> where there is no longer a broad, societally-wide accepted definition of facts.

I am not sure it is actually difference.

In the lead up to the Iraq War in 2003, there was so much discussion in the media about how Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and those saying it was made up were marginalized. In the end those doubters were right.

I think in Vietnam, there was similar misleading statements about cause belli e.g. Gulf of Tonkin Incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident I think that there is often disagreement on facts.

I think with Wikipedia existing, we are actually in the gold age of grounded truth.

There is always a sizable segment of the population who doesn't really care for truth though and they will just align with their side and be angry. This happens on all sides of the political spectrum. In the past this was pushed via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism and is still pushed via similar outlets today.

To your points, I agree, but that's why I phrased it as "societally-wide accepted definition of facts". There has always been propaganda and hard pressure against those who went against the status quo.

What I think is different this time is the process on coming to a "generally accepted conclusion". Take the Iraq WMD issue. At the time, the status quo was that Iraq had WMDs, even if there were plenty of people arguing against that - those people may have been "marginalized" as you put it (though not sure I agree - I was one of those people, and while I clearly the tide was against my viewpoint, I still felt we were having a debate over facts), but they were still arguing that there was little evidence for WMDs. But when the facts were cleared up, there was broad agreement "OK, the evidence is now clear, this is what happened".

My point is now that even when the clear picture does finally emerge, you have plenty of people still just willing to repeat the falsehood in the belief that "if you repeat it enough, it becomes 'true' enough to enough people." That's what feels different to me, at least in my lifetime.

> My point is now that even when the clear picture does finally emerge, you have plenty of people still just willing to repeat the falsehood in the belief that "if you repeat it enough, it becomes 'true' enough to enough people." That's what feels different to me, at least in my lifetime.

I understand the structure of your argument but I am not sure I can relate it to things that are happening. Can you give concrete examples?

Well, I know this is going down the political rabbit hole, but look at the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in the US. The evidence that Biden won and Trump lost is undeniable, at least if you use the definition of "the outcome is undeniable considering the standards of any previous presidential election in the US".

But still you have large swaths of the American populace (including, notably, the president elect) saying that no, Trump won the 2020 election. At this point, though, I don't even really see them putting forth any argument based on actual evidence that Trump won in 2020. It's just repeating the same platitudes of "it was stolen, the politicians are corrupt, ..." etc. etc. But it's like many people just accept now that this is an acceptable way to argue things, "if you repeat it enough, you get to have your 'alternative' facts" - like, they don't even really care that much that they don't have actual evidence to back up their position. That is the part that feels relatively new to me.

Yes: people consistently repeat that inmigrants are (criminals ((almost) exclusively)) despite never showing any statistics. I have seen people keep a printed list of inmigrant crimes (one of them, an Uber driver).

This happens in two countries, that I know. One of them is the US, the other is Costa Rica. I expect it to happen in all countries with important xenophobic populations.

> In the lead up to the Iraq War in 2003, there was so much discussion in the media about how Iraq had weapons of mass destruction

This is my favorite theory of what happened:

Iraq perceived Iran, and internally Shiites and Kurds, as its real and threatening enemies. USA was perceived as being far away and weak. To keep their real enemies scared, Iraqis kept up the illusion of having a solid WMD program. Iraqis would hint at their WMDs when communicating with their neighbors.

From the point of Western intelligence, the intelligence picked up Iraqis talking about their WMDs when Iraqis didn't know being listened to, and when Western intelligence assumed that Iraqis had no reason to lie. While there was no physical evidence of the WMDs, this was perceived as a rather reliable intelligence. Why would Iraqis talk about their WMDs in secret, if they didn't even have any?

"Failing to understand the Iraqi leader’s mindset and the context of his decisions, the intelligence community assumed that Iraq’s ongoing denial and deception operations regarding his alleged WMD programs, despite periods of genuine cooperation were ipso facto confirmation that Iraq was hiding WMD caches and programs."

"It appears that the intelligence community never seriously considered the possibility that Baghdad was conducting its denial and deception operations to hide weakness."

https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/ASPJ/journals/Ch...

The Iraq War was pushed by a group calling themselves neoconservatives. They were itching for a war regardless of the WMDs.

Its genesis was at least the mid 1990s per: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clean_Break:_A_New_Strategy_...

And then this group got more power under Bush's term and 9/11 happened and they responded by pushing for the Iraq war and got it:

https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2003/03/origins-of-re...

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iraq/what-neocons-got-wrong

The WMDs were a convenient cause belli for the masses, but it was not the motivator for the war. This is why no matter how much doubt was created about the WMDs before the war, and there was tons and tons, there was no stopping it.

>cause belli

At the risk of being that guy, the term you're looking for is casus belli: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/casus%20belli

You've misspelled it at least twice so far, otherwise I wouldn't be bothering you about it.

Thanks. I will try to do better. Another issue is that if I type it correctly it gets autocorrected to “cause hello”. So I have to go back and correct it every time.

Live on the wild side. Turn off the autocorrect.

I couldn't agree more. Truth is, the advances in technology have made it easier for the truth to be revealed. Imagine if the recent events in the last ten or so years were not caught on smartphones and other devices. I feel as if the narrative they would have attempted to sell us would be quite different. This is apparent so many times in recent history as the news spins one story, and someone recording with a phone clearly shows another.

But how does this go against the trend of less trust in facts? Surely it should contradict it? Actually, I think very recent technologies are about to: generative AI is going to make it much, much more difficult to prove anything as a fact.

Wikipedia is an improvement, but its still below the standards and methods that are accessible to humans. If you are an expert, you will hate the Wikipedia articles about your field and still be helpless because the garbage in there is referencing some guy who wrote a badly-researched book in 2001.

On the flip side, Wikipedia is available to a vast majority of the planet's population. We've traded optimum veracity for the privileged few, for 'good enough' for the masses.

I disagree that availability is the issue - you can download the primary sources from the Internet as PDF, even from China or 3rd world countries. It is that enough people don't care about "correctness" and take the best available hearsay as fact.

> If you are an expert, you will hate the Wikipedia articles about your field

I haven't noticed that. Generally I find it decent.

I don't think we've seen anything like the all out denial of the result of the 2020 election before, though. No matter who won or lost in prior elections, there was an acceptance of what the outcome was. Now you can't even get elected officials to answer what should be a simple yes or no question despite Biden being in office for four years. Sure part of it might just be people who don't care for truth, but the sheer scale of the denial feels like a big break from the past.

> In the end those doubters were right.

I think that helps demonstrate the parent's point. I think it is very much established fact now that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Can we say the same thing about anything that has happened since, certainly in the last 5-10 years? There have always been some dissenters, a small band of conspiracy theorists that would doubt even something as fundamentally true as a non-flat Earth. But now the group is much more sizable.

Edit: since writing this comment, I see that hn_throwaway_99 posted a reply of their own which pretty much matches what I said.

I would have to disagree a little. I think what were seeing is the true nature of some of these issues where you have a case where both sides are right and wrong at the same time and it really just depends on your perspective.

Take a conflict, any conflict. In most cases you can go to both sides and ask why they are fighting the other side and they will give you a coherent response. In some cases it's easy to judge right and wrong but in other cases it becomes murkier. This applies not just to war but to all social conflicts and issues like healthcare, abortion, immigration, so on and so forth.

Now what has happened previously is because media was essentially a monopoly of a few, outlets would take what happened and re-package that into something that typically stood in line with our western values, and that's how roughly everyone was on the same page, we were just being fed roughly the same story we all believed was happening and it was very hard to prove otherwise what happened.

Fast forward to now and that monopoly is long gone. Now we get the full unfiltered picture from independent media sources and increasingly just social media from ordinary people on the ground. The full idea doesn't have a concept of right and wrong, both sides of are right and both sides are wrong, just depends on your own personal worldview. This results in people drifting one way or the other depending on their personal beliefs and is a complete fragmentation compared to what we had before.

„We have always been at war with Oceania“.

Facts and their representation has been changed by governments since time immemorial. The internet probably made us much better in sporting it so we became a bit paranoid.

> This is a major change for humanity, one I'm not quite sure how we'll cope with.

I don't know, it seems vastly more likely to me that this is a regression to how things have been for thousands of years before the invention of mass media. Like, once mass media was invented, the "set of facts" could be distributed to everyone, and so it exploded, but now the various factions who want to control the narrative have figured out how to use that mass media to share their "set of facts" in the same way.

Naomi Klein recently said "conspiracy theorists ‘get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right’" and this is how I think a lot of way too online people are. They've correctly judged that the mainstream news is biased or flat out manufacturing consent such as the lead up to the Iraq war. However instead of seeking out actual truth or just better sources of news in response to this, they seek out what makes them feel good and correct in their assumptions. Honestly its the same behavior you see in older people that are "set in their ways" - new evidence and objective truth be damned.

> They've correctly judged that the mainstream news is biased or flat out manufacturing consent such as the lead up to the Iraq war

It's telling that nearly every time the mainstream media is criticized it's the same handful of incidents that are cited.

> we really have entered a world in the past 10-15 years where there is no longer a broad, societally-wide accepted definition of facts.

Never was :(

Hasn't that been the case much longer than that? The US for example has had a problem with creationists.

People used to care if they way they talked about politics made them look intelligent, reasonable, and informed. Now many of them speak online where they get warped signals of approval, and these signals elicit behavior that they would never engage in if they still depended on the good opinion of their friends, neighbors, family, and coworkers.

This is liberating and positive in so many dimensions of personal expression, but in politics, the effects are turning out to be the opposite. Some become entirely dependent on these online signals of approval, and they let themselves be guided by a warped perception of political effectiveness, where effectiveness might mean using disinformation to motivate people on "their" side (which I guess actually is politically effective) or it might mean winning meaningless games of online dunking. People who invest time and energy in online political discourse see themselves as heroes, above the judgment of those who don't engage, and see their online activity as brave and dangerous, even though in reality, both sides always go home the winner in their own eyes, and there are no consequences except degraded mental habits all around.

It has long been dogma on the far left and far right that the concepts of civility, reasonable debate, and legitimate political process are only cloaks for the brutal exercise of power, and the sooner cast aside the better. If you pay any attention to the quality of how we do politics, you have allowed your liberal oppressors to trick and distract you. Thirty years ago, I heard it from left-wing professors at university and from far-right gun nuts promoting race war in chat rooms. Now it seems a lot closer to the mainstream, on one side in rhetoric and on both sides in practice.

I’m wondering if it’s because so many people seem to be living more than 50% of their lives online. Facts seem less important in the virtual world.

Go play with some live electrical wiring and see how quickly facts about electricity become important.

I think a significant problem is that people are confusing facts with truths.

There is only ever one fact, which is immutable as far as the world is concerned. Our ability to perceive facts can change as our ability to do so changes/improves, but the facts themselves will never change. Getting electrocuted is one such very obvious example.

Truths, however, are as numerous as there are people and can even change on a whim. Someone could get electrocuted and that's a fact, but whether he agrees is a different question and his answer is his truth regardless of the fact.

"Fact"-checkers thus are about truth-checking and specifically programming certain truths upon the commons. A Ministry of Truth. The NPC meme isn't far from the mark.

Truths are not facts and facts are not truths. Forcing people to believe, speak, and act in certain ways violates the very basics of human rights.

One of the costs of a free society is that everyone has a right to their own opinion, their own truth. Personally, I believe that cost is more than worth the many benefits of a free society; but that's just my truth and you probably have a different idea.

Reading your comment, could we use another word here, beliefs?

If so then I'm not really against people having their own beliefs, except beliefs aren't facts and they can become extremely harmful, especially at scale, even to those holding onto the beliefs.

I guess you've heard about the Jonestown massacre, for example?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown

>Reading your comment, could we use another word here, beliefs?

Doesn't really matter, ultimately certain people want to enforce the notion that there is One True Truth/Belief/Opinion/Narrative/"Fact" and any heretics must be burned at the stake.

I like and appreciate a free society, so I am decisively against such notions.

That's a great point -- in addition, some facts are less consequential than others. For example, if I go around believing that the Earth is five-thousand years old, it may not affect me negatively at all (unless I'm a geologist or archeologist), in contrast to your electrical wiring fact that would have immediate effect.

> I’m wondering if it’s because the majority of people seem to be living more than 50% of their lives online. Facts seem less important in the virtual world.

Or when you're online, it's much easier to assemble a hyper conformist bubble (which cultivates a sense of self righteousness) and be rude to people you disagree with (because they're often just an abstraction you'll never interact with again, and also the enemy of your bubble). Then once developed, the habits formed in those spaces can bleed into interactions that aren't so conformist or anonymous.

Similarly, online discourse as much broader.

When online, im the world's foremost expert on fusion reactors, general relativity, geopolitics, genetics, and culture. I can dig up scholarly articles to back my position. If someone disagrees with me, the topic is deep and complex enough that I can't be decisively proven wrong.

The nature of the modern era is that everybody has a opinion about even the most niche topic. They get away with this because the stakes are non-existent and people have no real skin in the game. This habitual behavior has become the norm.

Sam Harris has a great summary of this: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/395...

It's so true in my opinion "doing research" is has often become, "finding a view that agrees with my world view" and to add to that, using that view to reinforce my beliefs.

It's really diabolical.

There has never been one.

It is a catchy phrase for saying that lies are spread by the goverment and the public is willing to pass them as facts.

Truth or fact is one and only, perspectives are many, opinions are personal. Lies are infinite.

At risk of sounding argumentative, another way of looking at this I think is that the community of people in the US who have known only a facts-first approach to reality are now discovering the size of the community of people whose worldview is effectively tribal. I was raised in a very rural community and many of my most vivid memories are of members of my extended family recounting stories which I now know are urban legends, joking knowingly with one another about how so called experts in far-off cities were confused, and cautionary tales about the horrible things that members of other races would do to you. You can imagine how confusing it was then to go off to college and then to see the world and meet people and discover how much of the mythology I'd absorbed was no more than that.

The bulk of the people I've described had very little interaction with the world outside the area where they lived, and the only way they were likely to interact with someone from the facts-first community was via a letter to the editor of some magazine (which might not be published), or if an outsider came to visit, in which case politeness might avoid a confrontation.

Social media introduced these two groups to each other, each group thinks the other is comprised of fools and neither is shy about saying so, and here we are. In my own family, I have yet to see a case in which a member of the tribal knowledge community was moved by an argument from a member of the facts-first community; their belief structure seems to ossify at around pubescence and compromising on it in any way would risk a loss of status in that community.

I take some comfort in believing that we have not been plopped into a post-truth reality, but rather that providing the internet to rural tribal communities was rather like switching on a light and discovering what things had been hiding before our eyes in the dark. I think its also a generational issue because the difference between my old relatives and their offspring my childrens' age is nearly as stark as the difference between the facts-first and tribal-knowledge communities on the whole. While it sucks that this post-truth era will be with us for a while I'm hopeful that the same internet access that led to this schism will also allow at least some of the kids who grew up like I did to be skeptical about tribal knowledge from a younger age. However you might also argue that now the segment of the entire population who are susceptible to misinformation will be poisoned in the same way I was.

Anyhow thanks for your comment; reading it made me stop to think about something that had been bothering me a great deal lately and it was helpful writing this response.