There is a semantic issue here that's bothering me: the word "Fact" is a contronym.
I was taught in elementary school that facts don't need to be true to be a "fact". Nearly 3 decades ago, I was told that "facts" are either true or false, as opposed to "opinions" which are neither.
Then, as time moved on, I encountered what appeared to be a bifurcation in the English language, where half the people I encountered defined "fact" as a true statement, and the other half defined "fact" as any statement about the external world that did not rely on somebody's internal state of mind to make sense.
I challenge all of you to perform a quick experiment with Google.
Step 1: Google "Fact vs Opinion". Skim the results.
Step 2: Google "Fact definition" or "Fact meaning". Skim the results.
Step 3: Compare and contrast.
I watched this debate between Destiny and a centrist influencer and the centrist influencer was really confident in their perspectives, but also said they mostly used heuristics to learn things. There’s nothing wrong with heuristics, but they played this game where Destiny tried to guess the centrist influencers perspectives on things, and came pretty close to all the opinions. And the influencer admitted their heuristics were really shallow.
One of the weirdest things I’m reckoning with is that objectivity isn’t optimal. That you’ll be most successful based on a relative positioning of beliefs (either towards or against a given common perspective) rather than being “objective” in most areas.
I suspect actually if you want to shape public opinion you do what Twitter and Meta are probably doing by the scenes, put your thumb on the scales around what goes viral. Which is much more terrifying than “fact checking”
People don't have the time to become familiar enough with every subject to form well reasoned opinions. It's the same reason we don't build everything we own for ourselves. Specialization and deferring to experts has been a natural human behavior forever
While I don't disagree that people could be better prepared by our education system, they also have to want to be capable of thinking for themselves.
By all means, feel free to fact check our textbooks, news broadcasts, and statements from official sources.
But when I log on to social media to rant about how UFOs are time-traveling humans, I don't want a teal-colored, official-looking div element to alert the world that the online version of my personal expression is objectively wrong.
The problem is that someone can say "they are eating the cats, they are eating the dogs" and that turns into hate and violence in the real world. They are not separate spaces, both the physical and the digital are part of the same world
So where does the line get drawn? Many believe that American style free speech goes too far and enables the malicious freedom to manipulate
Also, online platforms are currently anti-competitive, so when you don't agree with the provider, there are significant costs to choosing another. That's why efforts like ATProto & ActivityPub are important to the next generation of social media applications.
Time was (that is up to about 10 years ago) that people put phrases like "I think..." and "It seems to me ..." to prefix things which they are not presenting as facts. It seems that is seen as weakness now. It results in a worse world.
What is the meaning of facts anyway? How relevant are the facts for post-industrial society? We, as a society, are separated from "hard" reality by too many degrees of separation for facts to be of any considerable importance. That is the price to pay for the superabundance and sky-high productivity.
And i understand where it's coming from. People want social networks to be balanced that is, reflect views of the general society/mass of users: balance between left and right. Any thoroughly fact-checked content is a content with left bias too evident to miss. It naturally makes people unhappy: they feel that they are being "pushed woke shit". Because biologically, people are, and ought to have, a significant right bias (insert famous squirrel vs tiger example).
There are facts and history of course, just not on social networks. For people who call the shots - the elite and the intellectuals - things are just fine, but they don't spend days arguing with each other on Facebook.
I think a big question is what outcomes do you want. Let’s say a vaccine is dangerous. How many people are you willing to sacrifice on the misinformation. What if it leads to social upheaval? You could ask similar questions about say, class consciousness, immigration etc. true or not, beliefs have consequences.
But in any cases, it is not the facts, but narratives and manipulators who drive people's behaviour. There is competition between left and right propaganda machines, it happens among intellectuals working for the elite, not between the left vs right masses, masses are just that: masses, they have no conscious and no behaviour of their own, they are a product of manipulation.
I was taught in elementary school that facts don't need to be true to be a "fact". Nearly 3 decades ago, I was told that "facts" are either true or false, as opposed to "opinions" which are neither.
Then, as time moved on, I encountered what appeared to be a bifurcation in the English language, where half the people I encountered defined "fact" as a true statement, and the other half defined "fact" as any statement about the external world that did not rely on somebody's internal state of mind to make sense.
I challenge all of you to perform a quick experiment with Google. Step 1: Google "Fact vs Opinion". Skim the results. Step 2: Google "Fact definition" or "Fact meaning". Skim the results. Step 3: Compare and contrast.
One of the weirdest things I’m reckoning with is that objectivity isn’t optimal. That you’ll be most successful based on a relative positioning of beliefs (either towards or against a given common perspective) rather than being “objective” in most areas.
I suspect actually if you want to shape public opinion you do what Twitter and Meta are probably doing by the scenes, put your thumb on the scales around what goes viral. Which is much more terrifying than “fact checking”
While I don't disagree that people could be better prepared by our education system, they also have to want to be capable of thinking for themselves.
But when I log on to social media to rant about how UFOs are time-traveling humans, I don't want a teal-colored, official-looking div element to alert the world that the online version of my personal expression is objectively wrong.
So where does the line get drawn? Many believe that American style free speech goes too far and enables the malicious freedom to manipulate
Also, online platforms are currently anti-competitive, so when you don't agree with the provider, there are significant costs to choosing another. That's why efforts like ATProto & ActivityPub are important to the next generation of social media applications.
And i understand where it's coming from. People want social networks to be balanced that is, reflect views of the general society/mass of users: balance between left and right. Any thoroughly fact-checked content is a content with left bias too evident to miss. It naturally makes people unhappy: they feel that they are being "pushed woke shit". Because biologically, people are, and ought to have, a significant right bias (insert famous squirrel vs tiger example).
If you have no history, you can have no future.
If you have no future, then you are stuck in an eternal present. This is the ideal state for authoritarianism and autocracy.