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To your points, I agree, but that's why I phrased it as "societally-wide accepted definition of facts". There has always been propaganda and hard pressure against those who went against the status quo.

What I think is different this time is the process on coming to a "generally accepted conclusion". Take the Iraq WMD issue. At the time, the status quo was that Iraq had WMDs, even if there were plenty of people arguing against that - those people may have been "marginalized" as you put it (though not sure I agree - I was one of those people, and while I clearly the tide was against my viewpoint, I still felt we were having a debate over facts), but they were still arguing that there was little evidence for WMDs. But when the facts were cleared up, there was broad agreement "OK, the evidence is now clear, this is what happened".

My point is now that even when the clear picture does finally emerge, you have plenty of people still just willing to repeat the falsehood in the belief that "if you repeat it enough, it becomes 'true' enough to enough people." That's what feels different to me, at least in my lifetime.

> My point is now that even when the clear picture does finally emerge, you have plenty of people still just willing to repeat the falsehood in the belief that "if you repeat it enough, it becomes 'true' enough to enough people." That's what feels different to me, at least in my lifetime.

I understand the structure of your argument but I am not sure I can relate it to things that are happening. Can you give concrete examples?

Yes: people consistently repeat that inmigrants are (criminals ((almost) exclusively)) despite never showing any statistics. I have seen people keep a printed list of inmigrant crimes (one of them, an Uber driver).

This happens in two countries, that I know. One of them is the US, the other is Costa Rica. I expect it to happen in all countries with important xenophobic populations.

Well, I know this is going down the political rabbit hole, but look at the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in the US. The evidence that Biden won and Trump lost is undeniable, at least if you use the definition of "the outcome is undeniable considering the standards of any previous presidential election in the US".

But still you have large swaths of the American populace (including, notably, the president elect) saying that no, Trump won the 2020 election. At this point, though, I don't even really see them putting forth any argument based on actual evidence that Trump won in 2020. It's just repeating the same platitudes of "it was stolen, the politicians are corrupt, ..." etc. etc. But it's like many people just accept now that this is an acceptable way to argue things, "if you repeat it enough, you get to have your 'alternative' facts" - like, they don't even really care that much that they don't have actual evidence to back up their position. That is the part that feels relatively new to me.

> In the lead up to the Iraq War in 2003, there was so much discussion in the media about how Iraq had weapons of mass destruction

This is my favorite theory of what happened:

Iraq perceived Iran, and internally Shiites and Kurds, as its real and threatening enemies. USA was perceived as being far away and weak. To keep their real enemies scared, Iraqis kept up the illusion of having a solid WMD program. Iraqis would hint at their WMDs when communicating with their neighbors.

From the point of Western intelligence, the intelligence picked up Iraqis talking about their WMDs when Iraqis didn't know being listened to, and when Western intelligence assumed that Iraqis had no reason to lie. While there was no physical evidence of the WMDs, this was perceived as a rather reliable intelligence. Why would Iraqis talk about their WMDs in secret, if they didn't even have any?

"Failing to understand the Iraqi leader’s mindset and the context of his decisions, the intelligence community assumed that Iraq’s ongoing denial and deception operations regarding his alleged WMD programs, despite periods of genuine cooperation were ipso facto confirmation that Iraq was hiding WMD caches and programs."

"It appears that the intelligence community never seriously considered the possibility that Baghdad was conducting its denial and deception operations to hide weakness."

https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/ASPJ/journals/Ch...

The Iraq War was pushed by a group calling themselves neoconservatives. They were itching for a war regardless of the WMDs.

Its genesis was at least the mid 1990s per: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clean_Break:_A_New_Strategy_...

And then this group got more power under Bush's term and 9/11 happened and they responded by pushing for the Iraq war and got it:

https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2003/03/origins-of-re...

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/iraq/what-neocons-got-wrong

The WMDs were a convenient cause belli for the masses, but it was not the motivator for the war. This is why no matter how much doubt was created about the WMDs before the war, and there was tons and tons, there was no stopping it.

>cause belli

At the risk of being that guy, the term you're looking for is casus belli: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/casus%20belli

You've misspelled it at least twice so far, otherwise I wouldn't be bothering you about it.

Thanks. I will try to do better. Another issue is that if I type it correctly it gets autocorrected to “cause hello”. So I have to go back and correct it every time.

Live on the wild side. Turn off the autocorrect.

I couldn't agree more. Truth is, the advances in technology have made it easier for the truth to be revealed. Imagine if the recent events in the last ten or so years were not caught on smartphones and other devices. I feel as if the narrative they would have attempted to sell us would be quite different. This is apparent so many times in recent history as the news spins one story, and someone recording with a phone clearly shows another.

But how does this go against the trend of less trust in facts? Surely it should contradict it? Actually, I think very recent technologies are about to: generative AI is going to make it much, much more difficult to prove anything as a fact.

Wikipedia is an improvement, but its still below the standards and methods that are accessible to humans. If you are an expert, you will hate the Wikipedia articles about your field and still be helpless because the garbage in there is referencing some guy who wrote a badly-researched book in 2001.

> If you are an expert, you will hate the Wikipedia articles about your field

I haven't noticed that. Generally I find it decent.

On the flip side, Wikipedia is available to a vast majority of the planet's population. We've traded optimum veracity for the privileged few, for 'good enough' for the masses.

I disagree that availability is the issue - you can download the primary sources from the Internet as PDF, even from China or 3rd world countries. It is that enough people don't care about "correctness" and take the best available hearsay as fact.

I don't think we've seen anything like the all out denial of the result of the 2020 election before, though. No matter who won or lost in prior elections, there was an acceptance of what the outcome was. Now you can't even get elected officials to answer what should be a simple yes or no question despite Biden being in office for four years. Sure part of it might just be people who don't care for truth, but the sheer scale of the denial feels like a big break from the past.

> In the end those doubters were right.

I think that helps demonstrate the parent's point. I think it is very much established fact now that there were no weapons of mass destruction. Can we say the same thing about anything that has happened since, certainly in the last 5-10 years? There have always been some dissenters, a small band of conspiracy theorists that would doubt even something as fundamentally true as a non-flat Earth. But now the group is much more sizable.

Edit: since writing this comment, I see that hn_throwaway_99 posted a reply of their own which pretty much matches what I said.