> I realized that I couldn’t restrict my search for evidence to the familiar authoritative sources without ignoring a near-infinite number of new sources
This happens because the so-called "authoritative sources" have lost their trustworthiness, creating a vacuum that is filled by new sources, some good and some bad.
The problem is, people are bad at thinking for themselves, and basically outsource their beliefs to third parties. Are we worse at this than we used to be, or has it always been like this?
We need more primary sources of information, and less filters trying to persuade us, who often have unseen agendas and different motivations.
Gathering and evaluating information is hard work and can be a significant time sink. Most people have other things going on in their lives that they'd like to have time for.
Exactly. I was in a discussion thread where someone mentioned a book that was accusing some group of becoming apostate (in terms of the context of this particular community). Now most people in that community don't think the author of said book is an unbiased source of information - in fact the bias seems quite blatant. But people in the thread were saying "Have you read the book?!" and most people said "No, I've got better things to do" to which the reply was "Well, then you don't want the truth!"... and on and on. Who's got time to check out every crackpot source and determine it's veracity?
>I realized that I couldn’t restrict my search for evidence to the familiar authoritative sources without ignoring a near-infinite number of new sources
This was in the early 2000's when the CIA analyst said this, but with familiarity of a time when the majority of online sources had been trustworthy (if not completely authoritative), it was easier to navigate the pitfalls at the time.
It was still possible to judiciously exploit the new sources for deep research to a worthwhile degree for another reason because there was lots more info (but noisier by far) coming from all directions, but I wouldn't say they were exactly near-infinite.
Not compared to today.
Now I would say it's near-infinite.
Although AI may not have yet had the full effect that it could be capable of.
I have too often lately been in a situation where I cannot find any authoritative sources for a topic where there should be one. The first time this happened it was deeply unsettling - I couldn't recall going back a decade a single time I couldn't find a random piece of information - it was sometime mid-2022. Now it's so commonplace I just resign myself that I may just not get an answer to whatever question I have.
The most ironic thing would be if this "post truth" situation we seem to be in drives people back to brick and mortar libraries.
I am curious about the problem from the perspective of a startup idea / nonprofit website. What would you look for in an authoritative source that doesn't exist now? And which topics were you looking into?
It's not really that they don't exist, but it's silly stupid to find them now.
For instance - ddg, google, doesn't really matter the search engine - typing in something like "ohtani batting average with runners in scoring position with 2 outs" used to be so easy it'd practically pop up in the quick answers with the exact link to the ESPN table or dudewhoneverleavesbasement.com that has tracked every baseball stat for the last 150 years.
Now you just get basically the same results for "ohtani batting average" or "ohtani news." It's impossibly frustrating. It's like that with everything now.
I guess that's more of a problem with search than anything else, but honestly, search is the main way people navigate the web. If I want anything authoritative, honestly, I'm probably going to wikipedia to see a source list and then checking out authors in the local library. Anything dated post 2022 I consider inherently unreliable.
I think the issue is, dudewhoneverleavesbasement.com stopped working on his website and his potential successor is more likely to be trying to turn that information into an interesting youtube video.
I think this is definitely an issue but not the only one. In the game knowledge part of the web, there used to be personal sites written in plain html of some guy’s faq who figured out every single thing in a final fantasy game and google would draw on stuff like that. Now you get AI SEO spam heavily monetized drivel that contains a lot of inaccurate or outright false info.
I think the small sites like that are either mostly gone or simply not ever indexed.
I've had the same bad experience with search as you've had, but my conclusion was that AI tools are just going to replace "using a search engine" in the near future. Google is more and more unusable to me.
That doesn't exactly solve the authoritative problem, but theoretically it makes it more centralized (one AI company vs. innumerable websites.)
What worries me is as soon as we accept AI results with no fact checking (or ignore it) they will become the means to directly manipulate people without any recourse for judgement about veracity. Like phishing emails with perfect spelling and well formatted HTML.
On the one hand this is definitely a potential issue.
On the other hand I’m not sure how the current state of the web is really any different. We just rely on Google or whatever search engine to “fact check.”
You're looking for https://stathead.com/baseball/ but it is, for better or worse, a subscription service. You can get the raw stats from https://www.baseball-reference.com but you'd have to make your own filters to get splits like that. I have no idea if these surface highly on search engines (I guess not), but thankfully I've used primary sources for statistical information and raw data for decades and simply remember what they are without needing a search engine. I'm good as long they continue to exist, I guess.
Historical data is available in a number of places and is free to use for whatever purpose, commercial or otherwise.
More recent data is not. Major League Baseball has wide open APIs that give you a huge amount of nearly real-time data, and runs a site where you can bulk download data. For personal, non-commercial purposes only. They will go after you for running a commercial service and demand licensing fees.
That's basically why everything polished is now behind a subscription, while you can DIY all you want.
The authoritative source has to be .. authoritative. And it also has to be timely, i.e. updated in real time. This is hard. Being an authoritative source for certain sub-types of information is definitely a viable business, but only if your information is being used by other people to make business decisions. See, for example, the Bloomberg terminal.
For more and more people, a random YouTuber seemed preferable to a credentialled expert
People are too used to "having a platform" being a credential in and of itself. They wouldn't let just anyone be a TV News anchor or have a drive time talk radio show or write a book, right? There have always been snake oil salesmen, but what's unique about today is that it's very easy to make yourself look like Dan Rather or Barbara Walters or even Hunter S. Thompson. Some people fall into this false authority trap.
Anecdotally, I find that older generations are more willing to accept what they see online just because it is "published" online. Hopefully this is something that works itself out as more and more people grow up with these platforms.
Or maybe instead, distrust of credentialed experts is a natural consequence of it becoming easier to catch people out when they lie?
If say Fauci declares that there was no gain-of-function research, and some random blogger does a FOIA that turns up a paper trail proving otherwise? That's much easier to find out about these days than if I was limited to what a TV channel or two and maybe a couple newspapers decided to cover.
Part of the issue is the aborted attempt to turn journalism into a profession. Professionals, by and large, carry personal liability for errors, negligence, and deliberate bad behavior that harms their clients. Journalists are supposed to serve the public interest, but they generally only have narrow personal liability for torts like defamation. Recent precedent further limits that personal liability.
Despite this, journalists in the later part of the 20th century successfully created an aura of professionalism borrowed. Cronkite, Rather, the 60 Minutes crew, etc. projected a sense of seriousness and professional care. In some instances, the newspapers really did and to some extent still do engage in fact checking and other professional activities to increase reliability. However, because all of these measures are self-enforcing, they became over time even more corrupted than they were before.
They increasingly relied on anonymous sourcing for important matters, which is inherently open to abuse (it's why the Constitution requires that a defendant be able to confront their accusers and witnesses against them). They could no longer maintain this false aura because they were repeatedly confronted by bloggers and other small creators with evidence of their unreliability.
The standard proposed solution to the problems created by powerful universal publishing technology tends to be a licensing regime of some kind as a preventative measure, or otherwise that publishing technology providers submit to close supervision by the state (as they did during the cough cough era).
I think the better way that comports better with the Constitution is to just to enforce the criminal laws and facilitate civil suits against individuals retroactively for the harms that they cause through illegal speech. There are lots of kinds of illegal speech, e.g. you cannot engage in the unauthorized practice of law, you cannot provide medical advice without a license, you cannot defame people, you cannot incite riots, you cannot procure criminal acts, you cannot defraud, you cannot infringe on copyright, and so on and so forth. More lawsuits and prosecutions for illegal speech -- a reactive way of addressing the issues -- is less harmful and better comports with the Constitution than proactive means such as requiring that every social media user have a license that can be revoked or that the platforms submit to close management by the Article II government.
> Part of the issue is the aborted attempt to turn journalism into a profession.
The term "unfunded mandate" come to mind. Journalists should aspire to a higher standard (just as software developers should), but nobody's incentivizing it. Get the scoop, get the clicks, publish first and make it an exclusive. Traditional media is getting squeezed from all angles, who's got time to fact check, who's got the budget for deep research? It's hard to blame the poor journalist, who's just trying to survive in a landscape where anyone with a social media account is given the same consideration as an authority.
We've just been through a week of Americans on Twitter getting shocked at Brits on Twitter because there's some, very minimal, legal action being taken against people who incited riots through false statements on social media. I think you need to be much clearer about what this actually means. Especially as there has been very little prosecution of Jan 6 "inciters" (as opposed to people who were physically there committing crimes while being filmed)
> There are lots of kinds of illegal speech, e.g. you cannot engage in the unauthorized practice of law, you cannot provide medical advice without a license, you cannot defame people, you cannot incite riots, you cannot procure criminal acts, you cannot defraud, you cannot infringe on copyright, and so on and so forth.
Is this sentence unauthorized practice of law?
edit: It's a rhetorical question. If I had power over policing and the justice system, and I disagreed with you, and it were actually illegal to give legal or medical advice to people without a license (which it is not), it would absolutely be unauthorized practice of law and the spreading of misinformation. I might also claim that you're doing it to help Russia weaken a potential future law that would force journalists to be licensed. I will claim this with no evidence, but I will claim it everywhere, through dozens of different, soon-to-be-licensed, mouths. The rumor will be used as grounds to investigate you.
What caused you to believe that the unlicensed practice of medicine and law are legal? Are you drawing a distinction between advice and information, perhaps?
> Anecdotally, I find that older generations are more willing to accept what they see online just because it is "published" online. Hopefully this is something that works itself out as more and more people grow up with these platforms.
That only applies when the content is something they philosophically agree with. Those same people, when presented with information they disagree with, will say "they'll let anyone put anything on the internet", with a completely straight face. The cognitive dissonance is strong.
I would think a key difference is once this was found out, Dan Rather was fired.
There will always be failures of integrity. Our expectation can't be infallible people, but rather the rigor of an organization to care about the failures.
Who is "they"? You seem to be implying that CBS was aware of the deception but hid it until its hand was forced by bloggers. Was that the case? Because otherwise they obviously couldn't act on something they didn't know.
I think almost certainly their primary motivation was self-preservation.
The media simply lies, fabricates, deflects, obsfucates, cherry picks too much to assume they are acting in good faith.
The opposite is a problem too when authoritative sources on X topic start to talk about Y topic as if they still have the same knowledge and expertise and we should trust them. I see this more and more everywhere, here on HN too.
I wonder if this is partially caused by the internet spreading accurate knowledge for the first decade or so of its existence, which went against people’s existing sets of beliefs. After which they’re primed that the beliefs they held for decades (pre-internet) could easily be wrong.
How many times have you believed and old wives tale, but then found out it’s not true at all? Now apply that less to specific beliefs but more generally, and scale it across all your beliefs.
> After which they’re primed that the beliefs they held for decades (pre-internet) could easily be wrong.
I wish the majority of dwellers of the Internet is able to do this (I feel I'm quite reflective), but it seems like a lot of the noise online is people insisting that they've been right the whole time...
What is funny about all this is treating Harari as some kind of expert.
His training is in medieval military history. He is not an anthropologist. Yet he is always make grand pronouncements about human behavior.
Most of his fame is not due to his academic achievements but because he can write very engaging popular works. Harari has a lot more in common with a popular YouTube “expert” than he would care to admit.
>His training is in medieval military history. He is not an anthropologist. Yet he is always make grand pronouncements about human behavior.
Some of the best software engineers studied something else. Only because his training is in something else doesn't mean he didn't read up on it or is not knowledgeable about human behavior.
Also history kind of chronicles aggregate human behavior, so it's at least a related discipline.
I'm not saying he is knowledgeable, mind you, I just think you shouldn't pigeonhole people based on doing exactly what they studied. Because many people don't do exactly what they studied and are experts in it.
Since he's using the New Yorker's journalism license here, he becomes an authority on whatever subject he wants. Disagreeing with him here is some sort of "-information" with prefix, and may get you deleted on facebook.
> You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.” Back then, info-determinism was exciting. Today, it feels like a challenge which we must surmount, or else. ♦
You can learn more about the deranged minds of CIA officers and "public intellectuals" from the backgrounds of their arguments than you can from taking them at face value.
These people are _completely afraid_ of living in a world which does not require their permission or ideology in order to function. This article is written entirely from the "state" point of view and completely lacks any "humanity" whatsoever.
> And yet, “the public opposes, but does not propose.” Demolishing ideas is easy in a subreddit; crafting new ones there is mostly beside the point.
Give me a break. Tons of new ideas and new systems and new projects have been created on the internet using precisely this mechanism and with zero government authority involved. This is a completely ridiculous assertion by the article.
> How can a society function when the rejection of knowledge becomes a political act?
Is it the rejection of knowledge or simply the rejection of authority? Perhaps people expect those in authority to actually explain themselves, to act in a transparent manner, and to not use their power to unfairly benefit one group over another.
> But democracy on a mass scale depends on mass institutions—mass media, mass education, mass culture—that seem likely to fracture or mutate with the arrival of A.I. The forms of government that flourished in one info-epoch may not thrive in the next.
I'm sorry, but what a total crock of shit, this idea that "mass anything" is somehow _required_ for "mass democracy" to function, or even that "mass democracy" is something experienced in any of our governments.
It really sounds like these people want to diminish humanity at all costs, in favor of AI, so they can regain control of our information space, and have the ability to manipulate the entire world en masse and without any oversight or responsibility for it.
I'm completely grossed out by this article and the people within it.
Thank you for articulating these criticisms. IMO people like the author are pining for high modernism when we've been in a postmodern media (and cultural) landscape for at least a couple decades now. It's the same impulse that has extremely online right wingers pining for "trad" values while posting waifus. They seem to wish we could live in the Eisenhower administration forever. Unfortunately for these people, that's just not possible.
Edit: also want to add this quote:
>...disillusioned voters might adopt more realistic expectations about how much leaders can improve their lives.
This article positions itself against "nihilism" but this is the most nihilistic thing I've seen in a piece of political writing. This is no more than a way to say that elites should tell voters: "Peons, stop expecting your lives to get better. That's not our relationship. This is not a democracy, and your role in society is to suffer silently while also praising us."
> This article is written entirely from the "state" point of view and completely lacks any "humanity" whatsoever.
Well of course it's pro-statist: it's from The New Yorker. There aren't many more leftist publication than that one and leftists love the state: it's their religion.
To these people every single problem is due to "not enough state" and the solution is always "more state", which can be seen here:
> But democracy on a mass scale depends on mass institutions—mass media, mass education, mass culture ...
Yeah. Mass state. Mass mind control. More left.
I honestly don't understand how anyone who thinks for himself cannot see through this pile of horseshit.
IMVHO and perception we live in an era of very informed ignorance, NOT in the Socrates sense of course... I can speculate about various cohort of informed ignorant (me included), like those who demand "numbers" but not care how they was generated, so for them a "good looking" page of data CERTAINLY it's true or those who read only a specific news source and so on.
The signal/noise ratio it's not a new thing of course, but the real problem is mean (absence of) culture not information per se.
The author would have done well to read "The Beginning of Infinity" by Deutsch which has well rounded discussion of different methods of epistemology espoused over time. The development past authority need not result in anarchy. Deutsch's view, embracing fallibility can achieve an advancement of human creativity and knowledge.
Earthweb (https://www.baen.com/earthweb.html) is a story of a version of the internet where Gurri's "acerbic internet" was a more PH-neutral environment.
Absolutely, we are. The greeks recognize the phenomenon early through their concept of logos, and how it comes about is teche fromw here we get the word "technology".
Currently, we have built our systems so strongly that we practically develop technologically deterministically. Can we help but develop new computer security technology? No. Can we decide NOT to make computers faster, even if making new technology constantly requires the unsustainable extraction of raw materials and is polluting the entire planet? No, because SOMEONE will make their computer faster, so we call have to do so to keep up.
Our modern society is so intertwined, that we cannot make decisions at ALL on which technologies to develop and which technologies not too. The Amish do it, because they have some foresight into it social impact, and because they've structured their society to place their way of life ABOVE that of technology. But the outside world IS technology now, and we are but cells in the new amalgamation of humanity and machine and we can no longer do anything about it...
...that is, until someone starts a revolution and destroys it.
Societies built on lies can go on for quite a while, there are tests, a war for example, that can finish them off. But even then, they might stumble along.
I think "post-truth" is a symptom of unequal power. The rich and/or powerful can push their version of truth with little or no consequences for them. Unfortunately for them, there's a tendency for those in power to start believing the yes-men:
For example, in World War 2, the Japanese authoritarian regime took over newspapers and newsreels. Any time they would lose a battle, or have to withdraw, that would be stated as a victory. By the end of 1942, they had stated that the Imperial Japanese Navy had sunk "11 aircraft carriers, 11 battleships, 46 cruisers, 48 destroyers, and 93 submarines" (December 8th, 1942)
The Japenese people could look at maps, and see that the "glorious victories" were somehow occurring further and further west, closer to home each time. But they had no power, no way to challenge the newspapers and announcements from Navy and Army HQs. And the constant propaganda had warped the perspectives of everyone, including progressives and liberals, so they fell in line too.
A large part of Japan's defeat was because they fought an opponent capable of out-producing and out-training them. They had started to believe their own bullshit about being a superior race, about being simply better than the Americans, and as you said, collapse was inevitable. Before the atomic bombs convinced Hirohito to accept unconditional surrender, Japan was close to famine. If the war had lasted into 1946, millions of Japanese people would have died of starvation.
I don't think there is such a thing as truth; at least not for anything that matters to human meaning. The truth is we're just apes living on a planet that we're unable to stop ourselves from destroying; a tiny, ultimately meaningless rock that will be gone one day in a universe that won't even notice, let alone care. That truth is very hard to accept (I never really have) and so we create other stories to give us meaning, but these stories are too arbitrary and subjective for us to collectively agree upon.
> I don't think there is such a thing as truth; at least not for anything that matters to human meaning.
1+1 = 2, the earth is ~80% water, water freezes at 0degC.
What to you mean there aren't truths?
Do you mean people form opinions that are wrong? Sure. After sitting back at looking at it, it seems like the big problem is: there are small circles of power that make decisions for the rest of their population under the guise of "best interest of the people" when in reality we all know this isn't true.
So these small groups make the little people distracted with things that are very hot-button topics that affect a very small majority of people, by making appeals to emotion on both sides.
The small folks eat this up, rip a huge divide, and the small circle people sit back and laugh.
Trivial facts, yes. I like "1 second is the time needed for Cesium-133 to vibrate 9,192,631,770 times" or "the metre has been defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second", but who cares if the values were a bit different?
What does a life well lived mean? Is there a god or gods? Which one should one worship if so? What does it mean to be a good or bad person? Where does one find meaning? I don't believe there are truthful answers to questions like that, and modernity seems to annihilate the answers that cultures have developed in past. I'm not particularly versed in Nietzsche, but I believe he said it as "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."
Fortunately, Nietzsche was simply diagnosing a disease rather than expounding on the nature of health. Yes, many of us in the 20th and 21st centuries act like God is dead. But "right is right, even if nobody thinks it is" is something that people have recognized since ... oh, Socrates? And once you probe how something can be "right" even if "[everyone in society]" disagrees you find a law giver. That's when the rubber really meets the road.
> "right is right, even if nobody thinks it is" is something that people have recognized since ... oh, Socrates?
Something recognized since Socrates, whose death was foretold by Nietzsche, and finally rendered obsolete by the postmodernists a la Baudrillard (1981):
All Western faith and good faith became engaged in this wager on
representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning,
that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something
could guarantee this exchange-God of course.
To parse this idea properly it is important to define your terms, and lack of adequate definition is what leads to confusion especially as regards philosophical and especially religious discourse. "God" here should be taken to mean the belief in an absolute truth, a common, shared, objective reality from which our subjective realities are derived; metaphysics, spirits, ghosts, "energies," New Age quantum bullshit, and creationism all need not apply here (and are better dispensed with). It is the underlying reality to which all symbols refer; the concept of the pure simulacrum, the hyperreal, is a symbol with no reference to any underlying reality whatsoever, no referent, and thus untethered to any actual reality - atheistic and "without God."
Language and rational discourse are based upon this principle - that when we exchange words or symbols with one another that refer to a thing, we have some hope in hell of referring to the same thing, such that I can represent an object in the "external world," or even a thought in my intellectual "internal world" or "soul", serialize it into a literate form, and have you deserialize that literate string into the same intellectual or cognitive structures that I beheld in my own soul when I put those words together and hoped to communicate to you.
"The death of God" means that we can no longer guarantee this exchange of "meaning" between minds/souls (both of which I regard as terms that refer to exactly the same thing and are perfectly coextensive), because no symbols are tethered to an underlying objective meaning nor reality. Language and definitions are relative, malleable, subject to revision. Context and intent of language and expressions are irrelevant; the meaning of any string of symbols is now unilaterally determined by their impact or impression on the receiver, and thus any subjective meaning can be inferred from any expression.
The condition of post-truth is a consequence of this rejection of objective reality, of the elevation of relativism to the highest degree, and the confusion of (hyperreal, manufactured) symbols with actual reality. There is no objective truth any more, only relativism, narrative, and belief.
An excellent insight for which I have only one nit to pick:
> finally rendered obsolete by the postmodernists
is better render as "finally discarded as obsolete by the postmodernists". Since, after all, they didn't prove that symbols do not correspond to reality (they couldn't do that, since that would upend their arguments), they simply asserted that it was so.
You're moving the goalposts. This seems to be happening a lot lately...
You posited a lot of philosophical questions, and quoted a famous philosopher.
"Philosophy is the study of fundamental questions about the nature of reality, knowledge, and value. These are questions that everyone asks" [0]
If you're trying to say "we don't have answers to the philosophical questions of our time" I would agree with you. This would not be a salient point on your end, or even a useful one. This is an example of a well-established... dare I say... fact.
I don't feel like I moved any goalposts, but I'll fully admit that I'm not among the best at using language here. Objective fact may be possible, but truth is a human value and I no longer believe that such a thing exists. It's actually rather simple to get there from just what you said above. If "Philosophy is the study of fundamental questions about the nature of reality, knowledge, and value." and "we don't have answers to the philosophical questions of our time", then it would seem to follow that we cannot agree on the nature of reality which would seem to me to mean that we cannot find a truth that all can agree upon.
Plato has dealt with both of these already in the analogy of the divided line as dianoia (mathematical reasoning) and noesis (understanding). To Plato, facts are likenesses of the truth, just as an imagined object is a likeness of a real object.
Engineers have a hard time with this, because we work in a very 1-0, falsifiable world.
When people talk about "truth" with regard to society, government, politics, culture, etc, they're talking about "the story". A story is something that shortcuts discussion, an agreement that two parties don't need to litigate the foundation of.
Take the statement "Joe Biden is president of the USA." Many people accept that as truth not requiring further discussion. Many people do not accept that for a variety of reasons. If you're going to make that statement, you need to be prepared that some percentage of those hearing it will object. There are people that will object to "The earth is round."
So "post-truth" means that there's not a stable foundation of generally agreed upon facts. The least common denominator for discussion and agreement is smaller.
> Many people do not accept that for a variety of reasons.
That doesn't mean it isn't true about Biden being president. It is a fact, Biden is the sworn-in president of the United States. The part where people don't believe this doesn't make the world post-truth, it just makes some people wrong.
I don't care how hard someone believes Biden isn't president, he is. he was sworn in, this is a fact, not an opinion, not a story, not up for debate. The dude was sworn in as the president, he is the president.
Was he elected fairly? I think so, some don't. Debate that, sure. If two people on the opposite of that debate try and convince the other, it won't happen. That isn't post-truth, at all.
Truth still exists. People don't look for it. I posted this the other day as an example: My Brother-in-Law said recently "The NFL has declining viewership and is losing interest because of all the different platforms they stream to." Which I'm sure he heard/read somewhere, and knowing the fella, had a political slant towards what he was saying. I do not know what the slant was, but I DO know he was wrong. The NFL had one of the best ratings years ever in the 23-24 season.
My brother in law is just spouting nonsense. He didn't try and find the truth. We argued for 3 minutes, I pulled up the numbers, and he was wrong.
That isn't post-truth, it is willful ignorance, choosing to believe a false narrative because it aligns with core values.
This is a self-defeating statement. It's false on its face. If there is no such thing as truth, then this statement can't be true because it would mean there is at least one truth.
Not really. It’s a hyperbolic statement. It needs to be understood as such.
Normally this falls into the realm of moral truth. Or perhaps in a broader sense existential truth. For example: rape is wrong is not an absolute truth. It’s just like your opinion man.
In an entirely materialistic system morality is not universal. It merely the taste of whatever society wants at a time. Morality is ultimately might makes right. If you can enforce your morality through force, your morality wins. If the pro-rape camp could enforce their view, within a few generations we’d all say that the anti-rape camp was on the wrong side of history.
The truth is that we are very limited apes that are highly prone to self delusion and believing nonsense, trying to understand an impossibly complex world.
At the aggregate we seem to be making progress while at the individual level humanity always seems doomed. It seems a constant that the individual wants to pretend they live in the end times because at least then your time on this rock was a little bit special.
I’m more of what might be called “The Last Man” (as I’ve said elsewhere, I’m not really enough of a Nietzsche reader to really throw out his terms but sometimes they do seem apropos). I’ve never wanted to be special; quite the opposite, I just want to be left alone to my TV, video games, and garden. Safety and comfort are what little condolence I take against the nihilism of existence. And it has become quite clear to me that climate change threatens that. What is strange to me is how many people believe that perturbing the Earth’s carbon cycle could not possibly have dire consequences for the Earth when not only has it happened before in the Earth’s history, we have models showing how bad it could possibly be and are already seeing the effects unfold. My suspicion is that I lack a lot of the denial mechanisms that get most people through the day and that they also prevent people from thinking that things can actually go wrong. Take it from someone who has seen quite a lot go wrong - they can.
Nothing you said is truth. Those are just your own blind beliefs. How do you know the universe is meaningless? Maybe it’s a simulation being run for a purpose, and the beings running it care about the outcome. You’re just spouting YOUR truth, which is not truth at all.
> Maybe it’s a simulation being run for a purpose, and the beings running it care about the outcome.
This sounds an awful lot like a higher being who sits in judgement of their creation; and something that humanity seems to reach for very quickly. I was taught something similar as a child, but lost the belief when I was still quite young. I'd love to believe in a higher power or purpose because nihilism is quite a terrible experience. I often wonder if I'm just wired differently so in some way unable to believe things as others are or if a lifetime of chronic pain has revealed things to me that most people do not learn until they are older.
It’s hubris to think we can know anything about the reason for the existence of the universe. But just because we can’t know doesn’t mean there is no reason, that line of thinking is just hubris in the other direction.
Well, a technological society that loses the idea of truth as it relates to science and technology must inevitably collapse in its level of technology.
You can't maintain functioning tech on a "nothing is true" basis, because you cannot tell what will work from what won't.
Well, North Korea doesn't have "post-truth". It has good (or bad) old propaganda and brainwashing, but "post-truth" for me implies a plurality of (increasingly polarized) opinions. So "post-truth" can only happen in democratic societies, and is actually used by non-democratic states (Russia, North Korea, China...) to destabilize them.
North Korea and such nations aren't post-truth at all, though. They have little-t truths that most of their people believe in. That's what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about capital-T Truth (of the objective sort).
We had the tripartite definition, a "justified true belief", and the argument against it exemplified by a person looking at a fluffy white creature in a field and justifiably saying that they know there is a sheep in this field, but unbeknownst to them what they're looking at is a komondor and though there is a sheep elsewhere in the field it is not visible from where they are.
I think there is only belief, that we can have degrees of certainty about our beliefs but there is no way to transition to P(1) or P(0), and no specific probability other than 0 and 1 where we can reliably say that we "know" something to be true or false.
"truth doesn't exist" -- except for that truth statement you just made? If no truth can exist, then why are you making a truth statement?
Truth does exist. And the ultimate truth is Christ. Yes, those words ring as ignorance to most, but just like we are forced to reckon with gravity and the laws of physics, we all will one day reckon with the ultimate truth.
But it is not my job to compel anyone to believe this. I just find it fascinating that non-believers will believe in magic, ghosts, simulations, aliens, evolution, but that a Creator that exists outside of time, space, and matter created this universe? Nah, that's ignorant religious thinking.
Is the article worth finishing? It opens with a CIA agent complaining it's harder to be an authority when people self organize into communities and don't just listen to newspapers and political figures.
Which, yeah. Of course it is, and that's a great thing. Sure, we get some fringe communities but on the whole we get so many more communities of people who want to help each other.
Meh. Most comments here seem to be playing this pretense game that having to be critical about what you read is something that happened post 2016 and pretending the internet somehow changed things for the worse when media, biases, political influence and propaganda hasn't been a think since the Inception of the written word.
If you think we're suddenly "worse" then you're probably too used to your alleged set of beliefs being spread and shared by the major narrative setters and you were too comfortable in that echo chamber.
But hey, it's easier to call anyone who thinks differently some name (Today it's customary to rail against the evil right, in "the west" but your mileage may vary) and write "insightful articles" about post truth eras and the like.
This piece mentions Harari’s new work. Has anyone read it? I find his style appealing but I have also read comments here that are eyerolls similar to how Malcolm Gladwell is received, so I am wondering if I should even bother.
My understanding is that he wraps Twitter hot takes in an aura of credibility through narrative and authority without necessarily providing any proof. So in that way I’m skeptical. And it’s also ironic that an article about post-truth lifts up those kinds of ideas.
On the other hand, you could argue that at a certain philosophical high level, you can’t use current generation paradigms to meaningfully explore next generation paradigms anyway – so how else are we gonna intuit the world we’re transitioning into? I suspect that to explain emerging social phenomena we’re going to have to adopt some strange ideas, whether it’s neo-religious, postmodernism or Harari-style scientism. Pick your flavor I guess..
This happens because the so-called "authoritative sources" have lost their trustworthiness, creating a vacuum that is filled by new sources, some good and some bad.
The problem is, people are bad at thinking for themselves, and basically outsource their beliefs to third parties. Are we worse at this than we used to be, or has it always been like this?
We need more primary sources of information, and less filters trying to persuade us, who often have unseen agendas and different motivations.