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Lomax » Mon Nov 28, 2016 11:04 pm wrote:d30: wrote:
As stated, twice I think, instances of which it seems you missed, a second Truth Guardian Institute would be required, to be a safeguard against exactly what concerns you - one of the institutes becoming corrupt.
Okay...and who keeps an eye on that one?
What distinguishes these guys from fact-checkers?
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Lomax » November 28th, 2016, 10:04 pm wrote:d30 » November 29th, 2016, 6:42 am wrote:Lomax:
To reiterate a point made by Paul Anthony, which I feel you missed: Suppose I were telling you all this in my capacity as an employee of the Ministry of Truth - sorry, Truth Guardian Institute - what assurance would you have that I were not abusing my power, just as journalists and politicians do?
d30:
As stated, twice I think, instances of which it seems you missed, a second Truth Guardian Institute would be required, to be a safeguard against exactly what concerns you - one of the institutes becoming corrupt.
Okay...and who keeps an eye on that one?
What distinguishes these guys from fact-checkers?
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Braininvat » November 29th, 2016, 9:42 am wrote:Yes, after skimming, I would only say that putting up truth in an Institute seems like a scary idea! Factcheckers should be a bit scruffy and gonzo, roaming around outside of the halls of power, not seated comfortably inside.
The best bias for anyone scrutinizing your statements of truth is someone who doesn't like you. Or, at least, doesn't trust you. They are less likely to cut you slack or incorrectly assume that your premises make sense. Watchdogs should bark and growl and bristle, not wag their tails and smile at you.
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BadgerJelly » November 29th, 2016, 3:41 pm wrote:You cognitively map the worldc If not you have nothing. Your construct is a based on how "reality" appears to you and placed out there in reference to space and time.
Truth is convined not ubiquitous. The universe (the world as we see it) as a reality is ubiquitous and inferred. Truth is only parcelled in abstractly as absolute.
To even talk about bodies moving through space amd colliding requires causal reference. We "know" by way of causal inference not by being given some absolute truth. We simply cannot reduce reality beyond our capacity. I can only be me and infer otherness in you and in the bed I am currently lying on.
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Paul Anthony » December 1st, 2016, 2:41 pm wrote:d30,
I find Wikipedia a great resource as a starting point when investigating a topic new to me. But, the information provided by Wiki is not always complete...or even correct!
How will your proposed "Guardian of Truth Institute" be better? Why?
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lichen » December 1st, 2016, 4:19 pm wrote:The first post on this thread seemed to grieve a loss of respect for truth in politics, if not precisely a loss of honesty. I would personally hesitate to draw conclusions about the social valuation of truth based on one presidential election.
I would even go so far as to suggest that the election was a very late symptom of an ancient problem.
People, by and large, are defined by their bias and their opinions, irrespective of facts, and there will always be a minority who have the means, motive and opportunity to use this weakness of populations to their own ends (self-serving or just chaos serving or whatever).
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… what's the point of the human species, just make a mess and die off? What are we living for?
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lichen » Fri Dec 02, 2016 7:21 am wrote:
We seem, as a society, to have failed miserably to understand the consequences of misinformation. Of course we can't be executing people for lies, but we could, say, take away their right to broadcasting platforms. We can be creative, if we want to be.
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Braininvat » Fri Dec 02, 2016 10:41 am wrote:Some of the problem you describe Paul, in regard to your nutrition example, is not so much the raw research findings as it is with popular journalists who take ambiguous results (often presented with many caveats) and turn them into sensationalized stories that attract readership. Or, to use the technical term: bullsh--t. Sure, sometimes primary sources can be bullsh--t, too (bad data collection, shoddy interpretation of data, drawing phony curves through a bunch of points).... but given time and proper peer review, they can be weeded.
I do agree science should be challenged by anyone who, regardless of their formal credentials, has taken the trouble to study in depth the methods and research results that they critique. But ignorant critique, by people who have only half-absorbed an area of knowledge, is little better than the sensation mongering described in the preceding paragraph. As usual, better education is the answer, teaching that helps every citizen build a better bullsh--t detector.
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lichen » Sat Dec 03, 2016 6:59 am wrote:Paul Anthony, what would you say to a public, non-profit-run project to classify or rate public personalities by their veracity? A statistical summary of the important theories they promoted, based on the claimed confidence versus some scientifically or statistically acceptable means of measuring that confidence, combined with the risk factor of acting as if that theory were true or false?
What about keeping track, publicly and transparently with oversight, of the statements of clear falsehood about basic facts, likewise with the implication of harm to individuals or groups?
How do we give people the tools to identify charlatans and their chicanery? How do we build a public service to protect people from harm, but still let them make up their own minds?
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But don’t take my word for it. Listen to Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s first campaign manager and a CNN analyst, who admitted Thursday that his boss often lies.
Speaking at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, Lewandowski blamed the media for being gullible enough to believe his own presidential candidate.
“This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally,” he said. “The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes – when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar – you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”
Lewandowski is correct. This is indeed a problem, and not just for the media. For some reason, the world’s leaders are just as dumb as reporters. They don’t understand that Trump is just going to say things when he doesn’t have all the facts to back it up.
Who would believe the next leader of the free world when he heaps praise on a country like Pakistan, which harbored Osama bin Laden for so long, and has been such a good friend to the Taliban?
The Pakistani prime minister, that’s who.
“Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, you have a very good reputation. You are a terrific guy. You are doing amazing work which is visible in every way,” Trump said, according to the terrific readout from the Pakistani government. “I am ready and willing to play any role that you want me to play to address and find solutions to the outstanding problems. It will be an honor and I will personally do it. Feel free to call me anytime, even before 20 January, that is before I assume my office.”
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As Aleppo endured its final agonies, the simple act of circulating any account – a video, a photograph, a news report – would trigger an unnerving response. Someone, somewhere would reply that the photograph was doctored, the source was a stooge, the rescued child was not really a child or not really rescued.
But this is about more than assigning blame for this death or that bombing. This is about refusing to accept that the death or bombing occurred at all. This is about defenders of Bashar al-Assad, and his Russian and Iranian enablers, coming on television to say that what is happening on the ground is not happening, that it is all an illusion. The late US senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say: “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” But that distinction seems to have broken down. Now people regard facts as very much like opinions: you can discard the ones you don’t like.
This problem is not confined to Syria. This week the CIA joined 17 other US intelligence agencies in concluding that Russia was behind the hacking of Democratic emails, adding its conclusion that Moscow had done so in order to tilt the US election towards Donald Trump. “Ridiculous,” said Trump, who has not looked at the CIA’s evidence and has refused to receive the daily intelligence briefing provided for all incoming presidents on the grounds that he is “like, a smart person”.
After Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction that never were, plenty are understandably wary of accepting the word of the intelligence agencies. But Trump’s scepticism – cynicism is a better word – operates on a different level. “Nobody really knows,” he says about the hacking charges, the very words he uses about climate change, in the face of a vast body of evidence. Recall that he also says that he won the US popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally”, a flagrantly false claim for which there is no evidence whatsoever.
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We’ve been calling this “post-truth politics” but I now worry that the phrase is far too gentle, suggesting society has simply reached some new phase in its development. It lets off the guilty too lightly. What Trump is doing is not “engaging in post-truth politics”. He’s lying.
[...]
How has this happened so quickly? Technology has clearly played a part. Social media allows fact deniers to spread their anti-history fast and wide. Distrust in elites is also central. People are no longer prepared to take their leaders’ word on trust. Iraq poisoned that relationship, but its roots go deeper. In the US, Watergate broke public faith; some suspect the rot set in even earlier, with the Kennedy assassination.
But a crucial shift is surely the trend towards deeper and more bitter partisanship. Once people have aligned themselves with a tribe, studies show their first instinct will be to believe what favours their side and disbelieve what favours their opponent. One telling poll this week found Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings have shot up among US Republicans. They once hated him, but now their guy Trump is Putin’s buddy, they’re ready to see the Russian autocrat in a favourable light – and to ignore all evidence to the contrary.
This is making our public sphere a dizzying place. Without a common, agreed set of facts, we can hardly have any kind of public conversation at all. Writer David Roberts, who has a good claim to have coined the phrase “post-truth”, says that these days: “There are no more referees. There are only players.”
We have no group of non-partisan arbiters, trusted to define at least the factual basis for our collective discussion. When actual judges enter the picture, as they have in the Brexit article 50 case, one side rushes to discredit them, branding them as biased, ideological partisans, no less tainted and untrustworthy than everyone else: enemies of the people.
What’s so odd about this is that we are happy to accept that there are facts, and judges of fact, in every other aspect of our lives. Philosopher Quassim Cassam notes if a car mechanic says your brakes have broken, you don’t denounce him as biased and drive on: you listen. If a doctor says you have a tumour, you don’t mock him as a member of the medical elite. We even accept expert judgment on reality TV: no one minds Mary Berry deciding who should win Bake Off.
Only in the political realm have we somehow drifted into a world in which no one can be trusted, not on questions of judgment, nor even on questions of fact. But we cannot live in such a world. Evidence, facts and reason are the building blocks of civilisation. Without them we plunge into darkness.
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BadgerJelly » December 17th, 2016, 4:02 pm wrote:There is something important in the quote Moss posted.
Yes, we listen if a mechanic tells us our brakes will fail. And, yes, we listen to the doctor if he says we have cancer. These are both very clearly defined and measureable physical factors. What is a deep and concerning error of judgement is to apply this view of factuality to the political realm.
By this I mean it is not the denial of "facts" that cause harm. It is the idea of equating "facts" as "truths". A fact is simply a fact. A fact is defined by the methodology it is framed in and its truth has value only in how the individual understands it.
1 A person who is professionally involved in politics, especially as a holder of an elected office:
‘a veteran communist politician’
‘a local politician’
1.1US A person who acts in a manipulative and devious way, typically to gain advancement within an organization.
BadgerJelly » December 17th, 2016, 4:02 pm wrote:I have said elsewhere people have legitimate reasons to question scientific data. The legitimate reasons are political reasons.
BadgerJelly » December 17th, 2016, 4:02 pm wrote:Reason is not unbiased and objective, no one is without bias.
The power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgements logically
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Mossling » Sat Dec 17, 2016 1:24 am wrote:
This is an interesting definition of a politician from the Oxford Dictionary:1 A person who is professionally involved in politics, especially as a holder of an elected office:
‘a veteran communist politician’
‘a local politician’
1.1US A person who acts in a manipulative and devious way, typically to gain advancement within an organization.
Hopefully you are not talking about politiicans in the latter sense. I am thinking of someone who happily serves the public in a centralized government office - an official of some sort monitoring and guiding a certain aspect of civilized society.
It is not the job of a politician to guide a country according to their personal bias, it is their job to ensure that the basic economic facts and fundamental natural principles that keep society healthy are adhered to. They serve the social vision that has already been agreed upon. Their own personal biases should stay out of that as much as a doctor's religion should when he is helping a patient. There is a procedure to be done, and that must be carried out. For a politician they must preserve the peaceful liberties of the community - NOT, for example, grab all the resources for themselves and sell out the masses. We have the French Revolution to show us where that leads, and those leaders were supposed to be 'noble'.
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