How Do We Know What Truth Is Anymore?

Lots of food for thought, but I suspect we’re going to be talking past each other to some degree, because we’re using different definitions of the word “truth” 🙂 I think we’re on the same page, understanding the importance of trying to critically analyze what’s happening around us, but differ on the process and the ultimate goal.

You talk a lot about “truth seeking”, but this implies that there is a thing called The Truth, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, just waiting for us to find it, but I’m not sure that such a thing exists. I see things more as trying to interpret and understand what’s happening, but this is entirely subjective. The conclusions that I come to are merely my opinions, and will differ from those of somebody else. Am I right and they wrong? The other way around? Maybe we’re both right, or both wrong? How do we tell? Who is the arbiter of what is true and what is not? Is it even as clear cut as right vs. wrong?

There is an old philosophical question that asks whether the laws of physics and mathematics are discovered or invented, and I suspect this is along the same lines. Does The Truth exist independently of us seeking it, just waiting for us to find it, or does it come about because we look for it, a la Schrodinger’s Cat 🙂

>>> An essential part of the process are periods of argument — contending opinions do battle until one rises to the top — as our understanding is pushed closer to an understanding of “what is” and “what was.”

But what criteria do you use to decide which one wins? How do we come up with a universally agreed upon set of criteria with which to judge the merits of each idea? You might say that there are some things that really are universal (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?), but you’ve spent time in Asia, so you know there are people there who genuinely believe that social harmony and the good of the country supersedes personal freedoms. As Westerners, we find this idea somewhat repugnant, but are they really *wrong*, or just different? They think we’re wrong :shrug:

It might be OK if it were a free and frank discussion and exchange of ideas, but it’s not. There is a massive horde of people trying to sell you stuff, not just commercial products, but also ideas, trying to recruit you to their side. And people are simply not equipped to sift through all this shit, and come to some sort of sensible understanding of what’s going on.

>>> Our systems allow us to progress from one notion of “truth” to a better one … to a better one.

You seem to be stating my position exactly 🙂 You’re saying that “truth” is constantly changing, in response to new information, or maybe you connected the dots with something else, or maybe you just got older and wiser. Truth doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it’s always in a larger context, including the person doing the truth-seekin’.

>>> Without an agreed upon platform of truth seeking I don’t believe this would be possible.

This is the point I raised earlier – how do we agree on how to determine what is true or not? I’m not sure we can, I suspect it’s very subjective, and so we are inevitably going to have different opinions on the validity of different ideas, because we’re going to have different frames of reference when judging them. Which means that these differing opinions are not necessarily right, nor wrong, just different.

>>> But I disagree that truth is “whatever I think” because there are ways to back up and validate your opinions and measure contending ideas and see what ones come out on top

I’m not saying this at all, I’m saying that I’m not sure that such a thing as The Truth even exists, because it’s so subjective. But people think that it does, and it then often devolves into “whatever I think”.

Each person will have different ways to validate and measurecontending ideas, which will give different results. So who’s right? Who’s found the truth? Well, me, of course 🙂

>>> We think we’re right until we’re shown we’re not … and each individual has a different threshold of making this determination. Those who don’t eventually bend are what we call morons.

This is sort of the thing I’m talking about. We tell people what we think, we send them links, we yell and scream at them, and if they *still* don’t see the light and come around to our way of thinking, well OMFG, they must be just plain stupid!

People try to argue with you that the Biden laptop story and Russiagate are actually a thing, why won’t you see the light, isn’t it *obvious*?! But you don’t, you won’t change your mind. Does that make you a moron, as well? And so we reach this impasse where everyone is pointing a finger at everyone else who doesn’t agree with them, saying that because they think differently to you, that’s *proof* that they’re stupid. How do we get out of this situation, how do we progress forward from here?

>>> Without methods of truth seeking we’d still be believing [outdated science].

Science has always been about trying to understand the world around us, and calling it “truth seeking” might be a bit grand. What we currently know about quantum physics or medicine is simply our best understanding so far, and it will certainly change over time. Is there some fundamental truth that underpins how all this works? Maybe :shrug: We’ll certainly never know if and when we finally find it – it’s not like you can check your answers at the back of the book 🙂

Think about how we look at people in the year 1000. How primitive they were! But people in the year 3000 will surely look at us in the same way. What do you say when you realize that almost everything you *know* to be true will actually be demonstrated to be false over the coming years? What does this say about the idea that there is a fundamental truth underlying everything, when it is constantly changing every time new information comes in, or somebody has a new idea? “Seeking to better understand the world around us” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as nicely as “truth seeking”, but it’s probably more accurate 🙂

>>> Where would we would have been during the “pandemic” if there wasn’t a handful of experts and independent journalists who spoke out and citizenries who mobilized against the pseudoscience of Covid policies? We’d probably still be locked down, wearing masks, standing six feet apart, and injecting ourselves with shit that is neither safe nor effective.

Hard disagree on this. You’re saying that the decision-makers actually listened to these nay-sayers? They paid attention to people who were telling them to do something other than what they were going to do anyway? We had the response we got because it was the only option governments had, politically speaking. Put yourself in the place of, say, the governor of New York. What would you do? If you take a moderate approach, and people (inevitably) die, you will absolutely get nailed to wall for it. But if you get tough on germs, act decisively, lock everything down and put in place lots of restrictions, spending billions of taxpayer dollars to try keep everything propped up as you do so, what’s going to happen? If people die, well, it wasn’t because you didn’t try. And all the negative fallout of everything you did won’t happen for years, and if there’s one thing politicians love to do more than anything else, it’s kicking the can down the road. That, and avoid taking the blame :-/ It’s these two things that drove the COVID response, everywhere.

I strongly believe that the whole things was ultimately driven by the media, whipping up fear and panic. The people go running to the government, screaming “save us! make us safe!”, and the politicians can’t say “uh, we have NFI.” Behind closed doors, people who understand this stuff would’ve argued that it’s best handled in the same way we would handle any other outbreak, but the politicians can’t sell that. People are freaking out in the streets, you can’t advocate for a plan built on an acceptable number of deaths :-/ A policy of lockdowns, masks, distancing and vaccinations is much easier to sell to a dumbed-down electorate, and the government is now seen to be Doing Something.

Vaccinations, in particular, are a simple-to-understand, easy-to-achieve goal – “the nation is 93.72% fully vaccinated and double-boosted, yay!” – and just as critically important, it gives them someone to blame if and when things don’t work out (“pandemic of the unvaccinated”, anyone? :-/) Australia is coming out of winter now, and cases and hospitalizations and deaths are at record highs, but no-one gives a shit because we’ve all been vaccinated. But when you point out that these shots only last a few months, and they got their last one a year ago, so they’ve just gone through the winter season “unprotected”, with new variants on the scene and cases exploding across the country, at best you’ll get blank stares, or more likely, they get very angry. People don’t like it when you point out they’re doing something stupid 🙂

But governments can now start handling the situation the way they should’ve from the start – I think the Swedes had the right idea: protect the sick and vulnerable, but otherwise keep things more or less normal – and they can do that now, because people have stopped panicking, and quite frankly, they’re sick of the whole thing, and so the political winds are pushing us towards getting back to normal.

>>> We can measure this — look at the numbers of people who have been “red pilled” on various issues recently.

I think you’re demonstrating my point – you’re saying that people have been red-pilled, they’ve finally seen the light and found truth, because they’ve come around to thinking in the same way as you do 😀

I haven’t really followed the Biden laptop story, or Russiagate, but were these anything other than cynical political games? Sure, a lot of people believed them, or not, but the idea that the reporting and analysis of these events were a search for the truth, that they were anything other than a political and media circus, seems optimistic. What passes for news and reporting these days is rarely anything more than just another entertainment channel :-/

And the idea that people stopped talking about BLM because they were exposed as crooks is just as questionable. People still talk about politicians, Silicon Valley tech darlings, the Saudi royals 🙂 I suspect it was less about how clean they were, and more about people realizing that these guys were just completely full of shit. Corruption was part of that, but there were no more virtual signaling points to be earned by supporting them, and everyone’s moved on to the next cause du jour. It’s a new media cycle, dahling, they’ve had their 15 minutes :shrug:

Truth is whatever you are told it is. Doesn’t that fit?

I grapple with this question often. I think that what we are told is rarely true and it comes at us from multiple sides and angles. I have no doubt that we are told what to believe and we are given alternate viewpoints that they actually control.

Going back in this pandemic, I have always advocated for respecting the rights of others. That’s the basis for truth. If it doesn’t respect the rights of others then it’s not truth. Don’t confuse respecting my rights with respecting the rights of others though. So many people only care about the rights of others only in as far as their own rights are respected.

Masks have effectiveness, but it’s on an analog scale rather than a binary scale. Unfortunately, it was sold as a yes or no which sets things up for adversarial. Things can get visceral and I’ll bet you(or someone else) want to reply now with how ineffective they are.

I’ve said since early in the pandemic that we need to be giving people vitamins to fight things. Encouraging people to take zinc and Vitamin D along with a good multivitamin is surprisingly controversial. Why get people to take those precautions when they might not get a jab or take the myriad of other Big Pharma options?

Truth is black and white but because of the way things are, it looks very gray and difficult to find.

But you know what? It all goes back to the dumbing down of the population. People are both made stupid by the system but puffed in their pride by false measures of public stupidity. Look at the videos on Tiktok and FB showing how stupid other people are. It sure makes you feel smarter than you actually are. Everyone thinks they are smarter than they actually are. I call it Intelinarcissism.

People read a Wikipedia page and they are geniuses on the subject in question. Nevermind that they failed science class in high school or still think Astronomy is a branch of Astrology.

I better stop. 🙂