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linuxhansl

Regardless of what you think about this step I find it disconcerting that we can now disagree on facts.

For example:

- whether crime is up or down

- whether the earth is warming or not

- how many people live in poverty

- what the rate of inflation is

- how much social security or healthcare costs

- etc

These are all verifiable, measurable facts, and yet, we somehow manage to disagree.

We always used to disagree and that is healthy, we avoid missing something. But in the past we could agree on some basic facts and then have a discussion. Now we just end a discussion with an easy: "Your facts are wrong." And that leads to an total inability of having any discussion at all.

Fact checking is not censorship. Imagine math if we'd question the basic axioms.

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What you're talking about is statistics. Statistics are not irrefutable facts. They're data points from a report, and they are often incredibly easy to manipulate depending on how the macro is assessed. Usually it's impossible to gather stats over large, complex, chaotic populations. Instead samples are taken and applied to the whole and interpolated in-between. And in that interpolation an incredible amount of manipulation and even pure laziness is possible. It's possible to misrepresent the error bars of your conclusion. It's possible to leave out important details. It's possible to be selective about your time frame. There are a myriad of ways to mess up or screw up statistics. The more chaotic the system, the more difficult it is.

It’s much worse than that.

Every single example mentioned by the GP isn’t just a statistical measure, they measure of a wildly political (as in, defined by humans in a deeply imprecise manner) issues:

> - whether crime is up or down

Which kinds of crimes? In which political boundaries? In which reporting period? Did definitions change? Is reporting down because of ineffective policing? Is reporting up because of effective policing? That statistical games played with crime stats are criminal.

> - whether the earth is warming or not

There is a reason the phrase “global warming” went out of fashion in preference of “climate change”. Warming up how much? Over what time period? With what error bounds? Assuming which runaway processes? In which areas? Due to which causes? What are the error bounds around the sign of the change?

> - how many people live in poverty

The government literally draws a line in the sand and declares anyone below a certain income level is living in poverty. Who set the level? Why did they set it there? What is the standard of living at that income level? In which areas? How long do people live in poverty? What, if anything, prevents them from moving upward? What is there effective standard of living after government programs and charitable giving is taken into account?

> - what the rate of inflation is

This is literally defined by bureaucrats at central banks. Inflation according to which index? How were the index components chosen? How are the index components weighted? Over what time period? In which areas? Even the concept of “inflation” is highly suspect and basically incoherent.

- how much social security or healthcare costs

Over what time period? How did the demographics change? How about inflation? Where did the cash flows go and how did they net out? Which purchasing regimes were in place? How did the programs change? What was the quality of the services?

If, in an argument, you want to go back to the data and do different or better statistics on it then by all means. I would _love_ to have a disagreement with someone that went in that direction and we could discuss the intricacies of how to interpret the information that we have. I have my own gripes about the statistics done by various groups, with changing the inflation calculation being a recent example of the bad side of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/24/technology/inflation-meas...

However, I think the key point here still stands. Most disagreements (at least in my experience) are not reaching this level, and are instead diving towards anti-intellectualism and dismissing statistics and data interpretation wholesale.

> Most disagreements (at least in my experience) are not reaching this level, and are instead diving towards anti-intellectualism and dismissing statistics and data interpretation wholesale.

Not without reason though. Many statistics are pretty bad and very partisan. Unpacking this is not trivial, and who wants to invest that effort to settle a debate with one other person?

Fully agree. Statistics are not global irrefutable facts about society, it's literally just one or a group of person computing something random and claiming it is representing society as a whole, or a journalist saying he/she read that figure in a reputable source. Even from a mathematical point of view statistics are incredibly hard to manipulate, but even before that, reality cannot be really measured and put into numbers.

The problem I have with fact checkers, rather than "context expanders" is that their end product is a simple answer for things that may not be trivial. There may not be a clear binary answer.

> whether crime is up or down

Was the reporting consistent between the two timeframes (apathy, directions from police station, etc)? Was the reporting system fully operational both timeframes being compared? Is the reported vs actual crime ratio the same between the two timeframes?

> how many people live in poverty

> what the rate of inflation is

Is the metric calculated the same way between the two timeframes? If not, what's the justification for the new metrics? Is the answer the same if the old and new metric is used with the same data?

It’s not realistic, or IMO necessary, to put more into it than the original claim does, besides bringing actual sources to the table.

If the original claim is that crime is really up but it doesn’t show in the official figures because of subtle factors X Y and Z, then sure, a fact check saying this is wrong needs to dive in and explain why those factors don’t account for it.

But if it’s just “crime is up 87% since Biden took office” then “actually, crime is down N% in that period, see link from relevant stats agency here” is fine.

The latter is about a million times more common.

Every single one of your points is not boolean and depends on the definition and the data you include and exclude. For each you could easily find studies and statistics in either direction. The fact that this is apparently not obvious to you proves the point that all fact-checking is inherently biased and depends on the subjective opinions of the checking person.

People who study statistics are pretty good at saying "look, that data set was probably gamed, I would have done it <different way>", or "that conclusion does not follow from the data presented".

It's no different to someone claiming on twitter that they are a great programmer who can fix twitter's search in a weekend who then has to tweet for suggestions on how to write a search feature in javascript. People familiar with the subject matter can see right through your bravado.

I'm so tired of people with no expertise on anything insisting that people who have clear expertise "didn't think of trivial point A that just came to mind" as if some of these fields aren't centuries old and have been around the block a few times.

It's similar to the teenager insisting "you just don't get it mom", but like, mom totally gets it, she was a teenager once too. And while there are occasions when mom might not get it, like how she didn't grow up in a world with social media so she might not be able to help you through that, but she ABSOLUTELY gets that it feels like your world is ending when your first love leaves you, and in fact it is YOU who does not "get it" that you will move on eventually.

Not sure what you are trying to say - my point was that ie the question "is crime up or down" is not a yes/no answer. Depending on the input, you can easily create a statistic pointing in any direction. I think abtinf elaborated better on that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42628198 My personal highpoint in using statistical methods was probably implementing an analysis of variance for thousands of lab values (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_variance).

Most experts will not give simple answers to simple questions because they see the question itself as ill-posed. Theses could be written about "Is crime up or down?" GP's claim is that this has a simple answer that can be checked. The bigger issue isn't whether a dataset is statistically valid but which data would even be relevant to a particular underspecified and vague question.

> Imagine math if we'd question the basic axioms.

The world we exeprience and the language we use to describe it doesn't have axioms like math, so it's no surprise people routinely disagree about these topics. Most of the subjects in your list contain a great deal of nuance. For example:

> whether crime is up or down

What counts as "crime"? Is it based on a legal definition or a moral defintion? What jursidictions does this include? What time period are we using as a baseline? Do we account for the fact that different jurisdictions measure crime differently and do we use the raw reported numbers or adjust for underreporting in the statistics? Do we weight our consideration by the severity of the crime or is it just the number of recorded offenses? The laws themselves may have changed over the period of consideration, so how do we account for that?

These questions don't have objective answers, so it's unsurprising people disagree.

All of these sorts of facts are manipulable and/or not easily knowable.

> - whether crime is up or down

Manipulable by the agencies that keep track of and publish those stats. Governments often manipulate these.

> - whether the earth is warming or not

There is a huge amount of controversy in climate science. Check the "Climate Gate" files from 2009 for example. Check out the controversies over weather station siting for another.

> - how many people live in poverty

Poverty levels vary with time and by country, and are typically set by governments. People often disagree as to what defines poverty. Poverty stats are manipulable.

> - what the rate of inflation is

You should look into what Argentina did around 2012.

> - how much social security or healthcare costs

The figures from the budget are not controversial. How much healthcare spending is wasteful is a completely different matter. Quality of healthcare is also very much subject to debate.

> These are all verifiable, measurable facts, and yet, we somehow manage to disagree.

They are not easily verifiable because they are mostly susceptible to manipulation. Therefore it's not surprising that people disagree.

> [...] And that leads to an total inability of having any discussion at all.

No, it means that discussion might have to start with the fact that there is disagreement as to facts and then you can have an open discussion about why, what is being done to prevent consensus forming as to those "facts", what needs to change to make that possible, etc.

> Imagine math if we'd question the basic axioms.

No need to imagine, it's enough to look into non-Euclidean geometry (obtained by excluding Euclid's fifth axiom), non-standard models of geometry, or reverse mathematics (studying which axioms are necessary for a specific theorem to be provable).

Because social media has virtually eliminated peoples general ability to have constructive, level-headed conversations that take nuance into account.

I think the idea that a) people lack nuance now or b) that it’s simply social media’s fault is the exact same kind of lack of nuance that you seem to be objecting to.

Nothing I’ve seen suggests that mass media or mass propaganda contains less nuance now versus any other time. Propaganda of all forms (regardless of whether delivered by newspaper, radio, tv, or facebook) has always been a blunt instrument.

The issue is that before social media nobody took the guy bullshitting at the end of the bar seriously.

But with social media, his bullshit post looks just as authoritative as an expert who’s been studying the topic for decades.

I'm talking less about propaganda and more about the average person's ability to discuss the merits of climate change with one another online.

The average person doesn’t discuss, they repost. The things they repost are propaganda (be it true or untrue).

>The average person doesn’t discuss...

Exactly. We aren't capable of discussing shit online, which is unfortunately where the bulk of our culture's negative discourse is occurring. It's not the posts, even - it's the comment sections.

I don't care if someone shares propaganda, I care about the discussion that happens after they share it, in the comments. When was the last time on FB/IG that you saw someone share some propaganda (true or untrue, doesn't matter), and looked in the comments to find someone correct them, and then the two had a reasoned conversation wherein they traded perspectives and ultimately came to a healthy understanding of one another even if they disagreed?

Do you see that sort of conversation, or do you just see a shitload of people yelling at each other?

Nuance is dead with the short posts. "whether crime is up or down" may not be possible to post about realistically. On what timescale, which crime, has the reporting about this crime changed, has the classification changed, is it about confirmed crime or reports, etc. etc.

Specific crime is such a complex system now that we can (both accidentally and maliciously) post factual information that presents a small fragment of the issue, sometimes helpful, sometimes misinforming for the context we're talking about.

most of those things are actually not verifiable measurable facts within any useful definition

???

Aside from maybe "whether crime is up or down" (because of under-reporting), everything else can be objectively measured. The measurements might not fit with everyone's specific circumstance (eg. earth is warming as a whole but it's unseasonably cold where you live), but that's not a reason to throw up our hands and say "those things are actually not verifiable measurable facts within any useful definition".

The only items in the list that look reasonably easily answerable are how much social security costs and whether the earth is warming. Even the last one wouldn't be considered a good question to an actual scientist because of how vaguely it is phrased.

I strongly disagree that the rate of inflation is a fact, nor un-debatable. The mechanism for calculating it officially has changed drastically over the decades, and always in ways that reduce the official rate. It’s a politicized metric.

The earth has been warming. It's not a verifiable fact that it's still doing that today (you used present tense) or will continue into the future until the future comes and we've measured it. By the way, warming over what time period? It's colder now that it was at some times in its past so you could say we're in the middle of a longer term global cooling.

And of course you have to incorporate of the Earth's interior which is cooling. Are you sure that "fact" doesn't silently ignore almost all of the Earth?

There are rarely any two people experiencing the same inflation rate. As it heavily depends on any one buyers buying basket. Sure, you could, in theory, measure each persons inflation rate, but what for?

> - whether the earth is warming or not

The Earth is warming, but how much of it is caused by humans is under debate. The Earth is still coming out of an ice age, so it would be warming even without humans.

Also, the more important question is: how much will it accelerate based on our emissions? If there are no positive feedback loops, it would only warm up 1C maximum, no matter how much more CO2 we will emit. But because of the positive feedback loops (warmer earth -> more water evaporating -> more warming), this warming can trigger a 4-5C further warming. The feedback loops are just theoretical(you can't measure them empirically) and the quality of the estimations is based on our understanding and modelling of the climate.

https://xkcd.com/1732/

We've had in the last 100 years a temperature swing that usually takes a thousand years or more. We've already seen greater than +1C of temperature increase compared to before widespread use of fossil fuels.

Is that caused by humans? Sure that's up for debate, in the same way whether tobacco causes cancer is. People are willing to be wrong when being wrong gives them money/status/utility.

> We've had in the last 100 years a temperature swing that usually takes a thousand years or more.

A cute xkcd is not a time machine. You rely here on indirect measurements of tree ring measurements or ocean sediments. You can't verify if there were any other factors at play over the millennia, and I seriously doubt that these methods can even be theoretically +/- 0.5 degree C accurate. You may believe that, but you can't verify unless you travel into the past. Besides, 1000 years are NOTHING on the scale we are looking at. If you live anywhere north of the 40th degree, the place you now sit was probably covered by an ice sheet without a living thing in sight, only 10000 years ago. And a 100000 years ago. There is no way that you can divide that timescale into thousands and measure every one of them with a high enough precision to compare it with the present. The bold claims of climate science have lost any scientific humility.

> You may believe that, but you can't verify unless you travel into the past.

Do you believe in the method of radiocarbon dating? What about dinosaurs?

What about them, and how was your debate class? Can you measure the time of day an organism died with radiocarbon dating? This rhethorical question is meant as a hint. Did you know how they calibrated radiocarbon at first? They used wine bottles from french cellars, because they have a year printed on them. That's scientific verification, because believe doesn't do it.

> If there are no positive feedback loops, it would only warm up 1C maximum, no matter how much more CO2 we will emit.

GHG emissions are still increasing. If we assume that temperature increase is only linear in the amount of atmospheric GHGs, that means temperature will continue to increase, not remain flat.

Little known fact (I am still amazed how people don't know the mechanics of global warming...): CO2 effect in the atmosphere is logarithmic, increasing with concentration. That is because CO2 can only block one band of light, so at one point, you're approaching asymptotic effect. That's why we keep talking about "doubling of CO2", because it's a logarithmic function....

But yes, the temperature will increase slightly because of CO2 emissions. That triggers more warming due to feedback effects though, and those are hard to quantify, and more scary.

To be fair, the cause of the warming wasn't given as an example of indisputable fact.

Exactly. Supplying some context to support this:

The level of crime is pretty hard to measure. You can measure reported crime, but crimes are reported at different rates in response to complicated incentives.

How much the earth is warming depends on what you measure. Do you measure atmospheric temperature? Ocean temperature? And of course how much the world will warm is dependent on complicated models with tons of inputs.

How many people live in poverty depends on what your threshold for poverty is. There's a "Federal Poverty Level", but cost of living varies by significant amounts across the country.

The rate of inflation is highly dependent on the basket of goods measured and how improvements in goods are measured and so on. There are easily a dozen different measures of "inflation" and they're all reasonable and carefully considered, but none of them is the ground truth.

It is of course relatively easy to measure Social Security inflows and outflows, but usually when we talk about the "cost" of programs like this, we mean something like the net cost, which incorporates lots of societal effects. Also the interpretation of the accounting concept of the Social Security Trust Fund, despite being a fairly simple concept, has significant camps with diametrically opposed views.

With the exception of fiscal cost and global warming those are all quite subtle, actually. $Employer spends rather a lot of time replicating official inflation numbers, it's not trivial.

>$Employer spends rather a lot of time replicating official inflation numbers

Well? Does it match?

Yes (any more detail would be telling), ahead of time even, but my point is that we're mimicking the governments numbers not actually estimating a "true" value.

Could it be that nowadays we have so much more access to information that where we maybe agreed on facts in the past, they where really coarse and we did not really have much details on them, so it was maybe easier to agree?

Only one of those questions (earth warming rate) is clearly defined and scientifically addressable, as all the others have fairly subjective definitions (what is poverty? what is crime? how do we measure inflation objectively? etc.)

Even with warming, a 'fact' would be a data point at a particular time and location, assuming your sensor was correctly calibrated. You have to look at millions of data points across the entire globe for decades to get a sense of the current warming rate (which could be negative, flat, or positive). You have to do complicated statistics on all those data points to get a warming rate, and you'll have error bars on that, and the end result is not a 'fact' so much as a bounded estimate (+0.1 C / decade +/- 10% is plausible for the average surface temperature change averaged over the entire planet).

We can't even say with real certainty that 2100 will be warmer than today, as a supervolcano, asteroid impact, or global nuclear war could reverse the trend.

I think prediction markets (polymarket et al) get this right. Every question as vague as "is the earth warming" has resolution details which define some way to resolve the question such that all parties (even those with economic interest to disagree) have trouble disputing the outcome.

For a question like the earth warming, it would usually be something like "according to ___.org website on Y date", which in that case the final prediction becomes: will the average temperature in the period from 2016-2026 be greater than Y on ___.org, which is a bit different than the original but easier to arbitrate.

You sort of made your own counterpoint by giving a list of statistics that are far from objectively measurable and whose result and meaning depends a lot on the details of what exactly you're measuring and how.

Take inflation for example. Measure inflation in terms of gold, broken arm repairs, hamburgers, or houses and any will give you wildly different figures. The government preferred index prices a basket of goods but the particulars of the basket may not match you or anyone you know, and various corrections are necessary but are themselves subjective. An often disputed one is correction for goods substitution-- if steak goes up people buy less steak and more rice. The current preferred model of the government chains these corrections even though in reality you can only replace so much steak with rice before it's all rice and no steak. These indexes also have corrections for goods increasing in quality-- the price went up but its because the thing got better, not because inflation. etc.

yadda yadda, I don't mean to import the debate here but the point is that there is something to debate particularly when the statistics don't match a person's lived experience -- when the things they need to live are rapidly increasing in price-- especially when politicians are abusing the stats beyond the breaking point (I think of the time when the Biden administration was crowing about something like the rate of inflation increase no longer increasing. What a jerk! ... or is that a snap? ;) ).

And even when the fact itself isn't really in dispute there is often plenty of room for reasonable people to debate the implications or relevance.

When people confused these subjective issues for "basic axioms" and then impose their understanding as "facts" it's extremely problematic and highly offensive to people whose experience has taught them otherwise.

You are being hoisted by your own petard. Lying with statistics is a very common thing and it is, in fact a cliche. I'm surprised you brought up the crime thing. There are so many problems with this. Also, note, one way to reduce "crime" is to just make many crimes legal but it does not change normal people's view of crime. What kind of statistics were used to decide that Iowa would go for Harris with an 18 point jump?

The amount of crime is dependent on the police department reporting, which we know has been cut back

No we don't have verifieable measurable facts for those areas. Standards and definitions vary by location and change over time. Don't forget the corruption and manipulation of numbers to achieve desired outcomes.

Sadly the consensus was abused to push narratives once too often instead of actual leadership/guiding people to concepts/understanding/consensus building. Our leaders forgot/got too lazy/became too corrupt/dogmatic/complacent to care how to lead, abused the levers, and now it's going to probably take a generation for society to organize new trusted mechanisms.

Crime statistics/reporting are extremely gamed. It took a friend having a heinous crime committed against her by a large group, on a side street just off downtown Santa Cruz with no reporting for me to realize just how bad. We've probably all at this point had crime committed against us that the police didn't document which then destroys our faith in crime statistics.

I'm a super hippie. But there was a lot of manipulation/playing fast and free by the earlier global warming folks to try and get their message across breaking peoples trust and you are never going to get that trust back with models/projections no matter how good/accurate the assumptions used for those models/projections once the trust was lost.

Things like using COVID funds to KNOWINGS TEMPORARILY reduce child poverty with the goal of having INCREASED CHILD POVERTY statistics in the near future so that it could be used as a policy weapon again just does damage and makes poverty statistics more meaningless. Just politicians using abusing and manipulating instead of leading, breaking down more levers.

Stop with how gamed 'rate of inflation' was by this administration. You are never going to convince people WHO CAN'T AFFORD TO LIVE and are in CONTSANT distress that 'things are getting worse more slowly' is good. Sorry, you are going to have to lead and convince people on that one, not lazily use numbers. Again, it's lack of leadership.

See how the same things can be interpreted differently by different people and how much it's that these have been abused/used for manipulation/out of laziness/instead of leading?

Source: Other than my personal crime experiences it's from living in a red state and talking with people why they support crazy stuff or reject what seems like common sense to me.

This is because we have started accepting kritik-style debates as serious in the last two decades. Kritik used to be considered a bad faith technique but nowadays it’s considered a smart “trick” to win arguments. It’s when a debate participant doesn’t engage in debating the subject on its own merits, but instead challenges the premise of the question or a premise of the opponent’s position.

Crude example:

- I believe climate change is exaggerated because the Summers haven’t gotten notably hotter.

- If you say that, then you are unaware and uninformed. You must be watching Fox News.

Another:

- I think we are in a cost of living crisis, because every year, more US men are in crippling debt.

- Wow, look at your use of ableist misogynist language! Way to pretend women don’t suffer with debt 13% more than men!

Another:

- As society, we should be respectful of others online, because internet is an important (and sometimes only) social network some people have.

- Social media is unnatural, harmful and should be banned.

These are three failed debates, in each there is no clash of opinions, and no side provided meaningfully stronger arguments to win the debate. In fact, the two debate opponents stated opinions on different subjects entirely. And yet nowadays, this is how most people debate, it is considered appropriate, even in academia. In politics, this technique is considered a total winner.

So it is a bit like refusing to engage with the basic axioms when arguing mathematical proofs and just saying “math is for nerds”. We have totally accepted that as normal, as a society.

>These are all verifiable, measurable facts

No, they absolutely are not:

> whether crime is up or down

Depends on the definitions; what is or isn't a crime changes over time in a given society. Taking "crime" as an aggregate conflates many different possible crimes and relies on a subjective weighting of their relative severity. Crime rates can vary wildly between various subgroups of the population. We can only meaningfully compare rates of crimes that are actually detected and result in law enforcement actions; an unknown and broadly unknowable amount of crime is overlooked.

> whether the earth is warming or not

Most of the disagreement is about the rate of change, the predicted future rate of change, the predicted impacts of those change, the extent to which we can do anything about it, and especially about the relative importance of the predicted impact vis-a-vis the effort that might be required to do something about it.

> how many people live in poverty, what the rate of inflation is

"Poverty" is generally measured in terms of income versus an arbitrarily decided baseline. The baseline at best varies over time specifically to remain in "real" terms, i.e. adjusted for "inflation" which is calculated on a basis which may bear no relation whatsoever to the rate of change in costs practically faced by the poorer segment of the population. Furthermore, income is nowhere near the entire picture of wealth, which in turn is not a full picture of economic well-being. Inflation measures are designed with "hedonic quality adjustments" (https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/questions-and-ans...) in mind which involve subjectively putting numbers on a wide variety of factors - they're literally trying to measure "how much better" a cell phone becomes if the screen resolution increases, so that they can decide whether the increase in price is justified; and in many cases they just resort to assuming that the initial price is fair relative to existing devices when the new one hits the market.

>How much social security or healthcare costs

Again, this has to be considered in the context of inflation adjustments, because the value of currency is not objective. World currencies are not a unit of measurement for value; it's just another thing that you can exchange for other valuable goods and services. If they were objective, there would be no reason for exchange rates to vary over time; they vary because, among other things, of varying relative faith in the issuing governments, and varying supply (which governments can generally control more or less at will).

Aside from which, there are valid reasons why the per-capita costs might vary due to demographic changes. The disagreements I've seen haven't been about the bottom-line number in (say) the American federal government budget; they're about how to contextualize that number. Are per-capita costs changing? Are your personal costs changing? Are the costs of people like you changing? (Those answers could be different for many reasons.) How do they compare to costs in other countries? Is that justified? Is it explained by extenuating circumstances? How shall we compare the corresponding quality of care?

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