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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

Nice example :) So your answer to "Who gets to decide what's true?" is basically "there is no truth, and any truth that there might be is relative to the person asking the question". Is that right?

I think that's probably technically accurate, and also practically useless. Even damaging. I saw this in the climate arguments: two sets of different facts led to two different versions of the truth, which led to two completely irreconcilable points of view. Essentially two sets of people shouting "no, but..." and "well, actually..." at each other, pointing to two completely different truths, both supported by two completely different sets of facts. At some point we as a society need to agree on our truth in order to get anything done.

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> your answer to "Who gets to decide what's true?" is basically "there is no truth, and any truth that there might be is relative to the person asking the question". Is that right?

That's really not how I interpret it.

Assuming we agree on what "mixing" means, which itself isn't that trivial but even without a formal definition I think we have the same idea of "homogenous at molecular level on a longish time period".

The truth is "yes you can mix water and oil", there's no doubt about that. It's testable and tested.

The fact that we use context to interpret the question (rather than being entirely literal about it) and decide whether the literal truth is really what's appropriate to answer, doesn't change the nature of truth.

There's also the question of knowledge (I might not know that you actually can mix water and oil), but again that doesn't change the nature of truth.

Like so many philosophical questions, it only sounds interesting because we assign different meanings to the same words: here conflating truth and answer.

> So your answer to "Who gets to decide what's true?" is basically "there is no truth, and any truth that there might be is relative to the person asking the question". Is that right?

No it's not, at all. This isn't a debate about what's true, it's a debate over the intended meaning of the question. The point was that people assume context behind the question and answer based on the context. Because even the person asking often doesn't literally mean what the words say. The question is more than the words that are explicitly written.

The concept is that it is possible for people to be in bad faith. This also underlies the idea that people can commit crime, be guilty of crime. I guess the term is 'law'?

Bottom line is that you can't have the bottom line be 'does a person earnestly believe what they're doing is right and good', much less 'do they say they're right'. Can't fall back on that, it's hopelessly inadequate.

I might disagree with that and agree on the context approach. „The Truth“ does not exist and it would be much more helpful to have context related answers without one mayor view which needs to dominate.

Yes. This thread reads a bit like a convo between AIs, almost but not quite talking past each other.

> At some point we as a society need to agree on our truth in order to get anything done.

These are known as half-truths. We do settle for lies in order to do whatever it is people feel they need to do.

We also settle for lies because there are just things we don't understand yet, but our models are currently correct, and possibly collapsing over millenia to a stable truth.

As someone who writes fiction, I’d like to note that one often needs to write really complex lies in order to effectively transmit a single truth. You can’t just tell people anything, you have to prepare the mind to receive the knowledge.

What do you think of Ayn Rand’s works of fiction?

Generally as lies wrapped in lies. You can use the same techniques to push a falsehood as well. Which is not to say Rand did not actually believe her message — she did, which is why the books are so effective. But they have given the upper class an exaggerated sense of their own importance, and a conviction that government only stands in their way. Meanwhile over in reality, the more a state is run by oligarchs, the worse a place it is to live.

I don't really disagree, and don't appreciate Rand, but an oligarchy can be disguised as something else, and people will feel relief when it is replaced by an open oligarchy, because one means of gaining power is to give people what they need.

This is a very interesting comment. Is it possible for you elaborate on that?

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