Values Are Facts | Hacker News Reader

Values Are Facts

overcomingbias.com

24 pointscinquemb19 comments

The reason that we want to say that a value is not a fact is not because it literally isn't a fact that, for instance, I hate licorice. Instead it's because that sort of fact is subjective-- bound to a particular valuer and not necessarily shared. We say that values are not facts as a figure of speech; a rehtorical shortcut.

Logic does not compel us to share any value with anyone else, which is, after all, what drives the dynamics of free markets. If the farmer and the grocer didn't value licorice differently no licorice would ever get to market and give me the opporutnity not to purchase it.

However, whenever you are dealing with social dynamics, feelings should be treated as facts. No matter how ephemeral, every feeling is real within each person, in that it has real consequences for behavior. And so my wife might buy licorice to tease me.

Your dislike of licorice is a fact at a specific point in time because it is determined by your biology

You are only saying that because you assume they were telling the truth.

Does he mean that there are facts about who values what? And people value different facts more or less (i.e. economics of information)?

Also we should stop talking about facts as truth and instead assume we always mean "provisional facts" with differing degrees of certainty.

Digressing just a bit, I feel that facts and values aren't of the same type in the same way that electrons and protons kind of aren't atoms (the exceptions make the analogy somewhat richer).

That is somehow maybe values compose to form provisional facts like terms compose along with a copula to form propositions. This also lends itself to the notion that there should be a third category that is more often than not helpful to emphasize. This would be something analogous to argument in logic or chemical reaction in chemistry.

Lastly this makes me wonder about the relation between explanatory, imperative and declarative sentences and also dependent clauses which I imagine people have commented on. (I imagine none of this is new)

I think it is a bit confusingly formulated in the article. Facts in the common sense are objectively measured "information", whereas values are akin to facts in that they represent the objective truth perceived by people. That could be a single person's truth, as everyone has a certain way for seeing the world; or (as the authors argues), a number of other people share this view - this is when subjective observations become society values, norms etc. Therefore, by being shared by many people, values can become comparable to objective facts. I would argue they are still a different type, albeit no less or more important.

> Also we should stop talking about facts as truth and instead assume we always mean "provisional facts" with differing degrees of certainty.

Just providing related references here

Phrase: "I know that I know nothing"

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing

- https://betterhumans.pub/i-know-that-i-know-nothing-is-the-o...

Search using the keyword if you want more sources/related content

2nd ref above also contains another quote worth mentioning here: "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge"

Note that the phrase is originally from Latin so it might not be translated very accurately

It's a redefinition of the word values to mean something more like Heidegger's dasein, I think. It's not the same as fact or value, so thank goodness it has its own name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasein

We usually mean values to be scope-dependent (individual, group, nation, etc.) beliefs. But those are always defined within boundaries, so not true outside the boundary. A fact can't be true and untrue at the same time, so values aren't facts.

Yes, about half-way though I saw where this was going. A bottom-up positivist attempt to redefine "values" has (as you say Heidegger) precedent, but is usually steps along the way to defining what philosophers mean by value (so distinguishing universaliable/simpliciter kinds of "good/bad")

Those kinds of "facts" have utility. It's useful to know such "states of mind facts" as "That dog will bite you if it doesn't like you". But that's not real values. IIRC this is the difference between cognitive and non-cognitive value theories, but I forget now why that difference matters.

You can encode an opinion into a fact by attributing it, but this doesn't make the opinion a fact-- only its fact encoded version is a fact and they aren't the same thing.

"This is a beautiful sunrise" -- opinion.

"Nullc thinks this is a beautiful sunrise" -- fact

But the beauty of the sunrise remains an opinion.

Being able to fact-wrap opinions and unmeasurables is an important communication skill since sometimes working with fact-wrapped views is sufficient, but it often isn't especially when it comes to setting rules for other people's behavior.

> "Nullc thinks this is a beautiful sunrise" -- fact

Even that's not a fact; the closest one can get is perhaps "nullc said 'This is a beautiful sunrise'". (You can't even really get to 'nullc said this is a beautiful sunrise'.)

There seems to be a bit of a sleight of hand going on here. The argument being made is mostly about what values people hold being facts. Usually when people make a distinction between facts and values though they are not saying that what values people hold are not facts but rather that what values people should hold are not facts. Is vs ought.

Obviously the author understands this distinction so I'm not sure why it seems to be ignored / glossed over here.

You can make a case that what values ought to be is also connected to facts and I would tend to agree with that argument but it's not really the case that is being made here.

But arguing about what values people “should” have is dumb and pointless.

It's the preliminary step before making people to adopt new values: which values, exactly, are we going to make people adopt? Obviously, that's where "should" comes in.

Another reason it’s dumb.

Facts are, by definition, supposed to be indisputable. Values are generally fuzzy and harder to demonstrate.

> Facts are, by definition, supposed to be indisputable. Values are generally fuzzy and harder to demonstrate.

I think there's something wrong with your definitions. Facts obviously are disputable in a lot of contexts (e.g. reliability of witnesses, "he said, she said"), and recent times have shown that they probably are only "indisputable" within a shared system of values.

So this is about values as heuristics. The jump from facts like "if you move your pieces to the center - likelihood of winning increases" to values like "taking the center is good".

Or from "having law system increases the quality of life in a society" to "law is good".

I don't think anybody disagree about these. What people disagree about is when there are trade-offs between different heuristics. Or about what the goals for the heuristics should be.

The fact vs. value distinction is fundamental in establishing functional and peaceful political structures where rational apes can collaborate and achieve common goals despite their inherent disagreements.

It's completely irrelevant if a bike is factually a superior urban vehicle to a car or a tram. Or if a purely imaginary political border passes to the west of a certain field of maize, making it part of Russia, or to the east, making it Ukraine. The existence of a great being in the sky cannot be factually proved, but tell that to ~5 billion people.

Humans care very deeply about many contentious "facts" that are not settled and widely accepted. The only way to not implode is to call them values, and agree to disagree while establishing systems that can reach conclusions despite them, for example the democratic process. This also provides a frame where people can discuss such issues and expose "values" that turn out to be simply wrong facts, for example anti-vaccinationism.

To paraphrase a joke from model theory, allowing facts to make claims about other facts up to recursion is a fine way to prevent any long-term success in natural language processing. If you drop absoluteness, the consequences will never be the same.

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