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Comment by siosonel | Hacker News Reader

"binary judgement of truth"

I think people should be more comfortable with non-binary truth, based on the likelihood that something is a lie or not based on historical record. I would put more trust in a statement from someone with a record of telling unbiased truth versus someone with a record of frequently spewing lies or having ingrained bias.

Otherwise, if you don't make these types of initial simplifications, it becomes too complicated to start evaluating the truth of any statement, including scientific ones. And it's okay to be make a mistaken evaluation, just reevaluate and adjust the simplified "truth" assessment model based on more recent data.

There is a danger in deferring a "truth" assessment: a community loses a sense of shared truth leading to polarization, doubt, confusion. And a so-called "neutral" person is, by not taking action, implicitly supporting the dominant narrative, which may be a lie after all.

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>comfortable with non-binary truth

Careful, getting a bit too postmodernists in here. If you look at it too hard all "truths" become false eventually, and that can pave the way to apathy.

>And it's okay to be make a mistaken evaluation, just reevaluate and adjust the simplified "truth" assessment model based on more recent data.

And how many politicians on both sides of the aisle double-down on an issue just to remain consistent to their base? Or worse, change their position thanks to millions of dollars worth of lobbying or the promise of a high-up position once they're out of office?

>And a so-called "neutral" person is, by not taking action, implicitly supporting the dominant narrative, which may be a lie after all.

Maybe the Stoics were on to something. If the masses believe the lie, doesn't it become the truth?

> If you look at it too hard all "truths" become false eventually, and that can pave the way to apathy.

Isn't the point of seeing the truth as non-binary that they cannot become false? Just less likely to be true?

This seems intrinsically more amenable to changing one's mind on the truth of something, though I agree that not having an opinion on the truth of something is apathetic. Just because you strongly believe that you're about 60% sure that something is true doesn't make it less strongly held.

I do this all the time in scientific analysis... estimating how likely I am to be correct is part of the job.

I think what they mean by truths becoming false is rather that all certainties become uncertainties. Delving too deep in postmodernism is like taking all of your legos and melting them.

If I want to have a conversation about free speech, and a postmodernist begins questioning if we even actually have free will, or if it's even valid to discuss morality if it's entirely possible we exist in a simulation...you haven't actually advanced anything. You've just made soup. Postmodernism is a tool for turning building blocks into soup, and that is more often than not extremely counterproductive. Though it is, to some degree, necessary.

I think the fundamental problem is that aggressive postmodernism will often disregard presuppositions with absolutely no interest in understanding the utility/value of the presupposition.

I would turn that around and say antipostmodernists are upset that they can't have their presuppositions without justifying their utility/value first.

I think postmodernism leads straight to linguistics, not apathy. Much of politics is based around words like “democracy”, “freedom”, “the middle class”, “big government”. There is no truth around these things because they mean whatever is politically convenient in the moment. I mean sure you can define a pretty good general purpose term for your own use, but that’s not going to be how politicians use it. These should be seen as rhetorical terms, not inherently meaningful outside of the context of, say, a speech or and ongoing public discussion. It is far easier and cheaper to redefine yourself out of commitments than it is to actually stand for concrete values. The fix is to stand for concrete values that everyone can easily identify and discuss in concrete terms. It should be easy, then, to determine the difference between “waffling” and adjusting to a new situation because everyone can adjust together around a value consensus.

Note, PR takes literally the exact opposite tact to communication. We’re barreling deep into a post-truth world with an incredible amount of money fueling this. See also: non linear warfare, hypernormalization, Edward Bernays, why to buy a newspaper when it never makes money.

"If you look at it too hard all "truths" become false eventually"

My opinion is that many apathetic people become that way because of being treated unfairly (in their view) or feeling helpless, and way less people become that way because of thinking too hard.

"Or worse, change their position thanks to millions of dollars ..."

Well, I see new data: lobbying $$$ that could make a previously trusted politician biased. Time to update my simplistic model on his related political ads to being less likely to true. There might be another politician who changed positions based on new or emerging body of evidence - maybe this person is more trustworthy this time. New data -> updated evaluation.

"the masses believe the lie, doesn't it become the truth"

I'm not familiar with post-modernism or Stoicism. But I sure hope that the proportion of people who believe one thing does not ultimately determine its truthfulness. The way I would initially simplify this is to rely on the likely proportion of unbiased people who hold one position versus the opposite. And by unbiased, I simplify that by not trusting greedy people, or people who have not studied the policy or history of it or other places who've tried different approaches. I think these initial simplifications will already cut down many viewpoints and voices that I do not need hear, in order to make an informed voting decision.

> And a so-called "neutral" person is, by not taking action, implicitly supporting the dominant narrative

Strongly disagree, this would imply that an individual's support of a narrative can change simply by the environment around them changing while the individual stays static.

Three Christians, two athiests, and an agnostic are sitting at a bar. Does the agnostic support Christianity? Two of the Christians leave. Does the agnostic now support atheism?

People in your example are not “neutral” in the first place.

Did the Christians try to convince the agnostic about something? If not, nothing changes before or after they leave.

Anyway, the OP was about political ads that can affect how people vote, a decision to vote or not affects the community. Being agnostic about something (aliens) does not necessarily have the same gravity of effect as believing in a political ad.

If the Christians are bullying the athiests, and the agnostic does nothing, then yes, they are implicitly supporting the actions taking place in their vicinity. If they're just all sitting around doing nothing, the implicit support is of them sitting around doing nothing.

Every moment you're not actively working for the FBI homicide department, you're commiting implicit murders.

Yes, people are fine with all sorts of murders and other atrocities taking place, as long as its not happening to them. As long as the right kind of people suffer. Your phrasing is wrong, of course, because you're conflating support for something with committing the act yourself, but you're not too far off the mark.

If you are present for a murder and you do nothing to either prevent it or report it, then yes, you are complicit in the murder.

This is an extremely bad example for two reasons:

- one: you are bringing religion into a discussion where it isn't necessary

- two: it hangs in a frame where a causual passer-by might think this is usual. I mean: if I write "if the rabbits chases the cats and the dogs do nothing" an hypothetical reader who knows nothing about cats and rabbits might easily get the idea that this is a common occurrence, while in fact it is fact a very unusual one.

- one: not my example; it was introduced by someone as a rhetorical jab by trying to introduce an emotionally-charged subject. The point doesn't depend on religion in any particular way, and I'm happy to rephrase it.

- two: I think this is fine. In an example where a bunch of people are sitting in a bar and a big group starts bullying a smaller group, someone who does nothing is allowing this to happen, and we can attribute moral responsibility for them allowing this to happen. Just because everyone knows that it's normal for someone to always get bullied by the larger group doesn't make it okay. If someone doesn't know or understand that bullying is wrong, assigning moral responsibility is more complicated, but neither of those things depend on their knowledge of the frequency of bullying. There is a way in which available information is important, but not this one.

> Just because everyone knows that it's normal for someone to always get bullied by the larger group doesn't make it okay.

Hmmmm. I think you managed to sneak in another subtle error:

If that was your idea then, at least in an Internet context, you should probably write about how Atheists are bullying Christians.

I'd avoid this example at all. It feels contrived and either you intended it or not it smears a good number of innocent people.

Use something neutral instead:

Group a and group b or something.

> Group a and group b or something.

I referred to the groups as "The Larger Group" and "The Smaller Group." I'm not sure what you're getting at.

Ok, let me spell it out then:

Writing - especially in an Internet forum context - about Christians bullying Atheists

is about as fitting as

- in a historic context - writing an example about Jews killing Nazis. Yes, it has happened, more than once. And no, for some reason that doesn't make it a good example except when we are discussing that particular topic.

Besides, as was mentioned above you are both pulling an unrelated group of people into this and you are pulling religion into an argument about something else.

Snide remarks like that is equally annoying regardless of if they come from you or from the old relative who always wants to frame everything good that happens as a miracle from $DEITY

Both you and the old relative might mean it well and get som points from people who agree with you but on the larger scale it only increases tension.

I rephrased in terms of unnamed groups, what are you still going on about? You should direct these comments at the person who chose to make it about religion.

(Hey philipov, I'm kinda using this comment to reply to both of you -- not everything here is directed at you.)

Guy Who Chose To Make It About Religion, over here! FWIW I was just looking for a concrete example that would illustrate the preposterous nature of the statement I was replying to, and when I searched my brain for people who don't have a position on something "agnostic" was the one that immediately came to mind. Having the hindsight of seeing this little back and forth between you two, maybe "undecided voter" would have been more apropos... but I feel like that could have potentially spiraled out, too. In any event, I wasn't trying to start a holy flame war and I didn't imagine that anybody would go on a tangent about the religious aspect of it.

That said, why not stoke these flames unnecessarily? As for whether athiests gang up on Christians more than the other way around, I don't think the "internet" context is relevant; the internet is the context we're discussing this in, but the hypothetical bar was IRL (or at least, that was the interpretation of the author and the author has never heard of a bar that isn't IRL). Where I live (Midwest US) Christians ganging up on athiests seems more common than the other way around IRL, so if we need to unpack the realism of philipov's modification to my example and willfully ignore the fact that their choice of which group would be cast as the aggressor was just based on which group was initially larger in my example (which was in turn based on which group is larger IRL, but I don't feel the example would be substantially different if labels were reversed) I'll vote for "marginally more realistic than the other way around and nowhere near the same ballpark as a roles-reversed holocaust."

Edit: s/the holocaust/a roles-reversed holocaust/

Good explanation. My original point was that the attempt to reduce to absurdity fails because it's not simply being something or holding some opinion that causes others to be in implicit support of it. Implicit support consists in being present when an immoral or unethical action takes place, and not stopping it when you have the opportunity to do so. Indeed, it doesn't even require one group to be in the majority, although fear of going against a larger group is often what causes people to stay silent.

I get your point, but I don't think it's entirely relevant to my original post because the comment I was replying to was making statements about the truth of descriptive claims rather than, say, standing by while group X oppresses group Y. Of course these are intertwined and hard to separate in some cases; you can find plenty of examples where descriptive claims have been used to justify horrible atrocities, and being agnostic towards the claims Nazis made about Jews would not garner my sympathies, but I hope you can understand the distinction I'm drawing. I don't even feel comfortable saying that the scared or indifferent onlooker would be supporting group X (though if they pay taxes to group X I'd say they are supporting the oppression whether or not they speak up, in a financial sense), but I do understand your reasoning in that context and don't particularly care to split hairs over the definition of "support" (it doesn't affect my opinions of standing by and doing nothing in the face of oppression, I'm just a pedantic motherfucker).

Religion is absolutely part of the negotiation of power (politics). It is, after all, still 2019, but I think this will be so even in Dune.

The problem with degrees of truth is that they aren't composable into an argument. I can chain together a handful of things that are 99% true and arrive at an absurd conclusion because the 1% is the interesting bit.

In this context, the question is whether something is political speech or something else. What is included and excluded from that category will get pretty interesting.

We saw the same thing with compelled union dues in the public sector. Were those for political speech or just routine union activity? SCOTUS said it couldn't tell the difference, so a public institution couldn't compel employees to pay dues.

I guess twitter thinks they can tell the difference, but I suspect there will be a lot of controversy.

> The problem with degrees of truth is that they aren't composable into an argument. I can chain together a handful of things that are 99% true and arrive at an absurd conclusion because the 1% is the interesting bit.

For a general view:

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Probabilistic_logic

Bayesian side:

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/A_priori_probability

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Bayesian_inference (Bayesian Updating)

No, there are formal systems for handling uncertainty, Bayesian inference, fuzzy logic etc. Even informally we do apply similar rules all the time (though we are not free of biases)

> The problem with degrees of truth is that they aren't composable into an argument.

To me, this seems like less a problem with degrees of truth, and more a problem with faith in simplistic arguments.

Degrees of truth aren't some option you can choose, it's just an observation about how the world already works, where information is universally not perfect. The point is by acknowledging it, you will be more willing to update bad information and bad conclusions as you get updated information.

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