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I may be wrong if I am stating an opinion and I cannot be wrong if I stating a fact. Our society, since it got consumed by “social” media, has lost ability to a

• auggierose 3mo ago
  Every "fact" you state really includes the opinion that the "fact" is indeed a fact. Is climate change man-made?
  • khalic 3mo ago
    Are you arguing against the existence of an objective reality? Seems a little extreme. There are countless facts, indisputably so. Gravity, death, the fact you wrote me an answer, the fact I'm writing you an answer. These aren't opinions
    • croes 3mo ago
      There people that gravity doesn’t exist and it’s some kind of buoyancy. Death as the final end of existence? There are many religions that claim that isn’t true. Nowadays it’s even harder who wrote what but next week if I don’t find that text again, can I be sure it was written or could be just in a dream?
      • khalic 3mo ago
        1. yes they are objectively wrong, a persons belief does not need to be tied to a fact 2. death as in death of the body, it's very much inescapable 3. the last part is just uncertainty, hardly an argument against objective reality
        • jnd-cz 3mo ago
          Ad 2, How do you define it, precisely? Today we have the technology to keep the body alive even if it would stop functioning long time ago on it's own. Is the person still alive? Is the body still alive? Some bodies need permanent technical devices to be able to live, yet they can reach high age. Is it cheating or not?
        • lowbuzz 3mo ago
          Let me be annoying and tell you about your second point as I don't really understand your first one. Your perspective is that of a living looking at a dead body. Death itself though isn't an experience of life, Meaning that we can't really talk about what happens after we die. We just don't know and we probably can't know what or how death is. So any answer goes, really. I mean you are right uncertainty doesn't exclude objective reality, but my question in an argument would be: What do you even mean by objective reality?
    • JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
      > Are you arguing against the existence of an objective reality? I’d argue against absolute certainty in any knowledge. That isn’t a statement about reality, just our measure of it.
      • prmph 3mo ago
        I can be absolutely certain of my perception and recollection of what my consciousness is experiencing and has experienced. Note that the truth of this statement does not depend on any certainty about external reality, nor does it depend on certainty that what I perceive or remember is happening or actually happened.
        • JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
          > nor does it depend certainty that what I perceive or remember is what is It absolutely assumes a unitary conscious experience versus what increasingly seems to be the case, a bunch of narratives our brains thread into a cohesive story ex post facto. Put another way, there very well may be hard limits to how much a human-like consciousness can understand itself.
          • prmph 3mo ago
            > a bunch of narratives our brains thread into a cohesive story ex post facto That is exactly the reality I am asserting, whether or not they actually describe an "external" reality
            • JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
              I guess my argument is you can’t be absolutely certain about what your internal reality is. Perception, as a measure, even when pointed entirely internally, is fundamentally fuzzy.
              • prmph 3mo ago
                My internal reality I hope tracks external reality. And what I can be certain about is what my internal reality is. And if you think I cannot be sure of that, I think I can be certain about I think my internal reality is. And if you think I cannot be sure of even that, I think I can be certain about I think what I think my internal reality is. It's perception all the way down, recursively. The reality is result of this taken to infinity.
    • jnd-cz 3mo ago
      Objective reality is complex and hard to explain or list all the facts in a single argument session. People are also good at cherry picking the facts they agree with and disregarding other related facts. As others wrote, there are also bunch of trade offs, not many subjects have clear and low amount of facts that everyone can agree upon. People tend to argue most about society rather than theoretical math or physics. Like you can argue about what is the perfect form of government but you also have to account for the people who are part of the governing and being governed, they are not ideal actors, so the practical reality isn't straightforward. Coming back, what is objective reality, anyway? Each person perceives the reality differently. And if you go down to measure single basic part of the reality you will find out the act of measurement already changes the outcome. Or we can agree about the final, ideal state but not how to get there.
    • dahart 3mo ago
      > There are countless facts, indisputably so. True, but isn’t the problem here that even though there are many facts, no one of us knows most of those facts with absolute certainty, and we learned them from other people, therefore we primarily hold opinions about facts as opposed to know them first hand. My experience of gravity correlates with the explanation I was given in physics class, but I haven’t myself proven anything about it, and I just trust other people’s stories when they tell me gravity affects light or time. I think about this often when contemplating arguments; there’s almost nothing I personally know first hand. Like you I believe in facts, but I recognize that I’m not the source of most facts, and I’m relaying a story someone else told me. I’m guessing this is one of the reasons facts can be so easily argued, because there are gaps between facts being established and facts being told and shared. Like, it’s pretty common for scientific research results to be oversimplified and told & shared in a way that doesn’t capture the entire truth, right?
    • redsocksfan45 3mo ago
      [dead]
    • auggierose 3mo ago
      > Are you arguing against the existence of an objective reality? Seems a little extreme. No, I am not arguing against the existence of an objective reality. I argue against the capability of most people to accurately assess what that objective reality is. You for example apparently cannot even assess the meaning of my clear and simple sentence, why would I trust you to be able to assess any more complex situation?
      • khalic 3mo ago
        Nobody’s asking you to trust peoples’ assessments, this is why reproduction exists in science. Your sentence was very much ambiguous, you should think before writing
        • auggierose 3mo ago
          There is nothing ambiguous about my sentence. Once you learnt thinking, read it again.
          • khalic 3mo ago
            If you can't find the issue with your statement, you should probably not be giving anybody lessons about thinking or learning...
  • folkrav 3mo ago
    Do I need to hold the opinion that water is wet for it to be factual? To answer your question, if by climate change you refer to the dramatic post-industrialisation acceleration of warming and climate disturbances, the correct answer is "the overwhelming majority of existing evidence points to yes".
    • someonebaggy 3mo ago
      [dead]
    • what 3mo ago
      Is water wet though? It’s the substance that makes other things wet, but is it wet itself?
      • folkrav 3mo ago
        If we go full on aykchyually on this, technically no, sure. I however assume most English speakers would be familiar with the idiom lol
  • miyoji 3mo ago
    It's too early in the morning for this much sophistry.
  • conductr 3mo ago
    > Is climate change man-made? When having the climate change conversation with deniers I roll it back to; is the climate warming? They almost always[0] agree it is and we agree it’s evidenced. So now we’ve agreed on a fact and have common ground to advance the conversation. Then I can make my case that if we know the climate is warming then we have a responsibility/necessity to reduce our contribution to it and should likely invest in finding ways to reverse it. Because even if we are not the cause, we have a lot at stake. [0] in rare case they can’t agree to this, I usually ask them if they’ve encountered a source for that and then ultimately implore them to at least read something on the topic before forming their opinion about it, there’s plenty of data available I won’t push them down any path that may be seen untrustworthy or politically misaligned with their beliefs, I just leave it alone there because it’s usually quite obvious they’re parroting the talking points of some pundit without doing any research themselves. As the article mentioned, this argument would just become an ego war more than anything.
    • genewitch 3mo ago
      i disagree that it' warming, so where do you start with me? I'm not being coy, i 100% believe that all of the warming detected is strictly down to poor placement of sensors and incorrect assumptions thereof in the resultant data. So what we will end up arguing about, if we get past that particularity of my thoughts, is about models. And i hate arguing about models. edit: i think probably the cities are getting "warmer" but that's not climate change that's city change. In that cities are growing, generally, with more stuff paved over. We need to plant more trees and have less concrete/asphalt in cities if we want to reverse this trend. also less people, but that's not going to happen anytime soon.
      • goatlover 3mo ago
        Do you doubt that greenhouse gases being emitted into the atmosphere have gone up since humans started burning fossil fuels, and do you doubt the physics of how they trap solar radiation? Do you doubt that climate scientists know how to put sensors in the oceans, in rural areas and released in weather balloons along with satellites to measure temperatures across the planet year by year? Or that they can extract ice cores to measure trapped atmospheric gas from thousands of years ago? That sort of thing.
  • bdangubic 3mo ago
    I made $xxx,xxx.00 last year, that is a fact, I can definitively prove it via deposits to my bank account. It is a fact. Climate change being man-made or not definitely does not fall into “this is a fact”
    • goatlover 3mo ago
      So it's only a fact if you can verify it, and not if the scientific community can? And you're consistent about this via all scientific findings you haven't verified like the balance in your bank account? You reject as fact any astronomical data or microscopic results you haven't seen with your own eyes? Or any satellite data you haven't analyzed yourself?
      • bdangubic 3mo ago
        Not sure where you are getting this at and what does "scientific community" have to do with anything? There are things that are play and simply facts that are absolute and unquestionable. And then there are things that are open for debate because they are not facts. "Climate change is man-made" is so broad that a 10-year old can easily debate both sides of that argument.
        • goatlover 3mo ago
          Climate change being man made is a scientific fact as in humans are driving the majority of warming since the industrial revolution by pumping increasing amounts of green house gases in the atmosphere. This warming is simple physics even if the effect on weather is complex. Venus is an example of run-way greenhouse warming. A ten year old can debate what they want, opinions don't change scientific facts (burning fossil fuels puts greenhouse gases in the air which trap heat from the sun). Consensus meaning most most climatologists agree on what the data and models are telling them. There are not two sides to the basic facts of the matter (complexities around which models are more accurate or what society should do is a separate matter).
  • goatlover 3mo ago
    Yes it's a scientific fact humans have been causing the current warming by burning fossil fuels since the industrial revoluton. You can make skeptical arguments against this is you're willing to dismiss empirical data and methodology behind scientific facts. The people who do this aren't consistent and cherry pick which empirical data, models and methodologies to dismiss. It tends to align with some belief challenged by the science. Or their financial interests. It's much harder to be a consistent skeptic, since empirical data is verifiable, and the scientific method works for all sorts of fields and technologies. But it could all be dream of a mental patient in a simulation god programmed while making a bet with the devil.