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Yes, the fact that we can both disagree on the definition of truth gets to the heart of the subjectivity of truth. I just believe that it can be quantified the
by arthurhur 3y ago
Yes, the fact that we can both disagree on the definition of truth gets to the heart of the subjectivity of truth. I just believe that it can be quantified the same way we elect politicians and value companies.
Consider a presidential election. If you think about it, your vote is claiming "Candidate X should be president," and whether that is your opinion or what you believe to be true, it is capturing a moment in time and your vote reflects that. Leaving aside the nuances of the Electoral College, etc., that is good enough to choose the leader of the free world.
Consider a movie. If it has a 93% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, chances are it's a good movie.
Now, those numbers can change. You may not like the job the president is doing, so you might no longer agree that "Candidate X should be president." Or, perhaps culture shifts and a movie that was initially panned but was oddly prescient or has enjoyed a cult following might be revisited in a different light later on. That is what I want to track.
If you want to buy a stock for a company at a certain price, the price is what it is. You can't say, "Look at their balance sheet, they lose money every year! It should be zero!" The price is what it is, and that is what I consider to be true, whether you agree or disagree. And if you look at a chart of those prices over history, you will see the record of what was true when, and you will see spikes in the graph that are records of the change in narrative around that company. That is what I am trying to do with the history tab, which gives you a graph of sentiment over time.
> The examples you are calling out are errors or mistakes, not changing truth.
The errors or mistakes of yesterday are only errors today. They were true yesterday, and it means that what we accept as true today can be a mistake or error tomorrow. No one knows what will happen in the future, so the best thing we can do is capture this moment and say, this is the best we've got today, maybe it changes tomorrow.
> If people lie and other people believe it, that doesn't make the lie true, it just makes it a lie.
Of course, I see your point. Look at Iraq. Cheney lied, but everyone believed him. But they (the media, the politicians, the public) believed him enough for it to be "true enough" to invade a country. When we went in, what we then believed to be true no longer held true.
These are the moments that are most compelling to me, because eventually when people get called out for lying, they will deny it. Or they will not admit they were wrong. And the media will simply scrub archives of patently wrong stuff if they get called out on things.
However, if someone tells a "lie" but they believe it to be true, are they really lying?
I hope I am making my point clear enough, but I welcome your criticism and it's the reason why I built the app. I hope you try it out.