You also won’t be able to prove that hate it always wrong. Is it OK to hate Nazis? Is it OK to hate people that have harmed you? Is it OK to hate people that want to harm you? Is it OK to hate people that hate you? There is no obvious place at all to draw the line on that.

Finally, all facts are disputable. There are entire disciplines devoted to disputing facts. Science, philosophy and logic all revolve are hypothesising, disputing and falsifying facts. In the centuries that humans have been pondering logic, the combined efforts of everybody who has ever lived have yet to produce a single objective truth.

Asserting that people should hold the ‘correct values’ before being entitled to express themselves is simply asserting that your own orthodoxy should be universally enforced. This idea comes directly from Orwell in the form of ‘wrongthink’.

It's important to be clear about this, because some people seem to think that "it's a fact, therefore it's true". Facts aren't indisputably true, they are indisputably facts. True and false is a different scale.

No, you recall incorrectly; that's a rough definition of a fact claim.

A fact is a true fact claim.

Anti-vaxers are a good example of this. They’ve read that vaccines are dangerous, which is actually a fact, so they chose to not vaccinate their children. But they are ignoring another vaccination fact in the process. The fact that not-vaccinating children is more dangerous than vaccinating them. As a result we now live in a world where westerners are once again dying from the measles even though they really shouldn’t be.

Politicians are especially great at misusing facts to build their agendas. Possibly because they’d be too agreeing if they weren’t and they simply don’t know how to work together across party lines.

I once saw a climate change meme, asking if you’d cross a bridge which 99.9% of the worlds leading engineers said was unsafe. Every day we see more and more people cross that damn bridge. :p

I also agree with you though. Because things are this way, it would often be more reasonable to talk about “strong beliefs” rather than “facts”, exactly because people are chosing to ignore the facts.

Blindly criticizing experts and putting the word on quotation marks is a very dangerous game.

People who accept vaccination as good, do so because they trust the scientific and political institutions which have developed and tested those vaccinations. A relatively small number of people have actually done the scientific work to prove the effectiveness of vaccination themselves.

People who do not believe that vaccinations are effective/an overall good do not have trust in this scientific and political institutions. Perhaps because the system has failed them economically, educationally or otherwise.

Saying that a relatively small number of people have done the work to prove the effectiveness of vaccination is really disingenuous.

(Also, there's a pretty big difference between doubting an n=50 sociological study and deciding not to believe the very public historical record of global disease patterns.)

Great! Me too! I wasn't involved directly in that work, but I trust that it hasn't been manipulated.

This is what I mean, I still trust these institutions (in part because I'm part of the technical/scientific community, and understand how it works). Many people appear to have lost trust in these institutions.

History is rife with "facts" that weren't actually, you know, real facts at the time, even though there was "scientific consensus".

Note that I'm not an anti-vaxxer, and I'm not a climate change denier. I also don't imbue "scientific consensus" with magical properties, seeing how often it was dead wrong.

I hate mayonnaise. I guess that makes me “wrong.”

and "facts are indisputable."

1942: “The Germans are our enemies.” That was a fact.

1992: “The Germans are our friends.” That was a fact.

Facts change. Nothing in the universe is indisputable.

It still is a fact. The statement is implicitly about the relationship with Germany at the time of the statement. It is not a claim that the relationship will stay the same for all time forward.

"In 1992, the Germans were our friends."

Facts don't change. Poorly-worded, imprecise, incomplete statements can be misunderstood, though.

> 1942: “The Germans are our enemies.” That was a fact.

And it will not cease being a fact that, in 1942, Germany and whoever were enemies. Nor that they became friends later. It's possible that they will be enemies again in the future. That wouldn't render the statement about 1992 non-factual.

I'm not even going to bother with the mayonnaise, since that's just founded on a willful misinterpretation of the original comment.

We can get really, really certain about some things. If a superforecaster (or anyone for that matter) gives 95% certainty on an event occuring and he or she has frequently made similar predictions with 95% accuracy, the event is likely to occur. It's still uncertain, but not by very much.

"Donald Trump is president". It's uncertain, certainly, but I still feel comfortable calling it a fact. Are you talking about misuse of 'facts are unquestionable' to apply to statements that aren't as clear?