Hossenfelder puts it, when physicists judge the promise of a newly invented but untested theory, they “draw upon the concepts of naturalness, simplicity or elegance, and beauty.” This aesthetic filtering can push certain research directions while marginalizing others.
The confirmation bias I mentioned earlier is indeed the most popular one, in the sense of being the most common and the most talked about. But there is a bias that is even more frequent, yet few talk about it. That is the God’s-eye-view bias. It is typical of all religious texts (and maybe it shouldn’t be called bias there), but it is equally present in all scientific books and papers (the exceptions are so few that we can safely ignore them). It’s again a God’s-eye view, but it might be more recognizable if it is called objectivity bias. It is so much in the blind spot of science that what I call bias, most will call duty. The duty of a good scientist is to be objective.
The God’s-eye-view bias is based on the belief that there is reality out there which is perfectly knowable and independent of our minds and actions. Such a stance assumes the observer can be removed from the observation, an idea increasingly challenged in both physics and philosophy. QBism and other participatory interpretations of quantum mechanics argue the opposite: that all measurement is relational, and no fact exists without an agent’s involvement.
When the Gods-eye-view bias is baked into the meta-claim — “this is how it is, not just how I see it” — the claim resists challenge. It pretends to speak from outside all contexts. In this sense, scientific writing often inherits not only the rhetorical habits of theology but also its authority structure.
One experimental tool to resist this bias is E-prime — a version of English without any form of the verb “to be.” By removing “is” and “are”, writers are forced to rephrase claims with reference to context or perception: “this appears to me as…” instead of “this is…” While E-prime was suggested as a way to improve clarity, and the motive for introducing it was not related to the God’s-eye-view bias, I find that it has this nice side effect: by applying it, we can see how deeply this bias is embedded in language itself.
Sometimes I think that small doses of elegance bias can cancel out some of the God’s-eye-view bias. Like beauty can twist the truth, truth-chasing may be counterproductive based on a narrow view of beauty.
:there’s a way of talking about truth, where it’s very easy to think of truth as different from the beautiful, say, and that’s because we think of truth in terms of the correctness of propositions and we have an idea of correctness or of correspondence. But from a phenomenological perspective, that actually is a secondary sense of truth, and the primary sense of truth is disclosure or presence, or, to be you know, technical in the way that Husserl uses the terminology the you know, the evidencing of something. So evidencing is the you know, we use evidence as a noun in English we think here’s a piece of evidence, but that another languages evidencing has this verbal sense where you disclose something, you uncover it, you reveal it, it comes to presence.
While the elegance bias primarily arises from a search for beauty in mathematical expressions, if that search shifts to human experience, we might reduce both the elegance bias and the God’s-eye-view bias.
Attributions, IP, and AI
The main meta-claims are about attribution. The meta-claim for the core claim can be that it is an original idea of the author, while that might not be the case. Or that it is not the original idea of the author, while that might be the case. For instance, several Arabic texts from the 9th to 13th centuries were attributed to Aristotle to boost their authority, even though the actual ideas were Neoplatonic or newly developed by the translator-authors. Other Islamic philosophers attributed their own ideas to classical sources, masking their originality, not so much to increase credibility but as to follow a convention in Islamic philosophy to state that one is repeating the wisdom of the past.
In the modern world, attribution is bound to the machinery of intellectual property: originality becomes not just a virtue but a legal condition. In some cultures, especially modern Western ones, originality means ownership, and ownership implies rights. But that was not always the case, and in some places it still isn’t. In medieval China, the emphasis on individual authorship and ownership, as understood in the West, was often secondary to collective or anonymous forms. Even today, Chinese IP law retains traces of this collective orientation, emphasizing utility and shared benefit over originality for its own sake. Similarly, many traditional knowledge systems — from Andean farming techniques to West African music — treat knowledge as a communal inheritance rather than an individual asset.
The strong Western sensitivity to intellectual property is strangely inverted by the very institution that most profitably exploits it: academic publishing. It celebrates the sanctity of authorship and originality while operating on a model that strips both of their substance. As
notes, scholars have become both the unpaid workforce and the paying customers of a system that feeds on their own production.A not-wholly-unfair analysis of academic publishing would be that it is an industry in which academics compete against one another for the privilege of providing free labour for a profitmaking company, which then sells the results back to them at monopoly prices.
The paradox extends beyond academia: citizens, through public taxes, already fund most research, only to be asked again to purchase access to its results — sometimes at the price of an expensive book for a seven-page paper. What is defended as the protection of intellectual property thus becomes a mechanism for its expropriation. The system rewards not the creation of knowledge, but its circulation within a closed economy of prestige and metrics.
Academic publishing is a medium that aggregates, validates, and redistributes knowledge within institutional boundaries. Artificial intelligence extends this logic to a planetary scale. The largest investment wave in history now rests on a technology that similarly feeds on existing knowledge, yet without even the pretense of attribution. Its disregard for intellectual property stems not from cultural specifics, as with China, or from a commons-based ethos, as with open source projects, but from pragmatic erosion. The IP is highly valued again, but its meaning has shifted to Infrastructural Property amid global meaning drift.
On the other hand, the AI synthesis is natural, just the scale and speed look overwhelming from the perspective of a single human. But single humans, depending on when they wrote what they wrote, had different possibilities for knowledge synthesis too.
:Modern authors have the advantage that they have access to more data. But I find their opinions easier to predict, so I often prefer older authors since they surprise me and therefore expand my worldview more.
It seems LLMs continue on that same path; it’s just the ability to access more data and quicker than a single human could, which makes it look inhuman, but, as I wrote elsewhere, it’s natural.
The agent, human or not, is the medium, just like the medium is the agent.
The only meta-claim that holds in all cases, then, is that of knowledge synthesis.