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This is a bizarre line of reasoning > his perception that there are a set of correct facts and incorrect facts is just so meaingless Yes, there are facts. In

This is a bizarre line of reasoning > his perception that there are a set of correct facts and incorrect facts is just so meaingless Yes, there are facts. In your example, if I say "person X said Y" and have a video of them saying it, I am stating a fact. I am not dealing in beliefs and I don't give a fuck whether or not the person still supports the statements they made or not. I am saying that at some point in time T, person X said Y and this fact is on record.

bearcobra 7y ago
There is still the challenge of the context of "person X said Y" Were they saying it sarcastically? Were they quoting someone else? Does Y include the content said before or after? That can meaningfully change the "fact"
oconnor663 7y ago
On the extreme end, a video can be totally fake. Slightly less extreme, a video might be "fake" in that it's an actor playing a role, and the words they're saying belong to the character and not the actor. More commonly, a video might be taken out of context, so that the apparent meaning of a statement in isolation is the opposite of what it originally meant. (Compare "I hate group X" to "I think people who say 'I hate group X' are jerks.") Modern politics is effectively a distributed indexing system for exactly these most ambiguous cases, coupled with large media apparatuses for broadcasting them. And these are the problems with the simplest sort of fact, "A said B." That's not even the majority of misinformation out there. We usually have to contend with even worse ambiguities, like whether A "caused" B, or whether A "supported" B, or whether A "criticized" B. In everyday life of course, these problems are solvable. We find ways to punish people for acting in bad faith, and the incentives mostly line up. But that is very much not how things work in politics or in law. People have large incentives to seek out ambiguous cases. These edge cases become the typical case.
- MadWombat 7y ago
  > On the extreme end, a video can be totally fake Sure. And either you can prove it or not. But that is not what I am arguing against. The way things seem to be working today, is that you say "person X cures cancer" and I say "person X eats babies", neither one of us has any proof whatsoever, but that is OK because nobody ever asks for proof because "hey, there is no such thing as facts anymore"
  - oconnor663 7y ago
    That's fair. It's definitely possible to go too far with this. I guess what I want to argue is more like this: The problem here is sufficiently hard that, even though we can make definitive judgments about facts and misinformation in some cases, the value of doing so in practice will be low. But of course that's a pretty vague blanket statement that I'm making without any concrete support, and it would probably be better to look at the pros and cons of some specific idea about what the rules should be.
leftyted 7y ago
> Yes, there are facts. In your example, if I say "person X said Y" and have a video of them saying it, I am stating a fact. I am not dealing in beliefs and I don't give a fuck whether or not the person still supports the statements they made or not. I am saying that at some point in time T, person X said Y and this fact is on record. There are clearly facts. But people don't spend a lot of time arguing over whether "person X said Y". Rather, we argue over the meaning of Y and the context in which it was said. Political discourse has almost nothing to do with facts. That's just an observation, not necessarily a criticism.
curryst 7y ago
You are correct, there are literal truths. Some person factually used some set of words in a particular order. The part that people care about is how we interpret those words. It being fact does not make the implication incorrect. In an extreme example, if someone says "There are extremists in the world, and I am not going to be one of them", I can quote that as "There are extremists in the world, and I am ... one of them", which is factually true, that is a portion of what was said. The interpretation is the polar opposite, but it is factually true. Likewise, there are facts that are misleading, but true. "The Earth is at the center of our solar system". It's a perfectly valid statement; the rotation of planets can be modeled where the Earth is at a fixed point and the other planets moved around it. It's messy, and the movements look extremely erratic, but it's perfectly valid to be modeled that way. There are also facts that are true, given a set of circumstances. "I weigh 7 pounds". It's not true on Earth, but in the correct gravitational field, I do weigh 7 pounds. Determining whether that statement is true depends on the implication; was I implying that it is true on Earth or not? That depends on the context of that statement, and on how you interpret the context.
- Izkata 7y ago
  > In an extreme example, if someone says "There are extremists in the world, and I am not going to be one of them", I can quote that as "There are extremists in the world, and I am ... one of them", which is factually true, that is a portion of what was said. The interpretation is the polar opposite, but it is factually true. Not so extreme considering this kind of editing is basically what led to Count Dankula's court case and conviction.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    That's a reach. Doing explicitly offensive things as satire and being selectively quoted aren't similar.
    - 0x4477 7y ago
      Why is it wrong to say explicitly offensive things and why should someone be legally punished for it? Who gets to decide what is and isn't offensive and to what degree?
marcus_holmes 7y ago
You might be saying "they said this", but what your audience reads is "this is true". To take a recent example: "A renowned firefighter says that bushfires have mostly been caused by arsonists, exacerbated by conservationists protesting harm reduction burns, resulting in an exceptional fire season this year." "A renowned firefighter says that climate change has reduced the safe period to perform harm reduction burns, and has contributed to drought conditions, resulting in an exceptional fire season this year." These are both facts. But which one you report on will give your audience an entirely differently picture of the situation.
kryogen1c 7y ago
> Yes, there are facts. In your example, if I say "person X said Y" and have a video of them saying it, I am stating a fact. assuming you actually do this - which i dont believe you do but will accept for argument's sake - it is entirely meaningless. mouth-sounds are not important in and of themselves; you hear the mouth-sounds and interpret them to try and guess how that person will act in the future. you are building a predictive model of that person. lets say there is a video of a politician (clumsily) saying "i am a rapist hater. i will increase the punishment to try and dissuade these awful crimes and make all our lives safer". You argue it is a true fact that politician is on video saying "i am a rapist". My point is that "true" in this sense is nonsense, and furthermore "true" in any absolute sense is always nonsense. if your head is a list of quotes people have said that simply don't feed into your impression of them, then you are in a minority so small its effectively 0 on a global scale.

bearcobra 7y ago

There is still the challenge of the context of "person X said Y" Were they saying it sarcastically? Were they quoting someone else? Does Y include the content said before or after? That can meaningfully change the "fact"

oconnor663 7y ago

On the extreme end, a video can be totally fake. Slightly less extreme, a video might be "fake" in that it's an actor playing a role, and the words they're saying belong to the character and not the actor. More commonly, a video might be taken out of context, so that the apparent meaning of a statement in isolation is the opposite of what it originally meant. (Compare "I hate group X" to "I think people who say 'I hate group X' are jerks.") Modern politics is effectively a distributed indexing system for exactly these most ambiguous cases, coupled with large media apparatuses for broadcasting them. And these are the problems with the simplest sort of fact, "A said B." That's not even the majority of misinformation out there. We usually have to contend with even worse ambiguities, like whether A "caused" B, or whether A "supported" B, or whether A "criticized" B. In everyday life of course, these problems are solvable. We find ways to punish people for acting in bad faith, and the incentives mostly line up. But that is very much not how things work in politics or in law. People have large incentives to seek out ambiguous cases. These edge cases become the typical case.

MadWombat 7y ago
> On the extreme end, a video can be totally fake Sure. And either you can prove it or not. But that is not what I am arguing against. The way things seem to be working today, is that you say "person X cures cancer" and I say "person X eats babies", neither one of us has any proof whatsoever, but that is OK because nobody ever asks for proof because "hey, there is no such thing as facts anymore"
- oconnor663 7y ago
  That's fair. It's definitely possible to go too far with this. I guess what I want to argue is more like this: The problem here is sufficiently hard that, even though we can make definitive judgments about facts and misinformation in some cases, the value of doing so in practice will be low. But of course that's a pretty vague blanket statement that I'm making without any concrete support, and it would probably be better to look at the pros and cons of some specific idea about what the rules should be.

leftyted 7y ago

> Yes, there are facts. In your example, if I say "person X said Y" and have a video of them saying it, I am stating a fact. I am not dealing in beliefs and I don't give a fuck whether or not the person still supports the statements they made or not. I am saying that at some point in time T, person X said Y and this fact is on record. There are clearly facts. But people don't spend a lot of time arguing over whether "person X said Y". Rather, we argue over the meaning of Y and the context in which it was said. Political discourse has almost nothing to do with facts. That's just an observation, not necessarily a criticism.

curryst 7y ago

You are correct, there are literal truths. Some person factually used some set of words in a particular order. The part that people care about is how we interpret those words. It being fact does not make the implication incorrect. In an extreme example, if someone says "There are extremists in the world, and I am not going to be one of them", I can quote that as "There are extremists in the world, and I am ... one of them", which is factually true, that is a portion of what was said. The interpretation is the polar opposite, but it is factually true. Likewise, there are facts that are misleading, but true. "The Earth is at the center of our solar system". It's a perfectly valid statement; the rotation of planets can be modeled where the Earth is at a fixed point and the other planets moved around it. It's messy, and the movements look extremely erratic, but it's perfectly valid to be modeled that way. There are also facts that are true, given a set of circumstances. "I weigh 7 pounds". It's not true on Earth, but in the correct gravitational field, I do weigh 7 pounds. Determining whether that statement is true depends on the implication; was I implying that it is true on Earth or not? That depends on the context of that statement, and on how you interpret the context.

Izkata 7y ago
> In an extreme example, if someone says "There are extremists in the world, and I am not going to be one of them", I can quote that as "There are extremists in the world, and I am ... one of them", which is factually true, that is a portion of what was said. The interpretation is the polar opposite, but it is factually true. Not so extreme considering this kind of editing is basically what led to Count Dankula's court case and conviction.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  That's a reach. Doing explicitly offensive things as satire and being selectively quoted aren't similar.
  - 0x4477 7y ago
    Why is it wrong to say explicitly offensive things and why should someone be legally punished for it? Who gets to decide what is and isn't offensive and to what degree?

marcus_holmes 7y ago

You might be saying "they said this", but what your audience reads is "this is true". To take a recent example: "A renowned firefighter says that bushfires have mostly been caused by arsonists, exacerbated by conservationists protesting harm reduction burns, resulting in an exceptional fire season this year." "A renowned firefighter says that climate change has reduced the safe period to perform harm reduction burns, and has contributed to drought conditions, resulting in an exceptional fire season this year." These are both facts. But which one you report on will give your audience an entirely differently picture of the situation.

kryogen1c 7y ago

> Yes, there are facts. In your example, if I say "person X said Y" and have a video of them saying it, I am stating a fact. assuming you actually do this - which i dont believe you do but will accept for argument's sake - it is entirely meaningless. mouth-sounds are not important in and of themselves; you hear the mouth-sounds and interpret them to try and guess how that person will act in the future. you are building a predictive model of that person. lets say there is a video of a politician (clumsily) saying "i am a rapist hater. i will increase the punishment to try and dissuade these awful crimes and make all our lives safer". You argue it is a true fact that politician is on video saying "i am a rapist". My point is that "true" in this sense is nonsense, and furthermore "true" in any absolute sense is always nonsense. if your head is a list of quotes people have said that simply don't feed into your impression of them, then you are in a minority so small its effectively 0 on a global scale.