7 ms·

I realize this discussion will probably go down the political rabbit hole, but I think what's more interesting is that we really have entered a world in the pas

I realize this discussion will probably go down the political rabbit hole, but I think what's more interesting is that we really have entered a world in the past 10-15 years where there is no longer a broad, societally-wide accepted definition of facts. This is a major change for humanity, one I'm not quite sure how we'll cope with. Daniel Patrick Moynahan once famously said "You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts." I'm not sure that's the case anymore.

bamboozled 2y ago
I’m wondering if it’s because so many people seem to be living more than 50% of their lives online. Facts seem less important in the virtual world. Go play with some live electrical wiring and see how quickly facts about electricity become important.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  I think a significant problem is that people are confusing facts with truths. There is only ever one fact, which is immutable as far as the world is concerned. Our ability to perceive facts can change as our ability to do so changes/improves, but the facts themselves will never change. Getting electrocuted is one such very obvious example. Truths, however, are as numerous as there are people and can even change on a whim. Someone could get electrocuted and that's a fact, but whether he agrees is a different question and his answer is his truth regardless of the fact. "Fact"-checkers thus are about truth-checking and specifically programming certain truths upon the commons. A Ministry of Truth. The NPC meme isn't far from the mark. Truths are not facts and facts are not truths. Forcing people to believe, speak, and act in certain ways violates the very basics of human rights. One of the costs of a free society is that everyone has a right to their own opinion, their own truth. Personally, I believe that cost is more than worth the many benefits of a free society; but that's just my truth and you probably have a different idea.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    Reading your comment, could we use another word here, beliefs? If so then I'm not really against people having their own beliefs, except beliefs aren't facts and they can become extremely harmful, especially at scale, even to those holding onto the beliefs. I guess you've heard about the Jonestown massacre, for example? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      >Reading your comment, could we use another word here, beliefs? Doesn't really matter, ultimately certain people want to enforce the notion that there is One True Truth/Belief/Opinion/Narrative/"Fact" and any heretics must be burned at the stake. I like and appreciate a free society, so I am decisively against such notions.
- throw_pm23 2y ago
  That's a great point -- in addition, some facts are less consequential than others. For example, if I go around believing that the Earth is five-thousand years old, it may not affect me negatively at all (unless I'm a geologist or archeologist), in contrast to your electrical wiring fact that would have immediate effect.
- tivert 2y ago
  > I’m wondering if it’s because the majority of people seem to be living more than 50% of their lives online. Facts seem less important in the virtual world. Or when you're online, it's much easier to assemble a hyper conformist bubble (which cultivates a sense of self righteousness) and be rude to people you disagree with (because they're often just an abstraction you'll never interact with again, and also the enemy of your bubble). Then once developed, the habits formed in those spaces can bleed into interactions that aren't so conformist or anonymous.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  Similarly, online discourse as much broader. When online, im the world's foremost expert on fusion reactors, general relativity, geopolitics, genetics, and culture. I can dig up scholarly articles to back my position. If someone disagrees with me, the topic is deep and complex enough that I can't be decisively proven wrong. The nature of the modern era is that everybody has a opinion about even the most niche topic. They get away with this because the stakes are non-existent and people have no real skin in the game. This habitual behavior has become the norm.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    Sam Harris has a great summary of this: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/395-intellectual-authority-and-its-discontents https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/395... It's so true in my opinion "doing research" is has often become, "finding a view that agrees with my world view" and to add to that, using that view to reinforce my beliefs. It's really diabolical.
bhouston 2y ago
> where there is no longer a broad, societally-wide accepted definition of facts. I am not sure it is actually difference. In the lead up to the Iraq War in 2003, there was so much discussion in the media about how Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and those saying it was made up were marginalized. In the end those doubters were right. I think in Vietnam, there was similar misleading statements about cause belli e.g. Gulf of Tonkin Incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident I think that there is often disagreement on facts. I think with Wikipedia existing, we are actually in the gold age of grounded truth. There is always a sizable segment of the population who doesn't really care for truth though and they will just align with their side and be angry. This happens on all sides of the political spectrum. In the past this was pushed via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism and is still pushed via similar outlets today.
- honeybadger223 2y ago
  I couldn't agree more. Truth is, the advances in technology have made it easier for the truth to be revealed. Imagine if the recent events in the last ten or so years were not caught on smartphones and other devices. I feel as if the narrative they would have attempted to sell us would be quite different. This is apparent so many times in recent history as the news spins one story, and someone recording with a phone clearly shows another.
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    But how does this go against the trend of less trust in facts? Surely it should contradict it? Actually, I think very recent technologies are about to: generative AI is going to make it much, much more difficult to prove anything as a fact.
- blueflow 2y ago
  Wikipedia is an improvement, but its still below the standards and methods that are accessible to humans. If you are an expert, you will hate the Wikipedia articles about your field and still be helpless because the garbage in there is referencing some guy who wrote a badly-researched book in 2001.
dustedcodes 2y ago
[flagged]
jeltz 2y ago
Hasn't that been the case much longer than that? The US for example has had a problem with creationists.
blueflow 2y ago
> we really have entered a world in the past 10-15 years where there is no longer a broad, societally-wide accepted definition of facts. Never was :(
CGamesPlay 2y ago
> This is a major change for humanity, one I'm not quite sure how we'll cope with. I don't know, it seems vastly more likely to me that this is a regression to how things have been for thousands of years before the invention of mass media. Like, once mass media was invented, the "set of facts" could be distributed to everyone, and so it exploded, but now the various factions who want to control the narrative have figured out how to use that mass media to share their "set of facts" in the same way.
mik1998 2y ago
There has never been one.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jmuguy 2y ago
Naomi Klein recently said "conspiracy theorists ‘get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right’" and this is how I think a lot of way too online people are. They've correctly judged that the mainstream news is biased or flat out manufacturing consent such as the lead up to the Iraq war. However instead of seeking out actual truth or just better sources of news in response to this, they seek out what makes them feel good and correct in their assumptions. Honestly its the same behavior you see in older people that are "set in their ways" - new evidence and objective truth be damned.
- tzs 2y ago
  > They've correctly judged that the mainstream news is biased or flat out manufacturing consent such as the lead up to the Iraq war It's telling that nearly every time the mainstream media is criticized it's the same handful of incidents that are cited.
_fat_santa 2y ago
I would have to disagree a little. I think what were seeing is the true nature of some of these issues where you have a case where both sides are right and wrong at the same time and it really just depends on your perspective. Take a conflict, any conflict. In most cases you can go to both sides and ask why they are fighting the other side and they will give you a coherent response. In some cases it's easy to judge right and wrong but in other cases it becomes murkier. This applies not just to war but to all social conflicts and issues like healthcare, abortion, immigration, so on and so forth. Now what has happened previously is because media was essentially a monopoly of a few, outlets would take what happened and re-package that into something that typically stood in line with our western values, and that's how roughly everyone was on the same page, we were just being fed roughly the same story we all believed was happening and it was very hard to prove otherwise what happened. Fast forward to now and that monopoly is long gone. Now we get the full unfiltered picture from independent media sources and increasingly just social media from ordinary people on the ground. The full idea doesn't have a concept of right and wrong, both sides of are right and both sides are wrong, just depends on your own personal worldview. This results in people drifting one way or the other depending on their personal beliefs and is a complete fragmentation compared to what we had before.
niemandhier 2y ago
„We have always been at war with Oceania“. Facts and their representation has been changed by governments since time immemorial. The internet probably made us much better in sporting it so we became a bit paranoid.
gooseyard 2y ago
At risk of sounding argumentative, another way of looking at this I think is that the community of people in the US who have known only a facts-first approach to reality are now discovering the size of the community of people whose worldview is effectively tribal. I was raised in a very rural community and many of my most vivid memories are of members of my extended family recounting stories which I now know are urban legends, joking knowingly with one another about how so called experts in far-off cities were confused, and cautionary tales about the horrible things that members of other races would do to you. You can imagine how confusing it was then to go off to college and then to see the world and meet people and discover how much of the mythology I'd absorbed was no more than that. The bulk of the people I've described had very little interaction with the world outside the area where they lived, and the only way they were likely to interact with someone from the facts-first community was via a letter to the editor of some magazine (which might not be published), or if an outsider came to visit, in which case politeness might avoid a confrontation. Social media introduced these two groups to each other, each group thinks the other is comprised of fools and neither is shy about saying so, and here we are. In my own family, I have yet to see a case in which a member of the tribal knowledge community was moved by an argument from a member of the facts-first community; their belief structure seems to ossify at around pubescence and compromising on it in any way would risk a loss of status in that community. I take some comfort in believing that we have not been plopped into a post-truth reality, but rather that providing the internet to rural tribal communities was rather like switching on a light and discovering what things had been hiding before our eyes in the dark. I think its also a generational issue because the difference between my old relatives and their offspring my childrens' age is nearly as stark as the difference between the facts-first and tribal-knowledge communities on the whole. While it sucks that this post-truth era will be with us for a while I'm hopeful that the same internet access that led to this schism will also allow at least some of the kids who grew up like I did to be skeptical about tribal knowledge from a younger age. However you might also argue that now the segment of the entire population who are susceptible to misinformation will be poisoned in the same way I was. Anyhow thanks for your comment; reading it made me stop to think about something that had been bothering me a great deal lately and it was helpful writing this response.
dkarl 2y ago
People used to care if they way they talked about politics made them look intelligent, reasonable, and informed. Now many of them speak online where they get warped signals of approval, and these signals elicit behavior that they would never engage in if they still depended on the good opinion of their friends, neighbors, family, and coworkers. This is liberating and positive in so many dimensions of personal expression, but in politics, the effects are turning out to be the opposite. Some become entirely dependent on these online signals of approval, and they let themselves be guided by a warped perception of political effectiveness, where effectiveness might mean using disinformation to motivate people on "their" side (which I guess actually is politically effective) or it might mean winning meaningless games of online dunking. People who invest time and energy in online political discourse see themselves as heroes, above the judgment of those who don't engage, and see their online activity as brave and dangerous, even though in reality, both sides always go home the winner in their own eyes, and there are no consequences except degraded mental habits all around. It has long been dogma on the far left and far right that the concepts of civility, reasonable debate, and legitimate political process are only cloaks for the brutal exercise of power, and the sooner cast aside the better. If you pay any attention to the quality of how we do politics, you have allowed your liberal oppressors to trick and distract you. Thirty years ago, I heard it from left-wing professors at university and from far-right gun nuts promoting race war in chat rooms. Now it seems a lot closer to the mainstream, on one side in rhetoric and on both sides in practice.
catlikesshrimp 2y ago
It is a catchy phrase for saying that lies are spread by the goverment and the public is willing to pass them as facts. Truth or fact is one and only, perspectives are many, opinions are personal. Lies are infinite.

bamboozled 2y ago

I’m wondering if it’s because so many people seem to be living more than 50% of their lives online. Facts seem less important in the virtual world. Go play with some live electrical wiring and see how quickly facts about electricity become important.

Dalewyn 2y ago
I think a significant problem is that people are confusing facts with truths. There is only ever one fact, which is immutable as far as the world is concerned. Our ability to perceive facts can change as our ability to do so changes/improves, but the facts themselves will never change. Getting electrocuted is one such very obvious example. Truths, however, are as numerous as there are people and can even change on a whim. Someone could get electrocuted and that's a fact, but whether he agrees is a different question and his answer is his truth regardless of the fact. "Fact"-checkers thus are about truth-checking and specifically programming certain truths upon the commons. A Ministry of Truth. The NPC meme isn't far from the mark. Truths are not facts and facts are not truths. Forcing people to believe, speak, and act in certain ways violates the very basics of human rights. One of the costs of a free society is that everyone has a right to their own opinion, their own truth. Personally, I believe that cost is more than worth the many benefits of a free society; but that's just my truth and you probably have a different idea.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Reading your comment, could we use another word here, beliefs? If so then I'm not really against people having their own beliefs, except beliefs aren't facts and they can become extremely harmful, especially at scale, even to those holding onto the beliefs. I guess you've heard about the Jonestown massacre, for example? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    >Reading your comment, could we use another word here, beliefs? Doesn't really matter, ultimately certain people want to enforce the notion that there is One True Truth/Belief/Opinion/Narrative/"Fact" and any heretics must be burned at the stake. I like and appreciate a free society, so I am decisively against such notions.
throw_pm23 2y ago
That's a great point -- in addition, some facts are less consequential than others. For example, if I go around believing that the Earth is five-thousand years old, it may not affect me negatively at all (unless I'm a geologist or archeologist), in contrast to your electrical wiring fact that would have immediate effect.
tivert 2y ago
> I’m wondering if it’s because the majority of people seem to be living more than 50% of their lives online. Facts seem less important in the virtual world. Or when you're online, it's much easier to assemble a hyper conformist bubble (which cultivates a sense of self righteousness) and be rude to people you disagree with (because they're often just an abstraction you'll never interact with again, and also the enemy of your bubble). Then once developed, the habits formed in those spaces can bleed into interactions that aren't so conformist or anonymous.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
Similarly, online discourse as much broader. When online, im the world's foremost expert on fusion reactors, general relativity, geopolitics, genetics, and culture. I can dig up scholarly articles to back my position. If someone disagrees with me, the topic is deep and complex enough that I can't be decisively proven wrong. The nature of the modern era is that everybody has a opinion about even the most niche topic. They get away with this because the stakes are non-existent and people have no real skin in the game. This habitual behavior has become the norm.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Sam Harris has a great summary of this: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/395-intellectual-authority-and-its-discontents https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/395... It's so true in my opinion "doing research" is has often become, "finding a view that agrees with my world view" and to add to that, using that view to reinforce my beliefs. It's really diabolical.

bhouston 2y ago

> where there is no longer a broad, societally-wide accepted definition of facts. I am not sure it is actually difference. In the lead up to the Iraq War in 2003, there was so much discussion in the media about how Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and those saying it was made up were marginalized. In the end those doubters were right. I think in Vietnam, there was similar misleading statements about cause belli e.g. Gulf of Tonkin Incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident I think that there is often disagreement on facts. I think with Wikipedia existing, we are actually in the gold age of grounded truth. There is always a sizable segment of the population who doesn't really care for truth though and they will just align with their side and be angry. This happens on all sides of the political spectrum. In the past this was pushed via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism and is still pushed via similar outlets today.

honeybadger223 2y ago
I couldn't agree more. Truth is, the advances in technology have made it easier for the truth to be revealed. Imagine if the recent events in the last ten or so years were not caught on smartphones and other devices. I feel as if the narrative they would have attempted to sell us would be quite different. This is apparent so many times in recent history as the news spins one story, and someone recording with a phone clearly shows another.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  But how does this go against the trend of less trust in facts? Surely it should contradict it? Actually, I think very recent technologies are about to: generative AI is going to make it much, much more difficult to prove anything as a fact.
blueflow 2y ago
Wikipedia is an improvement, but its still below the standards and methods that are accessible to humans. If you are an expert, you will hate the Wikipedia articles about your field and still be helpless because the garbage in there is referencing some guy who wrote a badly-researched book in 2001.

dustedcodes 2y ago

[flagged]

jeltz 2y ago

Hasn't that been the case much longer than that? The US for example has had a problem with creationists.

blueflow 2y ago

> we really have entered a world in the past 10-15 years where there is no longer a broad, societally-wide accepted definition of facts. Never was :(

CGamesPlay 2y ago

> This is a major change for humanity, one I'm not quite sure how we'll cope with. I don't know, it seems vastly more likely to me that this is a regression to how things have been for thousands of years before the invention of mass media. Like, once mass media was invented, the "set of facts" could be distributed to everyone, and so it exploded, but now the various factions who want to control the narrative have figured out how to use that mass media to share their "set of facts" in the same way.

mik1998 2y ago

There has never been one.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jmuguy 2y ago

Naomi Klein recently said "conspiracy theorists ‘get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right’" and this is how I think a lot of way too online people are. They've correctly judged that the mainstream news is biased or flat out manufacturing consent such as the lead up to the Iraq war. However instead of seeking out actual truth or just better sources of news in response to this, they seek out what makes them feel good and correct in their assumptions. Honestly its the same behavior you see in older people that are "set in their ways" - new evidence and objective truth be damned.

tzs 2y ago
> They've correctly judged that the mainstream news is biased or flat out manufacturing consent such as the lead up to the Iraq war It's telling that nearly every time the mainstream media is criticized it's the same handful of incidents that are cited.

_fat_santa 2y ago

I would have to disagree a little. I think what were seeing is the true nature of some of these issues where you have a case where both sides are right and wrong at the same time and it really just depends on your perspective. Take a conflict, any conflict. In most cases you can go to both sides and ask why they are fighting the other side and they will give you a coherent response. In some cases it's easy to judge right and wrong but in other cases it becomes murkier. This applies not just to war but to all social conflicts and issues like healthcare, abortion, immigration, so on and so forth. Now what has happened previously is because media was essentially a monopoly of a few, outlets would take what happened and re-package that into something that typically stood in line with our western values, and that's how roughly everyone was on the same page, we were just being fed roughly the same story we all believed was happening and it was very hard to prove otherwise what happened. Fast forward to now and that monopoly is long gone. Now we get the full unfiltered picture from independent media sources and increasingly just social media from ordinary people on the ground. The full idea doesn't have a concept of right and wrong, both sides of are right and both sides are wrong, just depends on your own personal worldview. This results in people drifting one way or the other depending on their personal beliefs and is a complete fragmentation compared to what we had before.

niemandhier 2y ago

„We have always been at war with Oceania“. Facts and their representation has been changed by governments since time immemorial. The internet probably made us much better in sporting it so we became a bit paranoid.

gooseyard 2y ago

At risk of sounding argumentative, another way of looking at this I think is that the community of people in the US who have known only a facts-first approach to reality are now discovering the size of the community of people whose worldview is effectively tribal. I was raised in a very rural community and many of my most vivid memories are of members of my extended family recounting stories which I now know are urban legends, joking knowingly with one another about how so called experts in far-off cities were confused, and cautionary tales about the horrible things that members of other races would do to you. You can imagine how confusing it was then to go off to college and then to see the world and meet people and discover how much of the mythology I'd absorbed was no more than that. The bulk of the people I've described had very little interaction with the world outside the area where they lived, and the only way they were likely to interact with someone from the facts-first community was via a letter to the editor of some magazine (which might not be published), or if an outsider came to visit, in which case politeness might avoid a confrontation. Social media introduced these two groups to each other, each group thinks the other is comprised of fools and neither is shy about saying so, and here we are. In my own family, I have yet to see a case in which a member of the tribal knowledge community was moved by an argument from a member of the facts-first community; their belief structure seems to ossify at around pubescence and compromising on it in any way would risk a loss of status in that community. I take some comfort in believing that we have not been plopped into a post-truth reality, but rather that providing the internet to rural tribal communities was rather like switching on a light and discovering what things had been hiding before our eyes in the dark. I think its also a generational issue because the difference between my old relatives and their offspring my childrens' age is nearly as stark as the difference between the facts-first and tribal-knowledge communities on the whole. While it sucks that this post-truth era will be with us for a while I'm hopeful that the same internet access that led to this schism will also allow at least some of the kids who grew up like I did to be skeptical about tribal knowledge from a younger age. However you might also argue that now the segment of the entire population who are susceptible to misinformation will be poisoned in the same way I was. Anyhow thanks for your comment; reading it made me stop to think about something that had been bothering me a great deal lately and it was helpful writing this response.

dkarl 2y ago

People used to care if they way they talked about politics made them look intelligent, reasonable, and informed. Now many of them speak online where they get warped signals of approval, and these signals elicit behavior that they would never engage in if they still depended on the good opinion of their friends, neighbors, family, and coworkers. This is liberating and positive in so many dimensions of personal expression, but in politics, the effects are turning out to be the opposite. Some become entirely dependent on these online signals of approval, and they let themselves be guided by a warped perception of political effectiveness, where effectiveness might mean using disinformation to motivate people on "their" side (which I guess actually is politically effective) or it might mean winning meaningless games of online dunking. People who invest time and energy in online political discourse see themselves as heroes, above the judgment of those who don't engage, and see their online activity as brave and dangerous, even though in reality, both sides always go home the winner in their own eyes, and there are no consequences except degraded mental habits all around. It has long been dogma on the far left and far right that the concepts of civility, reasonable debate, and legitimate political process are only cloaks for the brutal exercise of power, and the sooner cast aside the better. If you pay any attention to the quality of how we do politics, you have allowed your liberal oppressors to trick and distract you. Thirty years ago, I heard it from left-wing professors at university and from far-right gun nuts promoting race war in chat rooms. Now it seems a lot closer to the mainstream, on one side in rhetoric and on both sides in practice.

catlikesshrimp 2y ago

It is a catchy phrase for saying that lies are spread by the goverment and the public is willing to pass them as facts. Truth or fact is one and only, perspectives are many, opinions are personal. Lies are infinite.