11 ms·
As always, who judges whether something is true?
by marcus_holmes 6y ago
As always, who judges whether something is true?
- imustbeevil 6y agoThe government, scientists, experts in various fields, people who have proven to tell the truth in the past, etc. You obviously still have your own ability to determine what fits your model of the universe and what doesn't. These are just groups of people more likely to have access to information that you might not. You don't have to trust anyone, but in a system where someone has to judge what is true, these groups are closer than the alternative, which would be people with no qualifications, no training, and no history of telling the truth. If you have another alternative I'm all ears.
- sandoooo 6y ago>The government, scientists, experts in various fields, people who have proven to tell the truth in the past, etc. But how has it been implemented in practice? If you look at the raw numbers, generally we rely on the lowest bidders amongst Facebook/Google/Twitter's third-world-country subcontractors, as well as the Chinese government.
- imustbeevil 6y agoThe existing practice is for the community of these sites to upvote good content and downvote bad content. Separately, moderators purge controversial content as a check/balance to the voting system. If users feel that the moderation is inconsistent with their content desires, they choose a different site to frequent, as is the case in market systems.
- sandoooo 6y agoagain, if you look at the whole system in aggregate, the existing practice is for GooFaceTwitBaba to farm out their moderation works to subcontractors, while also bending backwards to prevalent political headwinds to preserve their shareholder value. If users feel that the moderation is inconsistent with their content desires, they are free to leave the megaplatforms and become approximately completely irrelevant, thus achieving the exact same effect as being deplatformed.
- imustbeevil 6y agoWhat is your alternative system? It's very easy to point out that nothing is perfect. It's very difficult to come up with a better solution.
- vorpalhex 6y agoOften times the truth is not popular, even amongst those who should be protecting it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_Trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_Trial
- vharuck 6y agoFar more often, the truth is "popular" but boring. Not every nay-sayer is Galileo.
- Falling3 6y agoGovernments, scientists, and experts have also been proven to be wrong and to have lied in the past.
- Nihilartikel 6y agoA scientist being wrong is GOOD! The scientific process relies on assimilation of negative results. If a scientist is emotionally attached to a result and ignores a result that they don't like, they are no longer engaged in science. Peer review and replication is the correcting factor for the unfortunate reality that science must be, for the moment carried out by humans. At the very least, when operating properly science becomes less wrong. That cannot be said for politicians who are interested in nothing but confirmation of their preconceptions. There is a special place in hell for those who cynically use the fact that scientists are sometimes wrong as an attack against the very existence of knowledge and consensus reality itself.
- Falling3 6y agoI don't disagree with you. The only thing I'm arguing against is the GP's comment that we should blindly put our trust in the groups mentioned. Some of the best parts about science, as you've pointed out, are peer review and replication. There should never be a need to put your faith in an individual scientist and take them at their word. >There is a special place in hell for those who cynically use the fact that scientists are sometimes wrong as an attack against the very existence of knowledge and consensus reality itself. I hope it's clear that I was in no way doing that.
- Nihilartikel 6y agoReading charitably, I don't believe that it's what you meant. But with disturbing frequency, I do see similar words uttered and written with fairly clear cynical intent.
- Falling3 6y agoI completely agree; it's an alarming trend that's used to sew ignorance. Blindly following experts clearly isn't an antidote to that, which is all I was trying to express originally.
- giancarlostoro 6y agoAnother fun one I ask when someone brings up Snopes: Who snopes the snopes? In other words how do we know they are not being biased or thorough enough? I am not saying everything there is wrong but I have ran into weird biased articles before.
- shadowgovt 6y agoThey are biased, but if the facts are accurate, that's irrelevant. A trustworthy organization doing fact checking on one side of the aisle while ignoring inaccuracies from the other side is preferable to no fact-checking at all. Question is: where is Republican Snopes? It's a free information market; why is nobody doing it?
- googthrowaway42 6y agoThere is no Republican Snopes because conservatives, since the Enlightenment, don't do sense making that way (i.e. via institutional consensus). At the end of the day unless you were personally there to witness something or can prove something mathematically or do the science yourself, you are ultimately dependent on some network of trust to inform you of the truth or falsity of something. And even then "true" and "false" outside of logical and mathematical domains is entirely dependent on ones values. That's not to say there's no objective universal set of values. Most people are Liberal (in the American sense) because that's what all the organs of culture promote and reinforce. It's like the "default" position that people adopt. I grew up liberal in a liberal household where we watched Hollywood movies and mainstream news like ABC, NBC, PBS and I listened to NPR and I went to school which was run by generally liberal teachers and administrators and that's pretty much why I was liberal. This is the Cathedral vs the Bazaar approach to sense-making.
- jhardy54 6y agoYou're in for a surprise when you discover Fox News.
- 6y ago
- askxnakjsn 6y agoThis is an excuse to be lazy and not try to establish truth at all, which is way worse than getting the 'truth' wrong sometimes.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoI think this is the core political question of our age, myself.
- garrickvanburen 6y agoThe world is multi-faceted. Situations and individuals are complex. Externalities and exceptions abound. Multiple perspectives can accurately describe the same event - e.g. the fable about the blind me all describing an elephant. Each of their individual descriptions is true. There is also a larger truth that none of them are aware of. That doesn’t make them liars either individually or a group. Additionally, it can be highly politically advantageous to frame, spin, or otherwise mischaracterize, on the thinnest evidence, both out of bad faith and naïveté. So, about Truth with a capital ‘T’, I’d like to paraphrase PK Dick’s statement, “truth is what exists when you stop believing.”
- marcus_holmes 6y agoI totally agree, but it's not much use when trying to counter an anti-vaxxer spreading misinformation via Facebook
- petrocrat 6y agoI tend to agree with you there. I am starting to think that ultimately, though, the answer is one that no one particularly wants to admit because it boils down to two unpalatable options, one distributed and unregulated; the other centralized and regulated. 1) Unregulated: No one is the arbiter of truth, in which case a haphazard group of marketers, propagandists and psyops peddlers reign supreme. This eventually/inevitably consolidates into an organized propaganda outlet. 2) Regulated: A group is selected based on some credential or merit and you end up with essentially a Technocracy. More or less what the "Elites" boogeyman is. If the Technocracy is staffed by scientists and engineers, then it might be the best possibility available. But this also eventually consolidates and leads to an erosion of the eligibility credentials and then non-expert people will gain positions within it for ulterior motives. If the technocratic group is limited in scope of what "truths" it can decide on, then that is potentially a reasonable compromise.
- bena 6y agoYou can. And there's an easy way to smell test a source: What's their response to verification? People who are lying are going to say either you can't or don't want to check up on them. At some point, they're going to say "trust me". Never trust someone who asks for your trust. Someone trustworthy isn't concerned whether or not you trust them. They will just say, "Fine, here's what I used. Show me what I missed."
- marcus_holmes 6y agoSo (effectively) if they don't share their data, they're lying?
- KSteffensen 6y agoProbably, yes.
- bena 6y agoTo paraphrase: Not everyone who hides data is a liar, but all liars hide data. The rule isn't to positively identify liars. The rule isn't to positively identify non-liars either. The rule is to dismiss as many liars as possible as fast as possible. By immediately dismissing anyone who doesn't want you to check their work or doesn't give you all the information necessary to recreate their work, you will dismiss a lot of liars with little effort. You will also dismiss some people who aren't lying, but that's actually ok. It's better to dismiss an honest study that doesn't meet scrutiny rather than accept a dishonest study. Eventually, either the data will come out and you can vet the information, or someone else will reach the same conclusion and they will share their data. Liars can never reach that point.
- bjowen 6y agoOh nobody’s even bothered to think about epistemology before.
- ksdale 6y agoI mean, I know you're joking, but people agree on the easy stuff (mostly, I guess), so all that's left to figure out is the hard stuff. It's true that people have spent thousands of years thinking about epistemology, but my impression is that it's not a solved problem at all.
- dataduck 6y agoI know right? Wittgenstein solved the whole thing in 1922 and yet here we are 100 years later, still acting like "knowing the truth" is a hard problem. (Here's hoping I can avoid the wrath of Poe's law)
- mistermann 6y agoWittgenstein demonstrated that knowing the truth is not hard? Does this refer to a particular publication or idea?
- goldenManatee 6y agoBy that logic, who merits being judge of who other merits being judge? The act of asking your question, is itself a judgement, and a vote to silence others - which is, in whole, a politically violent act.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago> The act of asking your question, is itself a judgement It certainly wasn't intended that way. Maybe you're judging my question incorrectly?
- matmann2001 6y agoWe'll just let Google write another algorithm to handle it and take the human aspect out of the equation /s