Re:Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
by tshaddox on Thursday September 04, 2025 @07:55PM
(#45133590)
A piece of knowledge is a claim about some property of reality, which is another way to say that it's a claim about what is true. Thus knowledge can contain truth and can also contain errors, and importantly it's impossible to guarantee that knowledge does not contain errors.
Re:Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
by rfrey on Friday September 05, 2025 @12:09AM
(#45134911)
> Any knowledge is composed from imperfect abstractions, the edge cases of which we don't know.
That is a pretty concrete epistemological statement. Is it true?
That's not just a game, or a "gotcha". Any discussion about "truth" eventually ends up with the question of what it means to know something, a subject about which you seem to be fairly confident.
Oh I agree we can generate knowledge, but it is never the Truth, it can't be. Any knowledge is composed from imperfect abstractions, the edge cases of which we don't know.
We are taking patterns from our experience, and coining them as abstractions, but ultimately we all have our own lived experience, a limited experience. We can only know approximatively. Some people know quantum physics, others know brain surgery, so the quality of our abstractions varies based on individual and topic. We are like the 5 blind men and the elephant.