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Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

So there's an interesting topic hidden in your comment. What is truth? I don't mean to ask that in a flippant way. I mean to ask it in a way that has an answer - or at least a reliable set of answers. Of course this is a philosophical debate of long standing, but it has a lot of relevance for today.

What do you mean by truth? How do you attain to truth?

Is truth what is objectively perceived? If so, how do you determine what is the shared subjective perception of the exterior world? Is truth possible to attain to? Should we instead focus on finding and sharing working(up to tolerance) models of the reality we encounter?

This is sort of a big debate in philosophy of science circles. You can see traces of it in Popper, Feyerabend, and a few others you can rummage up on Wikipedia. These are the questions that frame how you do research, how you present research, and the expectations of reliability of research.

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In my experience, when most engineering-oriented people use the word truth, they (wittingly or unwittling) mean the pragmatic definition of "allows us to make stronger-than-previous predictive models about something". Most of the argument in philosophy of science circles strikes me as meta-interesting, not eminently relevant to the practice of science.

Especially when dealing with psychology, a lot of those "what, exactly, is an electron" sort of deeply epistemological statements are not really asked, because we have enough trouble with the simplistic models we have.

So yeah, my recommendation (for what it is worth) is to always assume "most predictive model available" when someone says truth, and be aware that you are making that assumption and that simplification.

That's a reasonable approach when talking with people who have sort of day to day experience with data and systems. Unfortunately, this doesn't per se hold true when talking with people from other disciplines. Some people hold truth as a platonic thing: it's either true or not true, and new research disproving old things implies falsehood, not a less accurate model. Tackling the elephant in that room, I'm not even talking about religious discussions, just normal discussions on physics research being found out.

A historian could speak more pertinently to this, but my understanding is that in 50s-60s "middle" USA, scientists were pretty much treated as oracles of divinity by a great deal of the common population.

I agree and have run into that problem myself. Unfortunately, fixing that impression takes time and to my knowledge there isn't any real way to explain the problem with "Platonic truth" as a tangent off of a discussion around research journals, for instance. It requires a full step back and a couple hours of discussion to explain it at all, if you haven't been exposed to it before.

If anyone has any recommendations on that front, I am all ears.

Actually, I don't think we have to go down that rabbit hole. The current journal system is built such that a published paper is essentially a claim that this result is reproducible and statistically significant in some sense. A philosopher can and should then go and question what exactly that means in practice, whether it's the best standard, etc etc, but in the meantime, it is also acceptable to take the system's claims and observe that they do not match the reality of the journal system on its own terms, without any particular need to dig into philosophy.

In fact, I'm personally not convinced it's the best standard, but, nevertheless, it is a good start to hold journal papers to the standards they proclaim.

Worry about what the best theory is when they show some ability to implement any theory!

Truth is discovered. The process of arriving at the discovery of truth is where the perceptions and subjectivity play a role.

For example, water has certain properties based on the conditions surrounding it. These properties exist whether you know about them or not. If you can, through observation and/or measurement, discover these properties, you have discovered truth. If you never discover these properties, it does not affect the existence of the properties.

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