This. The march to authoritarianism accelerates when people accept the meme that the truth is unknowable. So they simply accept the reality put forth by the autocrat.

The most basic kind of truths are facts. We at least need to agree on those as best we can first. And then apply critical thinking on the the squishier stuff on top.

> The most basic kind of truths are facts.

Except for that for a lot of "facts", according to Rousseau, we already have 4 truths: what you say, what I say, what we agree upon and what really happened.

So, while the pursuit of truth is important, I'd argue that respect towards each other even when we cannot agree is the most important thing.

Maybe we need to start teaching people to habitually attach provenance and confidence information to every fact (really: belief) they report, at least as much as practically possible?

"Iraq had WMDs in 2000s" != "I strongly believe Iraq had WMDs in 2000s" != "I find it plausible that Iraq might have had WMDs in 2000s" != "According to that UN report, Iraq had WMDs in 2000s" != "According to NYT, which quotes that UN report, Iraq had WMDs", etc.

A lot of problems are caused by people who say "X" when they should say "I strongly believe X", or "I think I read somewhere that X", or "I'm not sure, but I think X".

I generally speak like this and find it causes problems with others because they view this as a weak form of speech. It makes you appear uncertain, which should be a good thing, but our society seems to value undeserved confidence far above cautious uncertainty.

This is my experience 100%. Blatant lies, told confidently, are far more convincing than the truth with a source.

I find it helpful to spend a bit more cycles on keeping track of audience and a bit fewer on perfect conveyance of certainty levels.

Once you've set the bar re: certainty for a particular discourse neighborhood, you can just make claims at that level thereafter without feeling dishonest. As long as you're sensitive to cases where others may have joined without enough context to know that you're out on a limb.

Yes- intellectual dishonesty is at the root of this. When I was raised, the integrity of a "man's" word was a measure of the "goodness" of the person. Now, we hear things like "he said what he had to say" and a basic acceptance of lies if the person is on our side of the debate.

It's depressing.

I've tried to get into this habit. Qualifications are great too because when someone comes back to say "you said X! You lied!" you can remind them of how carefully you qualified your statement.

This is Circle of Competence applied[0]. It's admitting what you know you don't know so you don't make mistakes by being overconfident.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_competence

It's even more than that. By qualifying your statements, you let others evaluate them correctly.

So, for instance, if 'tptacek here says a factual statement about security (and there's no large thread contesting it), I'll treat it as gospel. But if he says he's unsure about it, or he read it somewhere, I know to attach less weight to it. I'll code in it my brain as "uncertain, but passed the sniff test of a relevant expert". Etc.

The same principle works in more mundane aspects of life. Whether a person believes something (and how much), or whether they're just reporting something they've read elsewhere, matters a lot for evaluating a factual statement independently.

The one thing with this is that you have to be consciously careful of who you view as an authority on different subjects, or whose opinion on something is relevant. For a simple, everyday example, it's easy to follow a friend's recommendation to eat at a particular restaurant, even if that friend has completely different tastes in food than you do (which, in all likelihood, will result in a poor dining experience for you). Likewise, I think even smart, educated people often make the mistake of treating the word of powerful individuals as fact even if those individuals have absolutely no experience with or authority on the matter.

> "NYT, which quotes that UN report, Iraq had WMDs"

You left out the last step,

!= Bush administration says Iraq had WMDs

That is a major part of the formal training program for professional intelligence analysts. Of course they still often get the probabilities wrong.

Let's just talk in Quechua then, evidentiality is engraved in their grammar!(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quechuan_languages)

They are just 4 different angles of the same fact.

Lying and misreporting are two different things.

The world s autocratic countries (russia china turkey etc) don’t rely on fabricated news, they rely on hiding the truth and placing a biased spin on it. They know that outright lies will actually harm their image.

And killing journalists, and imprisoning political opponents, and controlling the media and, yes, straight up lying, because no other voice can be heard, so it's impossible to publicly fact check their lies.

That's a few autocratic countries. Such a statement is obviously not true in general. For starters you have dictatorships which have been based upon absurd and shameless lies. North Korea currently, Haiti under Papa Doc, Turkmenistan under Niyazov. In addition I'd imagine hiding news is the first line of defense, but if that fails none of these autocratic governments are not above lying (and I'd bet you find the dictators of those countries have lied many times when it suited them, if evidence is available).

I m talking about specifically “fake news” , lies that are generally obvious yet for emotional reasons persistent

What s different about autocrats is that they will unscrupulously plant evidence and kill everyone who knows

Autocratic countries like... ones that ignore and undermine their own judicial system and appoint family members to positions of power?

Any evidence to your words ? Or this is just a lie you made up to spread your FUD ?

What FUD?

Here s an article about typical media strategies https://theconversation.com/four-things-you-need-to-know-abo...

Such countries will usually fabricate stories by implanting evidence or killing witnesses, not just by repeating them

But if the truth is unknowable, how does the autocrat know it?

I've only met a few people who are skeptics about the existence of facts--but I find that they're likely to be skeptics about other things too.

I think that if it's a position you arrive at via honest philosophical inquiry, it's not a hazard at all.

The position to be wary of is where you still believe in the truth, but are so beleaguered by the cacophony of voices claiming to know it that you're willing to accept that somebody else has access to it if it means that you get to just peacefully be on their side and don't have to bother sorting through it all anymore.

That is too say: claiming to know the truth is often a proxy for being too intellectually lazy to bother forming a good argument, and I think that nihilism is preferable.

> This. The march to authoritarianism accelerates when people accept the meme that the truth is unknowable.

How do you know?

Sorry but no, the sides cannot work together to dispassionately purge only clear falsehoods.

Consider this case, hot off the presses. Yesterday Aaron Sorken wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg in the New York Times in which he stated the following:

"And right now, on your website, is an ad claiming that Joe Biden gave the Ukrainian attorney general a billion dollars not to investigate his son. Every square inch of that is a lie and it’s under your logo. That’s not defending free speech, Mark, that’s assaulting truth."

Really? Sorken knows for sure that Biden was not self-dealing? Joe was totally not thinking about his son's half million dollar no-show job with a corrupt Ukranian firm when he ordered the Ukranian government to fire the guy who was investigating it? Wow, that's a really amazing level of access to the truth!

No doubt Sorken has heard and completely believes the mainstream narrative: the prosecutor was himself corrupt and all right-thinking people wanted him removed. (Never mind it's entirely possible that this narrative is true, AND Biden was self-dealing.)

My point is not to convince anyone that Biden was self-dealing. My point is that Sorken is calling objectively false something that is clearly plausible.

This is how it goes. Most people are invested in narratives, and they are keen to suppress ideas that counter their preferred narrative. The idea that they will somehow draw clean lines between facts an interpretations has always been a foolish hope.

Wait, but if I know the story well enough, Trump didn't say that Biden might have offered Ukraine $1B. He simply said that he promised. And as far as we can all know, Biden promising $1B to Ukraine isn't a fact. Is it plausible? Sure. Can Trump suggest that it's a possibility? Of course. But had Trump suggested that Biden might have given $1B, people could judge it for what it is - an assumption. Instead, he presented it as fact, which it simply isn't.

It seems to me that truth isn't so hard to find when one actually looks for it.

> People still need to think and be critical.

My theory is this is exactly the value proposition various news companies provide - they do it for you. "We give you the Abstract and the Conclusion".

If anything, that -hampers- critical thinking. It removes the need to apply logic and deduction to stuff that happens and just accept provided explanations of outcomes.

Would we trust a Scientist if they only explained background and results of their experiment, and didn't discuss the actual methodology and analysis of what they did and how they did it? How is that much different from being a Magician? Or saying, "Trust me, I know I'm right"?

>I just took a look at a long list of lies by your current President.

The idea that one side tells lies, and the other only truth is part of the problem here.

>You can't argue that it's some interpretation, or just half of the picture or anything like that. It's simply a bunch of words phrased as a fact but they never happened.

"Russian collusion" appears to fit this description, yet I still read about it every day.

The entire political game is composed of stretching the facts to control the narrative. If you see it as one-sided, you're not paying attention.

> > I just took a look at a long list of lies by your current President.

> The idea that one side tells lies, and the other only truth is part of the problem here.

This is just an observation about your current president, there is no "other side" to it.

> The idea that one side tells lies, and the other only truth is part of the problem here.

Your divisive thinking is the problem here. Someone said that Trump lies, they didn't say "Republicans lie and dems don't," but that was somehow your interpretation of the statement that Trump lies (which is true of any president, yet you and I both know in our heart of hearts that he lies more than anybody by an overwhelming margin).

I believe the parent was mistakenly interpreting "lies told by your president" (emphasis mine) to be a #NotMyPresident kind of attack from a citizen across the aisle as opposed to an observation from a non-citizen. It sounds like the parent thought gp was a democratic who was insinuating that the current president and his political party are the only president and party who've told lies so egregious compared to those told by any other president from across the aisle that they're the only ones of consequence.

That's what I assume, but you know what they say about assumptions.

That's funny, it didn't cross my mind at all. I said your president because I'm not from the USA, that's all.

I know trump tells a lot of blatant lies (I think most Americans recognize this), but if you’re a Trump fan you’ve been hearing Democrats calling Trump a traitor, a dictator, a Russian-pawn and colluder and a criminal long before any of those titles could be considered “facts” (they mostly still cannot be called facts, though the Ukraine call may have changed that).

Yes Trump tells a lot of lies, but I also think each side of the aisle tends to ignore their own hyperbole (or at least fail to appreciate when the other side is hearing “lies”)

It's simple reciprocation from game-theory perspective: when the other party lies and gains advantage, you do it too. But I feel Republicans are way more untruthful than the Democrats and simply bring down the level of discussion for everyone.

And I don't know why is it, that majority of Americans are so accustomed to lying that they tolerate it from politicians. In Finland if politicians get caught with outright lying, it's career-ending if it's bad enough. Prime ministers have resigned over it, party leaders seen their polls slump. In US if Republicans are caught lying (Democrats too I guess to lesser extent), it's a simple distraction and meh from public. Their supporters don't simply care and I guess are not capable of criticizing their own party.

I've been recently thinking that what US has now isn't that far stretch from a single-party system since the parties in power don't really have to fear losing their support. There are no other options, so they can just pass the ball between each other, putting up a show and doing whatever since people can't really choose anything else. If your only option is picking between two assholes, which one you pick? And when the population doesn't know to demand change, what will happen? Nothing.

Yes there are advantages with two-party system, but what I see it has really rotted the political discussion and ideologies into two boxes that can't possibly overlap. In multi-party systems coalition governments can be bit sluggish but at least they offer people a real opportunity for change, and letting go of the old, obsolete power structures. For a country that is so keen on free-market and unrestricted competition, you are awfully restricted in your choice of political parties.

I know Trump is in a world of his own, but most often the “lies” are not lies to the speaker or the speaker’s fans. For example Obama’s “if you like your plan you can keep it” regarding Obamacare. It turned out not to be 100% true. To Democrats he was well-intentioned and over-optimistic and couldn’t deliver his promise (probably due to Republican obstructionism) while Republicans had always considered that a lie.

If 50% of the country believes something is a lie and 50% believe it’s mostly true, is it really a lie? The truth is most political “lies” are only considered lies by the opposite party.

From what I heard about Obamacare it seemed a quite crappy deal indeed, and not really criticized properly by the Democrats. It's sad that either party can't acknowledge their own errors and have to just tout their own version of reality to make it true for their supporters.

And about lying, there are degrees of lying that can be established. The earth is not flat even though some believe it to be so, to state the opposite is untrue. On the other hand, sure you could say eg that Americans have obesity problem (compared to the rest of the world) or they are just normal weight as "only" 1/3 of the population is overweight. But which is a truth or a lie?

I think the problem is largely a cultural shift in politics where the issues have become secondary to the rhetorical war between the two opposite ideologies. It's not about establishing a truth in a sense than it's trying to beat the other party. Yet there is a consensus that can be established, honesty that could be had when stating facts and acknowledging their up and downsides. It's not just black and white wordplay.

Perhaps we should just get rid of the politicians, have our best scientists (preferably chosen at random from a pool of candidates) run the government and people would just vote on things that they wished to improve (immigration, job-safety, healthcare etc). All results would be evaluated afterwards and their effects measured with meticulous statistics. I know that it could be abused too, but even that would be better than what is the current situation in US government.

Obamacare was hardly what Obama or the Democratic party wanted originally. They arrived on the final system only after two or three years of negotiation in Congress and intense corporate propaganda towards the American public regarding health insurance. I've only seen PR and advertising of that level previously during elections. So of course it wasn't perfect... It was very much a compromise with the powerful and well-funded healthcare industry.

The problem with the political culture in Washington isn't the rhetorical war. It's politicians obsession with being reelected. The culture is that no indignity is beneath you if it's for the sake of reelection. Lindsey Graham was once known alongside John McCain as being a RINO by partisans, 'Republican in name only'. Now he acts like Trump's dog on 99& of issues.

The reason? So he can be more influential on that 1% of issues he cares most about. If he doesn't get influence on that 1% (like we saw with Syria) then he breaks with Trump, because he has a bottom line: the set of issues he wants to influence. This is true for all politicians. They have a political calculus where they are willing to sacrifice legislation or points in certain areas for the sake of being able to affect legislation in most other areas. Functionally this means that politicians do things like accept big campaign donations in exchange for going easy on a certain sector. I believe most politicians want to do what they think is best for America, but that comes with a single constraint--that they're the ones accomplishing it. And that comes with a hefty cost.

I have a hard time believing Obama truly believed a plan could be kept. Given how it works, I just can't imagine how you could reform healthcare in any meaningful way without outright terminating some of the plans as they existed. I don't have a particular problem with it. Which is probably true for most -- they care more if their leader is acting ethically and trying to do the right thing, than how (pedantically) honest they are being. If Trump lied "I support Confederate statues" to get elected, and then led an effort to tear them down, I doubt history would have any issue with his lies.

> "Given how it works, I just can't imagine how you could reform healthcare in any meaningful way without outright terminating some of the plans as they existed."

I'm just spitballing here but... grandfather in all existing medical insurance contracts unless the individual chooses to terminate the contract. Let the insurance industry bank on the fact that the number of grandfathered contracts will only trend down over time.

Maybe it would hurt their profit margins, but how much hurt? Probably not enough hurt to knock down the industry is my guess.

America is huge, it has to rely on the states to fight back.

If we go by polifact (https://www.politifact.com/personalities/), the highest rated politician has a truth rating of 14%.

From personal experience the issue we have with fake news is not caused by a president. It was the polarization from the 2016 election, which has resulted in people valuing the narrative over facts. Nothing was a clearer example to me personally when later that winter as I was participating in a conference located in Stockholm, which had a track title "Fake News", with an invited keynote speaker who was a previous board member of the wikipedia foundation. The keynote talk was made to present a narrative that media had failed to present information to the voting population about trumps scandals, and as evidence there was a image from a study showing survey result about what people knew about each candidate and their scandals. The conclusion was that if media had done their job then obviously the election would had ended correctly rather than electing Trump.

The numbers were extremely biased against Clinton and fitted the narrative so perfectly that I got a bit suspicious. Looking at the recording of the talk afterward I noticed that the evidence had a reference printed inside it. A moment later I had the paper itself, and what do I find above the image? The researcher explicitly saying that anyone reading it should not draw any comparable conclusions about the numbers as the survey operated during a period of 9 months. The researcher noted that if they had done a new short survey closer to the election date then the numbers would look very differently. It pretty obvious that people can not answer a survey with knowledge of scandals that occur in the future.

Fake news will continue as long we try to make facts fit a narrative, rather than first looking at the facts and then construct a theory about the world.

I still run into people convinced "leftist infighting" turned the election rather than the handful of votes in three states that really did it. People need better civics education. They find out about the Electoral College and can't believe it exists, or that a handful of votes for one person can offset millions of votes for the other.

Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are not leftist strongholds, where "infighting" might allow the Other to win, but people prefer the narrative that "Bernie Bros" ruined our beautiful democracy. Clinton got millions more votes, but it didn't matter. The Electoral College turning it doesn't fit the narrative they've been fed that people further to the left are responsible.

You're right about polarization though. Less than 100k votes wouldn't matter if the country wasn't divided right down the middle. Choosing the future of our country shouldn't be a matter of who can influence a coin toss more.

> If we go by polifact (https://www.politifact.com/personalities/), the highest rated politician has a truth rating of 14%.

My very first check of that assertion has a fully "True" rating of 20%[1]. And if you count the entire true spectrum it's 73%. And there is not a small sample size. I assume your statement is only regarding the current executive branch?

I also tried a spot check of the Congress, but my very first check also failed to meet your criteria[2]. The problem with this is that it undermines your entire point. The executive branch has the most strained relationship with objective reality, and that stems from the demands of the current president. They're basically forced to lie for political reasons because the truth is too damaging.

[1] https://www.politifact.com/personalities/barack-obama/ [2] https://www.politifact.com/personalities/mark-warner/

Aah, my browser addons blocked the lower list, so I only saw the 2 Executive Branch and the 4 Congressional Leadership.

Off the two democrats congressional Leaderships, Nancy Pelosi has 14% and Charles Schumer has 11% in the True category. This in contrast with the republicans that has 12%, 0%, 10% and 5% (trump).

Does a fact checking website really tell you how often a person is truthful? Isn't it more like the falseyness % of accusations?

Every president has lied; they have reasons to do it. Maybe it's to avoid revealing classified information, or to gain a political or geopolitics advantage. It doesn't matter; lying is an essential part of statecraft.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-history-of-lies-on...

Edit: I would appreciate if whoever is downvoting can please explain why they are doing so.

Yes, it does feel in large part that it's the crass and blatant nature of Trump's presentation that enrages, not just the actual content.

As a Canadian I 'preferred' Obama, who ran on the line "change you can believe in" -- but he led the US empire substantially the same as any previous... and so this "can believe in" line, it really expresses a truth. The substantial piece was not that America would change, but that you could _believe_ in the fact that it would change. Little actually changed in America, at least from a distance. And once people stopped believing in the change... one gets Trump.

Disgusting as he is, Trump really is "changing" America. And his lying is more transparent and blatant and crass, but also more theatrical and aggressive. It's weaponized.

>It has nothing to do with facts like the ones you've stated above.

I don't think I can agree with this. When dealing with one group who is using facts to push a narrative/conclusion you think is false, it can become quite easy to push back without outright lies. Once misleading facts have been introduced into a discussion, the level of civility drops. That opens the door for the further drop into outright lies. Especially if one side feels they are less versed in manipulating statistics.

I've spoken to many people who view lies of omission as being just as dishonest as outright lying, especially when done to manipulate someone (normally this involves when a child has lied to their parents and isn't related to anything political). As such, a lie of omission or selectively using facts has now introduced dishonesty into the conversation, making the other side feel like they are just using the standard that was already been set.

>It ruins the ability to have a real debate in a society, and I think it harmed America (not only of course) greatly.

I feel this occurs as soon as someone starts relying on presenting facts to push a certain narrative because it sends the message that it is now acceptable to have a dishonest conversation. At that point, any discussion changes into a matter of winning at any cost.