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Comment by feralimal | Hacker News Reader

Who arbitrates?

Is it whoever owns big corporations? Is it the mainstream media? Are they trustworthy? Is it the government? Scientists? Which one of us holds the truth?

One man's facts are another man's lies. And this is fine. We should be able to tolerate multiple opinions. Labelling things as 'hate speech' and denying people the right to speech doesn't help!

I think C S Lewis said it best:

"those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience"

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Why not jump off a bridge? After all, Newton's theory of gravitation is just a theory, and besides Einstein proved it's incomplete. The elite still pretends their disproven theory is truth because they want to control your life. Show the power of positive thinking and faith, make the leap!

But seriously, equating fact-checking with torment is probably not what C. S. Lewis had in mind. It has historically been the case that when opinions and ideology replace facts, it opens the door to tormentors who won't hesitate to hurt you to impose their version of reality.

Here is the full quote. I think its even better:

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals."

Is fact-checking tyranny? No.

People who wish it to be difficult for millions or billions to read anything they deem "false" is accurately described as "a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims".

If the only information allowed is the one approved by designated "fact checkers" (the ideal most major social networks strive for, and most fact-checking enthusiasts would wholeheartedly approve) - it is the most complete example of tyranny (at least in the information space) possible.

Of course, if fact checking merely exists as a set of opinions - it doesn't become tyrannical by itself. It's just an opinion of somebody on the question of what the facts are. But we all know it's not how it works. At least not how it works on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

This presumes that the robber baron has a conscience which perceives the suffering of an outgroup to be a bad thing.

No, it explicitly doesn't. The implication is that the robber barons are pure self-interested evil. Self-interest means they aren't focused on you, as opposed to well intentioned self appointed saviors.

Lewis's more philosophical works are massively underappreciated for how insightful, nuanced, and prescient they often were. If I were the kind of omnipotent moral busy-body he warns about, I'd swap every copy of 1984 in every primary school with a collection of his essays.

The difference is that Newton's theory of gravity comports with what every single person experiences in real life, in the same way. So nobody's really prone to believe it's some sort of hoax.

If we were all floating in zero gee in a giant space ship there would definitely be people arguing that it’s not real.

I wonder if flat Earthers seriously argue against Newton’s theory of gravity?

I don't know what flat earthers believe about gravity, but they do experience it the same as everyone else. They can drop an apple from height X and time how long it takes to hit the ground and come to the same conclusions as anyone else at least as far as the math is concerned.

They may not argue against the idea itself, but the flat Earth just doesn't make sense if you account for gravity.

It also has been the case that when somebody is going to subjugate you, one of the first things they'd try to do is to control your information intake. If they can define what is "fact" for you, the rest goes much easier - after all, if somebody resists accepting "facts", it is ok to force them to do what "factually" needs to be done, it's only for their own good - it's literally like saving somebody from jumping off a bridge. So if you put a couple of bruises on him or break an arm or a leg, it's still a good deed - after all, he was going to jump off a bridge, so he's better off alive, even with broken leg. As soon as you've given yourself an exclusive license to facts, violence against and subjugation of whoever disagrees with you happens very easily and very naturally.

> One man's facts are another man's lies

This is pretty absurd. We should be fighting disinformation instead of legitimizing it. Not all “facts” are based in a healthy reality. See: 2020 election “fraud”

See also: 2016 Russian collusion.

The Mueller investigation indicted 34 people.

So, it's prosecutors that decide what is true? What if they are wrong?

(I'm not talking about this particular case)

I have an idea, we can convene special committees where both prosecutors and defendants are given a structured format in which they can present all the evidence for guilt/innocence and counterevidence and arguments. We'll have separate professionals in charge of making sure the structure/rules of the committee are followed so that it's fair, and of course we'll have advocates well-versed in these rules on both sides, but maybe we'll also have a panel of everyday people representing, well, everyone, so that decisions like this remain a public matter as well as professional opinion.

Think of it as something like the royal courts for important decisions of old. In fact, that might be a good name for it: court.

Except courts do not determine truth. They determine legal guilt or innocence. They are actually designed this way - everybody can know somebody murdered somebody else, but if the court procedure is not followed and proof is not presented in a certain manner to achieve certain legal outcome - no prosecution. Moreover, there are special rules when known true evidence can be dismissed for not following the rules. OTOH, there are plenty of factually untrue court decisions - people have been incarcerated and even executed for crimes they factually did not commit. Check out Project Innocence, for example. If you want to find truth, courts are not the best place to look for it.

> Except courts do not determine truth

Courts definitely rule on matters of fact. Or truth. The fact that they also have a responsibility to apply the law once matters of fact are established doesn't exclude the fact-related portion of their focus and responsibility. Where known true evidence is dismissed, it's usually to protect defendants against violations of due process or other important rights.

If your point is that courts have limits in their ability to bring truth to light and apply it... sure. Every human being and every institution has such limits. If your point is that courts have failed catastrophically in some cases and improvement in how they're conducted or how prosecutiorial incentives are placed or examining other aspects of the system would be worthwhile, I heartily agree.

But if your point is that courts are useless when it comes to arbitration of the truth, then you're not on any particular road to truth. Social arbitration of truth is necessary for society. There have to be some institutions trying to do that work, whatever shortcomings they have.

Courts are one particular model for such institutions. There may be others but most institutions are going to converge on similar functions (though potentially distributed across different roles with different incentives).

They do rule on factual matters. But it has nothing to do with the truth (well, we hope it has something to do, but there's no guarantee whatsoever), it's just legal action. They can rule sun rises on the west, but it won't change the movement of the sun. They can rule somebody is a murderer, but whether it's the truth or not is not determined by that ruling. It could be either. The legal consequences are determined by the court ruling, but the actual murder doesn't change. We hope that in most cases the ruling coincides or at least resembles the truth, but we know for a fact (and this is the truth) that is it not always so.

> Every human being and every institution has such limits

That's exactly the point. So we shouldn't act like these limited institutions suddenly gained magic capacities because we conducted some complicated procedures involving some highly paid people.

> But if your point is that courts are useless when it comes to arbitration of the truth

No, they are not useless. They just aren't the truth, they are implementation of a flawed process that hopefully leads us closer to the truth than any of the other the alternatives we could find. It's not binary - it's either whole truth or useless.

> There may be others but most institutions are going to converge on similar functions

There are other models. I wouldn't claim they are better or worse, but they exist. I would recommend checking out: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30066446-legal-systems-v... Are any of those better than what we have? Who knows. Maybe we had the luck of finding the best one. Maybe in 200 years history enthusiasts would be laughing at us idiots subjecting themselves to such obviously flawed and useless system.

And yet no indictments for anything resembling collusion, i.e. coordination between the Trump campaign and foreign actors.

The fact is that liberals and the media subjected us all to 2+ years of peepants reporting, telling us that all of the shoes would be dropping any day now, chasing a fever dream of a grand conspiracy with Russia. And it was all total horseshit, despite the fact that the NYT, Wapo, MSNBC, CNN et al filled volumes with reporting on the subject. These are the loudest voices in the country, they're supposed to use facts to buoy the public and keep us moored to reality, and instead showed themselves to be the most detached.

If you can't even acknowledge this basic state of affairs, then we're not even talking about the same universes and there's no conversation to be had about the factual accuracy of the media.

This is inaccurate. Go read the report, or at the very least read the Wikipedia summary.

The conclusion was that a conspiracy between Trumpworld and the Russian government could not be proved because the potential suspects on the US side hid, or destroyed, evidence and lied to investigators.

What were these people covering up -- at considerable risk to themselves for prosecution -- if there was nothing to hide?

Disinformation is dangerous because too many overly credulous people are all to willing to believe in alternative facts even if contradictory primary source materials are available.

The talk page for that wikipedia summary is also entertaining.

If and whether anyone impeded the investigation is beyond the point -- there is nothing in the Mueller report about,

- money laundering through Deutsche Bank

- quid pro quo for a Moscow tower development

- secret mail servers

- Trump as a "Russian agent"

- incriminating piss tapes

And many other topics which don't immediately come to mind but can be easily googled. For two years, these are the stories we were all told were just about to drop.

If for those years, the claim had been "Trump and Russians may have worked together to take out Facebook ads, push bogus articles through troll accounts on Twitter, and phish Clinton aides" nobody would have given a shit. Yet even this set of underwhelming claims probably exceeds all that the Mueller investigation suggests could allege to have taken place at maximum.

You're shifting the goal posts from the question of a campaign conspiracy (coordination) to a broader question of inappropriate connections between Trump and Russia.

Further, the purpose of the Mueller report was not to investigate any of these issues. The Mueller investigation was very narrowly focused on whether the Trump campaign conspired (not 'colluded') with Russian entities during the 2017 campaign.

The additional issues you raise were outside of Mueller's remit. Those questions were supposed to be answered by a separate counterintelligence probe conducted by the DoJ. This separate investigation has vanished without a trace[0] and appears to have been killed or suppressed.

Leaving aside the conflict of interest issues inherent in the Trump DoJ investigating Trump, why would this investigation disappear, given how eager Barr would be to exonerate Trump if the outcome of the investigation would give the DoJ the slightest figleaf of justification to do so?

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/15/what-happ...

This the finest special pleading, and exemplifies exactly what I'm talking about. It's fine for you to insist on this very narrow and technical view of the situation, but that's absolutely not how the case was presented in the media day and night for years, and I have no desire to engage you on these minute points.

I'm not going to argue with you about these specific facts, because the correctness of facts composing your take does not even matter for what I'm saying. You want to argue about the specific gastronomic precedents of a shit sandwich, whereas I'm telling you that the problem is that everyone was told for years that a gourmet hamburger was on its way. It doesn't seem like you have anything to say about this state of things, which is why you keep dragging the conversation down into how many kernels of corn did the sandwich contain, and of which variety.

The Russian conspiracy story did not materialize anything remotely living up to the fantastic sizzle -- a fact made all the more amazing by the staggering abandonment of journalistic principles undertaken en masse by establishment media in promulgating that story. Nobody can be taken seriously who thinks these same people are arbiters of fact.

I'm genuinely impressed with your language and use of culinary analogies. I wish I could learn to write this way

Excellent example of the dangers of "fact checking", where highly partisan talking point about "collusion", supported by a highly partisan, highly groupthink-selected source is presented as "fact". And supported by another statement which is a fact, but doesn't equal to the original one. Now it's your choice either to say "here you see fact-checkers confirmed/debunked it!" or spend infinite amount of time on fact-checking the fact-checkers, thus making the whole enterprise net negative.

This comment has been hidden because it was fact checked and determined to be partially false.

Reason: facts don't have to be based in a "healthy reality" to be true since perception of reality is subjective.

Click [here] to see original comment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH9ihoLi1NA

This looks pretty factual to me. It's fraud of some kind.

Facts aren't lies, and facts are definitely not opinions.

Hate speech absolutely exists. Rights end when they infringe on the rights of others.

Hate speech definitely exists. A lot of people, regrettably, hate other people for a variety of reasons, and speak about it. But there's no "right" to be loved, so neither speaking nor hating violates any rights.

You can easily do hate speech without telling any lies, just presenting [a specific subset of] verifiably true facts.

And this is why we are tormented with free-speech absolutists - their conscience says they're doing a good thing for the world.

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