Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

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What even is a “shared reality”? For example my mum and I could watch the exact same movie and showing at the cinema and still come away with a completely different opinion of it.

And even when TV was limited to a small few national OTA (over the air) channels, different people would tune in at different times to watch their different preference of shows. So just because content was fewer, it didn’t necessarily equate to different people consuming the same content.

The real crux of the modern problem isn’t preference drive choices. It’s independent publishers being driven out by corporate greed. Eg AI traffic making it unviable for independent blogs. But then one could argue that the current ecosystem, where the barrier for publishing being so low, is an anomaly because historically that was always prohibitively expensive. To go back to the TV example: you couldn’t commission a show without deep pockets and a lot of TV exec contacts.

I’d love our golden age of information to be persistent. But, and as yourself and others have alluded to, that’s not guaranteed unless we fight to keep it that way.

>What even is a “shared reality”? For example my mum and I could watch the exact same movie and showing at the cinema and still come away with a completely different opinion of it.

Exactly. The shared reality is the experience. You both were given the same opportunity to take in the same information. The different opinion is what comes out of the other side of the meat suit processing the experience.

Algo driven results changes the experience by changing what the user perceives. So there might never be a shared experience.

“Never” is a little dramatic. Sticking a TV show on from a streaming platform and watching it as family is still less effort than going to the cinema.

> For example my mum and I could watch the exact same movie and showing at the cinema and still come away with a completely different opinion of it.

yeah because there is a shared reality in which you can both see the same movie. enjoy it while it lasts.

I think of it more as a basis for shared culture - I could chat about Seinfeld / Friends, and odds were high that the other person would know what I was talking about.

I imagine in prior ages this was perhaps more about folks reading a core collection of books. I expect there was less shared culture than in ^

Now it seems like we're in an era with (potentially) less of a shared cultural bases than either of those times. I've certainly met people where there's really no overlap - their core beliefs, values, etc - fundamentally different foundations. If that becomes more widespread, it's hard to know what that will do to our societies.

The thing is, people I’m friends and thus likeminded, we watch the same shows and still have those kinds of conversations. And people I wasn’t likeminded with never used to watch the same shows, even pre-streaming era, so I’d never had those conversations.

Take your examples, Friends and Frasier were aired at roughly the same time in the UK (obviously on competing stations). Most people watched Friends, but that show wasn’t really my thing. So I watched Frasier. As did my closest friends. And we’d chat about that. But I couldn’t join in with work colleagues with Friends chats.

It’s a bit like sports matches. People at work will talk about football/soccer but I’d be more interested in Snooker. So I’d chat snooker with friends and duck out of the football work chat.

Independent blogs are perfectly viable. It is basically free to publish. What's not viable and never was is to be a professional blogger. At best, some people could try to be professional shills with blogs as bait (it is good if these go away; they were noise), and an extremely tiny minority might actually make a living with people paying to support their blog directly.

I think being a professional blogger is on the rise, the driver for the viability of being a pro blogger has risen. Substack/medium etc. streamline the getting paid part. The fracturing social narrative, (rise in censorship, cancel culture, tribalism) actually drive people to pay to gain access to periodtical writing from specific people seen as authorative on one or more subjects. These subjects that mainstream media are too shy to surface, too dry to feature, or have a tendency to twist to a narrative that supports the sponsors etc.

> What even is a “shared reality”? For example my mum and I could watch the exact same movie and showing at the cinema and still come away with a completely different opinion of it.

A: It excludes opinion.

Everything is opinion. A shared reality is just where opinions coincide.

The shared reality in that example includes only facts: OP and mum went to a movie. The movie was called X. The actors were Y and Z.

The original point of this subthread was that we can't even agree on a shared set of facts anymore! The political Right has an entirely different set of facts than the political Left, and when our reality is derived from those facts, we cannot share the same reality anymore.

If the facts can differ then they’re not facts. What you’re then dealing with is propaganda.

Then, we're just back to OP's conundrum: "Everything is opinion." I'll say grass is green and you'll say grass is red, and there can be no fact because they differ.

Not really no. Some things can be proven while some cannot.

The colour of grass is something that’s scientifically measurable.

My point is that some broadcasters are very strict about sticking to the facts. Some will misrepresent those facts but not technically lie (eg discuss statistics that favour their partisan view but don’t share the full context behind those stats).

And then there’s broadcasters like Fox News that promote flat out lies. It’s often not even an interpretation of the truth. It’s shared as an opinion but the evidence clearly proves it’s just lies presented as facts.

And I really wish there were criminal charges for broadcasting blatant lies. Not just in America, but most of the developed world where populist-propaganda is used to brainwash gullible voters.

Communication cannot be scientifically measured. Someone's expression being a "blatant lie" can only ever be an opinion, fundamentally.

Broadcasters absolutely have a responsibility to ensure they communicate truthful statements in exactly the same way that any other profession has a responsibility to ensure their output is correct.

Fundamentally impossible. Communication is completely made up. It cannot be measured scientifically. Consider the statement: "Cows live on the moon". It is 100% true, although you may not see it that way if you misinterpret what is said. It's only a lie to the extent that your opinion says it is even though in actuality it is the truth.

That’s some serious mental gymnastics you’re applying there but that’s not really how society works.

We, as a society, fully understand the concept of truthful and untruthful statements. We learn it as a child and get scalded when we lie. We depend on this understanding in law, courts, contracts, and commerce. We understand it when educators teach and when requesting services of others.

If you want to claim that communication cannot be truthful nor verifiable at any level, then society would fail to function because the literal point of communication is to share an information.

Now if you wanted to make a philosophical point about proving an intent to lie, or our perceptions of reality, rather than communication as a medium, then that’s a different topic (and one I discussed elsewhere in this thread). But for your exact argument presented, we already have millennia of past precedence to prove that communication is expected to have truthful statements.

Right, society functions on opinion, but there is no scientific basis for it. Its just making shit up and running with it. You aren't charging someone for lying. Detecting the utterance of a lie is fundamentally impossible as there is no objective way to measure language. Language itself is just opinion. You'd, instead, be charging them for them for going against your opinion. No mental gymnastics needed. Its just the simple reality.

Again, society is literally built around the exact opposite of the premise you’re arguing

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1621

https://www.gov.uk/contempt-of-court

https://www.uklegalguides.com/what-is-fraud/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-Truth_Pledge

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8n99727lvo

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

And they are literally hundreds of thousands of other examples I could share where communication is understood to have provable truthful states.

Literally no one, aside yourself, believes that it’s impossible to communicate a fact nor that lies doesn’t exist.

> Literally no one, aside yourself, believes that it’s impossible to communicate

I don't know, there is pretty strong evidence in this discussion that we are unable to communicate. Your apparent opinion of I am saying continues to show to be incorrect over and over — and I'm sure that goes both ways.

In fact, it seems evident that, deep down, you already realize this as you have stopped even trying to add anything of your own to the discussion, outsourcing to the words of others. Poor form to not be able to speak to something yourself, but I can appreciate that your emotions are starting to run wild on realizing that the world isn't as simple as you originally imagined.

But, as before, I likely have the wrong opinion about what you are trying to say. There is no objective way to measure language. QED.

Trolling isn’t the same as having a disagreement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpQlyUjp3vM

That would depend on your opinion of what those words mean, but in my opinion neither has any applicability to our discussion. Not sure why you would want to take the discussion off topic now unless that is the only way you can find to try and sooth hot-running emotions?

Let's face it, there is no technical reason for us to disagree. The universe is what it is and that is an incontrovertible fact. We can measure the state of universe scientifically. There is fundamentally nothing we can disagree about except our opinion of the language. And, indeed, it is apparent that we are failing to discuss the state of the universe because our opinion about what the words mean is ostensibly not shared.

But, I mean, that's what we've been talking about the whole time: that there is no objective way to measure language. If you are trying to repeat what I said from the start, what value do you believe is added? Simple acknowledgement?

Not necessarily. A shared reality is one where people are discussing the same thing (within a reasonable margin) even if filtered by their individual perceptions, and drawing different conclusions.

I don't know the word for the opposite of shared reality (maybe private individualized realities), but it results in a scenario where you have nothing in common with other people other than "I saw some thing" and therefore it becomes very difficult to discuss anything with them.

"I don't know the word for the opposite of shared reality"

Different cultures?

Maybe, but not necessarily.

I think different cultures can share the same reality, though filtered through different lenses.

If two people from different cultures watch the same movie, one finds it ok and the other offensive and disrespectful, that's a shared reality filtered through different cultural backgrounds. Even if either version of the movie is dubbed, censored, or altered in any way, there's still enough common or shared material that a discussion can be held.

If two people had completely different experiences and watched completely different, tailor-made movies, then there's very little for them to discuss or even disagree with. "I haven't watched your movie", "I haven't watched yours either", "Mine was better", "I guess... I wouldn't know, I thought mine was cool", etc. No shared reality.

I understand what you're saying.

My point, which admittedly my last message didn't make at all, is that "different shared realities" is not a new thing. The concept is what would have been referred to as "different cultures" throughout most of human history.

Different art, politics, passions, fears, identities, and myths is what cultural variety is about.

If you and I watch the same movies and listen to the same music and follow the same politics and share the same dreams and worries, I don't think it's reasonable to say that we are from different cultures.

What is being described as a "shared reality" in this thread feels more like globalism and less like something obviously positive or worth protecting.

I'm all for more cultural variety as an expression of individual differences.

Everything is perceived, and our perception gets filtered based on our prior experience. Just because we're not directly perceiving objective reality, that does not mean _everything_ is opinion.

JFK was shot, that's not just my opinion.

Unless you choose to believe some kind of post-modern crazyness, in which case - have at it.

You don’t actually know JFK was shot from your own personal experience. You just choose to believe what credible source claim. And even if you were there, who’s to say that your fallible memory is incorrect?

To be clear, I don’t think this line of thinking helps much. But it’s an interesting philosophical dilemma.

There is an pink elephant behind you. In practice, I believe that at least after the dust have settled, events of the type of "Count Ferdinand was shoot dead infront of 100 witnesses", like maybe 1/50 are fake? Dunno what share.

The faking part would be in who is blamed and what country to bomb etc.

"Who’s to say that your fallible memory is incorrect" - you can very easily test if someone has a bullet through their head. Well, assuming someone didn't go and steal their brain.

I'm saying that not everything is opinion, that there does exist a category called 'fact'. And you're talking about something else - a chain of trust with respect to those facts.

This is starting to go down the crazyness line I had mentioned. I get it's fun to philosophize about such things, but it's not how we live.

> you can very easily test if someone has a bullet through their head. Well, assuming someone didn't go and steal their brain.

Do you have access to their head? How do you know that someone didn’t swap that head for someone else who had been shot?

Like I said, this is purely a philosophic argument. I’m not actually trying to suggest that there isn’t such thing as “facts”.

> And you're talking about something else - a chain of trust with respect to those facts.

No, I’m making a psychological point that our perceptions are what we use to construct our reality, and that our perceptions are malleable. If they weren’t, then drugs would have no effect, psychosis wouldn’t be a thing, and people’s opinions wouldn’t differ about even the most straightforward things like god, globe vs flat earth, and so on and so forth.

> This is starting to go down the crazyness line I had mentioned. I get it's fun to philosophize about such things, but it's not how we live.

I agree. As I said in the previous comment:

“To be clear, I don’t think this line of thinking helps much. But it’s an interesting philosophical dilemma.”

> Everything is opinion. A shared reality is just where opinions coincide

I'm not sure I understand.. we have objective realities in the world that are certainly not "opinions".

According this logic, gravity exists because opinions coincide?

If everything is opinion then there can be no shared reality. The only "reality" that exists is your opinion about there being one.

Like whether you teo were even in the same room watching that movie.

Opinion and preference are the same thing. And thus personalised search results, choice of shows in the streaming era, and so on, are just a result of that personal bias.

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