> what does or doesn’t constitute a “fact”, are all political topics.
It clearly is not. A fact is a fact by definition, regardless of what anyone happens to feel about it. There are facts that are known to be true beyond all possible doubt.
If it is uncertain or in doubt, then it's not a fact and shouldn't be corrected by fact checkers.
The way Community Notes usually end up working in practice is comments that provide sourced context that may be [arguably intentionally] omitted in a topic. For instance if it happens to be that there have been 27 different studies showing no statistically significant reduction in spread of infectious diseases with healthy individuals wearing masks, then that would likely be a community note on the first one. And vice versa if rent has been demonstrated to keep rents below the surrounding means in the cities of Blah, Bleh, and Bluh, then that would often end up a community note on the second.
It basically helps reduce the hyperbole/echo chamber effect of such comments/topics. Vice/versa if those topics were "Respirator masks are useless." and "Rent control is always good." then the community notes would tend to go in the opposite direction. It's just a really good idea. For that matter I think a similar algorithm would also work well on general upvote systems at large.
I'd also add that one of the biggest issues with "fact checkers" was not only sometimes questionable checking, but also a selection bias - where the ideological bias becomes rather overt in both directions. Whether that be in deciding to "fact check" the Babylon Bee (in an overt effort to get it deranked), or in choosing not to not fact check statements from the lying politicians that one happens to like.
Your example is a false equivalence. Economics does not define "good ideas" and "bad ideas," it only attempts to model resource dynamics. Whereas the spread of infectious disease is clearly quantifiable regardless of value assignment.
Partly true, but besides the point. Making a blanket statement like "economics says rent control is bad," is only marginally better than saying "physics says nuclear weapons are bad." There is a critical assumption of values which is totally outside the objective of study.
The presumed goal of rent control is to prevent rents from rising. If they actually cause rents to rise even more quickly then they are indeed "bad" (at achieving this goal).
The goal of rent control, as I infer from the mechanism, is to prevent existing tenants from being priced out of their current homes (eventually leading to eviction) - at least as I have seen in the US.
If the goal were to prevent rents from rising, the mechanism would do so directly, ie. regulate all rent, rather than limiting to continued rentals on certain types of property. Which would by definition prevent rents from rising, presumably along with other undesirable effects.
Anyways, the whole issue with conflating "bad" with objective consequences is the "presumed goal," which is of course totally subjective.
Well this is definitely false. If you're a politician who can afford a nice place then rent control is a great idea: it gets you elected (look, I made things cheap for you) and keeps you elected (look, I will solve all the problems underpriced rent brings).
Here's another one - "Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election in 2016".
I have never seen an accepted fact checking site answer this, which is very strange since it is such an enormous and grave conspiracy theory if it were true. The Mueller report is extensive and quite conclusive in stating that no such evidence of collusion (conspiracy) was not found. Yet fact checkers are happy to check peripheral and far less consequential claims around the case for some reason (e.g., https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mueller-report-no-obstruct...), but are strangely hesitant to address the elephant in the room.
Or for another example, there were many false or poorly substantiated claims made about covid and vaccines during the pandemic. I saw "reputable" fact checkers address a certain set of those claims about the virus and drugs, but were strangely silent when it came to a different set of claims.
So fact checkers don't even need to provide false content at all, they can be very political and biased simply by carefully choosing exactly what "facts" or claims that they address.
But even straightforward stuff goes unchallenged. Jada Pinkett Smith released a movie trailer claiming Cleopatra was black. When NBC covered the issue, they couldn’t even bring themselves to fact check her. They did a “he said, she said” article asserting that Egypt contested whether Cleopatra was black: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/queen-cleopatra-black-egy....
I think someone said it but there's a difference between facts and making an inference about those facts. The evidence in Trumps case was maybe he had a conversation with a person of Russian descent on Day X. That in itself is a fact. Does this fact or other facts like it mean he "colluded", whatever the definition of colluded means, is a matter of opinion. Even in a legal framework, where "collusion" has a definition, its still up to a jury which can get it wrong. Fact-checking is extremely complex as you are alluding to and cannot be simplified the way it has been thus far
Sure, but the fact is that there was never any solid evidence showing that Trump did collude with Putin to hack the election. That's contrary to what many high level politicians were claiming, the fact is that they falsely claimed there was "ample evidence" proving Trump colluded, and they never produced it. That's what was never fact checked, because it is inconvenient, and it would show that many high level people who insisted on there being "ample evidence" to prove collusion were actually being dishonest about it.
Well there is a lot of connections between Trump and Russia. Wiki here shows quite a few: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates...
I'm not interested in auditing the entire thing, but like I said whether what occurred was "collusion" is something that cannot be fact-checked as it will always be a matter of opinion
There's a lot of connections between a lot of people. Obama tried to secretly transmit a promise to Putin that he would "have more flexibility" after his election. How do we know it wasn't Obama who colluded with Putin? It was his whitehouse overseeing the 2016 election. Why doesn't any fact checkers check that fact and come up with "inconclusive" because they are unable to prove it false? Because it's political.
Trump Putin election hacking collusion was always a wild baseless conspiracy theory. Sure there is no absolute proof he did not, and there is various incidental connections and circumstantial evidence you could arrange to fit some crazy narrative. But what it not in dispute is that many people lied and mislead claiming to have "ample evidence" of collusion, when no such thing was ever produced.
That is a dilemma humanity has struggled with for millennia. Humans are very bad at recognizing their own biases and admitting to themselves they were wrong about something.
What do you mean how? Science. The process of science.
There might be people who want to believe gravity on Earth accelerates objects at 1m/s^2, but we can trivially establish through countless experiments repeatable by anyone who wants to try that this is not true.
If you can't measure it or repeatably demonstrate it then it's probably not a fact. If it can, then it is a fact and no amount of emotionally wanting to believe something else can make it not a fact.
The irony is that the example you cite, i.e. F = G * m1 * m2 / r^2 is demonstrably not the correct formula for gravity.
Science, the process of science, does not prove something as fact. It can only eliminate non-facts, and even then, the experiments may be flawed in their recognition.
> If you can't measure it or repeatably demonstrate it then it's probably not a fact. If it can, then it is a fact and no amount of emotionally wanting to believe something else can make it not a fact.
This is demonstrably false. If you witness an event once, you cannot necessarily repeat it, but you know for a fact that it happened. Unless you redefine the term "fact" narrowly, what you suggested is an ideology.
See how even the definition of "fact" is up for debate.
> Science, the process of science, does not prove something as fact.
I intentionally picked a wrong value for Earth gravity instead of the correct one to avoid nitpickery on precision, location, yada yada.
If someone has a feeling that Earth's gravity accelerates at 1m/s^2, they're just flat out wrong full stop. This is the problem with the anti-intellectual crowd who believes everyone's opinion has equal weight. No, it doesn't. If someone wants to believe Earth's gravity accelerates at 1m/s^2, then their opinion (on that topic) is worthless because it is known to be false and they don't deserve any recognition for the nonsense. Facts are facts, beliefs don't make them go away.
> This is demonstrably false. If you witness an event once, you cannot necessarily repeat it, but you know for a fact that it happened.
Not at all. Human memory is fallible so if you are the only one who saw that event and swear it is true that does not make it a fact no matter how hard you believe it.
That's why scientific process requires repeatable results that anyone can (re)validate over and over, not one-off recollections.
XKCD has a fun comic about a guy who recalculates the world records of pole vaulters based on the gravity of the locations of various events. Earth's surface gravity is by no means constant -- it varies, presumably due to the density and altitude of any particular location.
Indeed, "sea level" is defined as the level that the sea would be at, if the area of question didn't have the land mass, but still had the same gravity. Of the various possibilities, this particular definition is useful, in that it you can expect the air pressure at a particular altitude to be the same, regardless of where you are, after factoring in things like temperature and humidity -- which is kindof important if you're a pilot of some sort!
> Earth's gravity accelerates at 1m/s^2, they're just flat out wrong full stop
You do realize it depends on the distance of the object to Earth? So perhaps you are wrong not them depending on the context.
Now someone comes up and says I am nitpicking blah blah... well, the author should have been clear and not stating falsehood as fact! This is just your belief which does not change the incompleteness/incorrectness of the statement (as per the original post).
And this is the whole goddamn point. What's "fact" to someone can be incorrect, half-correct, wrong with completely good faith, or wrong with intent to mislead, etc. Who gets to decide all this is not as simple as "I am ScienceTM" Dr Fauci style.
You missed a basic element of what they said: "can't measure it or repeatably demonstrate it"; seeing a non-reproducible event with your eyes is a form of measurement, and that measurement could in principle be done by an objective machine (recorded by a camera). The potential for objective evidence is what distinguishes a matter of fact from a matter of opinion.
As to the "correct formula for gravity" - that's just bad faith nitpicking. "Newtonian gravitation is a fact" is both a strawman and completely irrelevant when it comes to social media fact checkers.
> You missed a basic element of what they said: "can't measure it or repeatably demonstrate it"; seeing a non-reproducible event with your eyes is a form of measurement, and that measurement could in principle be done by an objective machine (recorded by a camera). The potential for objective evidence is what distinguishes a matter of fact from a matter of opinion.
No. Recording an experiment does not constitute scientific repeatability of an experiment. (Not to mention Quantum Mechanics explicitly rejects your claim as a universal principle at the micro level.)
> As to the "correct formula for gravity" - that's just bad faith nitpicking. "Newtonian gravitation is a fact" is both a strawman and completely irrelevant when it comes to social media fact checkers.
No, it is not a strawman at all. It clearly illustrates via an example of something we have known to be false for about a century, yet not only we do not censor it on social media, we teach it to kids, and almost no one would object to it.
So, where do you draw the line?
I posit there exists facts that are unknowable by the scientific method. The GP claimed science as the end-all-be-all method to fact-check. My statement is that it's not sound, nor complete, in its ability to fact-check.
The scientific process works amazingly well for repeatable experiments, but it doesn't do anything at all for non-repeatable events. You can't use the scientific method to figure out who blew up the Nordstream pipeline, just for a relatively recent and hotly debated political fact.
And if I take a ballon, fill it with the right helium/air ratio so it sinks at exactly 1m/s²? It's a provable scientific fact that it's falling at 1m/s². Even if I leave off the part that it's a balloon, and talk antigravity fields or aliens or some crap, and "let you draw your own conclusions", the fact that the ballon fell at that rate would still be demonstrably true.
People want to sell you lies and get you to believe them, and they'll give all the half truths they can to support their version of the truth.
they'll use misleading graphs with real numbers, so you can fact check the numbers on the graph and come away thinking the graph represents the truth of the matter. But X axis that don't start at zero, logarithmic Y axis that don't say they're logarithmic, Or pie graphs viewed from a funny angle, with slices that don't represent the percentage they're labeled by, or with percentages that add up to greater than 100%.
If all we wanted to run were trivial physics experiments, we'd be golden. The real world of social media facts include things we can't run science experiments for, or go back in time to redo, like economic stats that use a different formula today and there's not enough information to see what it was in the distant past. So we get these narratives from people who are trying to convince us to believe theirs by leaving off important context. Which is totally dishonest of them, but they have a vested interest in us believing a particular narrative.
This is not uncovered ground though. Philosophy and logic cover the notion of truth and reality in some depth. The entire field of law is based on proof beyond reasonable doubt.
The aim of fact-checking isn't to be a perfect system that covers every single possibility and edge case. The aim is to reduce the effectiveness of lies and propaganda, so that people are less misinformed when they go about their daily actions and democratic duty.
You're reading them as saying that moderation is suspect because it's political, and all I read them to be saying is that political considerations are unavoidable when you moderate, in a manner distinctive to moderation.
Answering this question has to be a political topic, because there's an infinite stream of people asking you the question (by posting things that may need to be fact checked), and you have to decide which ones to prioritize.
For most of my life, I would have agreed with you.
As I've gotten older, I've become increasingly skeptical of the idea of a "fact".
There's no way to separate information from human context. Even seemingly obvious things like "that shirt is blue". To who? My wife sees it as green, frequently.
Or things are reduced to tautological nonsense like "gravity keeps us on the ground". Hard fact, right? But define gravity. A physicist will give you an answer, that may or may not mean much. A layman's definition might be something like "it's the thing that keeps us stuck to the ground", and now we're back to tautological nonsense. The entire "water is wet" class of "facts".
Anything less trite instantly becomes less fact-like the more humans are involved.
"Trump is a criminal" many people would argue passionately that this is a hard, incontrovertible fact.
Nearly as many, (or maybe more?) would argue the opposite.
I like the approach of the Fair Witness in Stranger In A Strange Land: "What color is that house?" "It's yellow on this side."
I'm increasingly convinced that the belief in "facts" is more about the desire to be right and know things than anything to do with objective reality.
Facts exist. Your first sentence has 11 words. Easy to verify, right? Doesn't matter who's counting.
May I suggest that your confusion comes from a conflation between facts and generalizations. Hard facts exist in strictly defined contexts. Relax the context, and you need to eventually reach for generalizations that less precise and potentially ambiguous.
If somebidy asked me whether the cup in you hand would fall and and shatter when they release it from their grip, my answer would of course depend on a few things I pick up from the context: what gravitational attraction would the cup experience in your current location? What material is the cup made of (porcelain, metal...)? So if we're standing on earth and the cup was made of porcelain, I'd answer that it would fall and likely shatter. Doesn't mean that any cup would shatter. Metal cups doesn't. But that's a different fact. So there is no generalized fact that all cups shatter when they fall. Some do, some don't. We can play the same game with gravity. The cup wouldn't fall if we were floating on the ISS. So the same cup doesn't fall in all locations it might conceivably be.
Many people don't want to deal with the level of precision that hard facts require. They get sloppy and then start these endless discussions of "this isn't true because..." etc. and everyone gets gradually more confused because nothing seems to be entirely true or false. The fundamental counter here is to dig in and tease the generalizations apart until they become sets of constrained hard facts.
It's, I think, quite relevant here to note that "word" is a famously hard to define concept in linguistics. That is, there is no generalized definition of the concept "word" that works across languages, writing systems (e.g. Chinese and Japanese writing don't traditionally use spaces to separate words), and ways of analyzing language (phonological words are different from grammatical words).
So to make your sentence more accurate, you'd have to say "there are 11 groups of letters separated by whitespace characters or punctuation before your first period".
> It's, I think, quite relevant here to note that "word" is a famously hard to define concept in linguistics. That is, there is no generalized definition of the concept "word" that works across languages, writing systems (e.g. Chinese and Japanese writing don't traditionally use spaces to separate words), and ways of analyzing language (phonological words are different from grammatical words).
True, but for a language like English, the various definitions for "word" agree in many (though definitely not all) cases, and in the particular example, I think you'd have to argue somewhat harder to convince me that that sentence doesn't have exactly 11 words
(maybe if you argue that "would have" often turns into "would've", which is a single phonetic unit, but then I would also write it that way). There are however other cases where it's less clear (e.g. is possessive 's a separate word or an affix?).
While I get your point, and I think it's strong, I'm entirely unconvinced.
Everything we see, do and understand exists in a context window of an individual. We have a shared language, with which we can inexpertly communicate shared concepts. That language is terrible at communicating certain concepts, so we've invented things like math and counting to try to become more precise. It doesn't make those things "true" universally. It makes them consistent within a certain context.
How far it it from Dallas to Houston? On a paper map, it might be a few inches. True, within that context. Or you might get an answer for road miles. Or as the crow flies. In miles? Kilometers? It's only fairly recently (in human history) that we've even had somewhat consistent units of measure. And that whole conversation presupposes an enormous amount of culture knowledge and context - would that question mean anything to a native tribesman in Africa without an enormous amount of inculturation? Are their facts the same?
I'm not trying to make a "nothing is true, we can't know anything" kind of argument, that's lazy thinking.
I'm making an argument for maintaining skepticism in everything, even (especially?) things that you know for sure.
You still have to distinguish between hard, absolute facts which definitely exist and representations thereof in human language. The facts never change (the distance between Dallas and Houstom doesn't change while we are having this conversation), but accurate descriptions require additional concepts and now we get into the imprecise world of human communication. Doubting the precision and accuracy of human language is a fair point, but that doesn't make facts themselves subjective.
I admire the conviction that things become absolutely true at a sufficient level of specification.
So long as facts are represented in language, they are subject to language’s imprecision and subjectivity. And I don’t think that platonic ideals of facts, independent of representstion, have much utility.
What is Dallas? What is Houston? Which parts do we measure. are we talking about road distance? That something doesn't change during a conversation is not the same the thing as them never changing
If someone says "it's 250 miles from Houston to Dallas" you know that there will be some error involved. From precisely what part of Houston to what part of Dallas, does it include the outskirts, are they estimating, is it rounded to a nice number, etc.
If someone claims "it's 500 miles from Houston to Dallas" they're wrong.
I’m going to pretend to avoid asking what is a mile and what is 250 and 500 :)
I could imagine ways we could interpret “500 miles” the same way as The Proclaimers i.e. as a noteworthy or arduous distance, under which that claim “it’s 500 miles from Dallas to Houston” isn’t contextually false.
More interesting is what knowing that things are not the case tells us about what we can know is the case. I don’t think it reveals much, but I’m not sure
This is much of science: taking a hypothesis, understanding where the bounds of that hypothesis lie, then testing the bounds to try to disprove it. Then creating a more accurate hypothesis within the space of what’s left unknown.
Unfortunately, I missed out a key word “… what knowing that things are not the case tells us about what we can know is [absolutely] the case…”
My apologies for this and with the omission I don’t disagree one bit with your reply.
On the other hand I can see how we might imagine ways we could scientifically sarisfy ourselves beliefs are not absolute, but I’m not sure how we could satisfy ourselves they are
> How far it it from Dallas to Houston? On a paper map, it might be a few inches. True, within that context. Or you might get an answer for road miles. Or as the crow flies. In miles? Kilometers? It's only fairly recently (in human history) that we've even had somewhat consistent units of measure.
No one’s opinion is going to make them closer together or farther apart, though. The distance (in whatever context) can be known. Can be objectively measured. That makes it a fact.
> I'm making an argument for maintaining skepticism in everything, even (especially?) things that you know for sure.
Are you skeptical about which way to put your feet when you get out of bed? Do you check to make sure every single time?
I think you are trying hard and writing a lot to miss the parent's point. You're thing about the number of words in the sentence is like what the parent is mistakenly calling "tautological;" another way to say it is blatantly obvious and a banal observation. This is not the type of thing we are talking about here. This is entire post is about "facts" and "fact checking" in the case of socio-political issues, the kinds of things for which there are fact checkers. The parent is obviously correct. Just look at the state of actual "fact checking" of this variety in the real world. There is a lot of controversy and a lot of words are used in a very loose way, these are not simple physics problems that you can punch into a TI-86. The issue is clearly about "who are the fact checkers" or put another way "who decides the facts." In a court of the law in the US, the judge is only arbiter of facts, these can not even be appealed.
But I agree with your overall point! :) Ok, so the statement "gravity keeps us on the ground" is not a tautology in the strict sense but you have correctly defined it here. I think it probably seems like a tautology because colloquially we might use it that way. I don't think its worth parsing out too much. This kind of stuff about coffee cups and all that has nothing to do with "fact checking" political statements and anyone else being serious knows that.
With "gravity keeps us on the ground" I was trying to point out that the word "gravity" to most folks is the same thing as "the thing that keeps us on the ground", it's just a language symbol/shorthand for that concept, so the statement would reduce to A=A, and isn't a meaningful "fact".
Everything is political, which is one of the statements made above.
Facts are political. Because facts actively change how you live your life.
The playwright who created the “kill all climate denialists” talks about how it took years for the play to get onto stage.
And then how he began to see the truth of climate denialists positions. That climate denialists believed the facts, and realized it meant their whole way of life was over. So they had to do something about it. They responded with denial. In a very real way, they lived their beliefs.
The fact of climate change IS political.
EVERYTHING is political, there is no fact that I cannot convert into a weapon, through some means or the other. Blaming fact checkers, is simply trying not to blame humans.
No, whether a coffee cup will break when you drop it or whatever that was is not a political thing. I'm not sure what the rest is about. To deny that there is a lot of subjectivity in the kinds of "facts" we are talking about her is just to deny reality.
“Facts is facts” works for counting words in a sentence.
It does not work for anything with nuance or context, or for unprovable propositions. It is a fact that there is no elephant in my house. But if you want to doubt that fact for the lulz or for profit, I will be hard pressed to prove it.
That’s where our modern populist / fascists have weaponized disingenuousness to prove that “up is down” is just as valid a statement as “up is up”.
> As I've gotten older, I've become increasingly skeptical of the idea of a "fact".
I think the problem actually lies in your personal interpretation of what a "fact" should be, and how it contrasts with what facts actually are.
The definition of "fact" is "things that are known or proven to be true". Consequently, if you can prove that an assertion is not true then you prove it is not a fact. If your wife claims your shirt is green and not blue, does that refute the fact that your shirt is actually blue? No. Can you prove your shirt is blue? Can she prove your shirt is green? That is the critical aspect.
Just because someone disagrees with you, that does not mean either if you is right or wrong. You can both be stating facts if it just so happens you're presuming definitions that don't match exactly in specific critical aspects.
If your shirt is cyan, you can argue it's a fact the shirt is blue and argue it's a fact the shirt is green, because in RGB space both the blue channel and green channel is saturated. You can also state that it's a fact that your shirt is neither blue or green because there's a specific definition for that color and this one is in fact cyan, not blue or green.
If you can prove your assertion, it's a fact. If you're making claims you cannot prove or even support, they are not facts.
And more importantly, the problem tackled by fact checking is people making claims that are patently and ostentatiously false and fabricated in order to manipulate public perception and opinions. Does anyone care if your shirt is blue or green? No. Does anyone care if, say, Haitians are eating your pets? Yes.
1) While “facts” undisputed exist, there are vanishingly few people sufficiently versed in both epistemology and myriad substantive areas for “fact checking” to make sense. In particular, domain experts are rarely sufficiently versed in epistemology to distinguish between facts they know by virtue of their expertise, and other things they also believe that aren’t really facts.
Moreover, the folks employed checking facts for companies like Facebook typically don’t have any expertise in either epistemology or the range of substantive areas in which they perform fact checking.
2) In practice, the issue in society isn’t “facts” but “trust.” You can build trust by being consistently correct about facts in a visible way. But you can’t beat people over the head with putative facts if they don’t trust you.
Tautologies are not necessarily uninteresting, all of mathematics is essentially about finding tautologies (on some level), but they're far typically from obvious.
Subjective interpretation is very fundamental to being human and the way our minds work, but the underlying physical reality -- the wavelengths of light reflecting off the shirt -- can be measured objectively. A physicist might say that gravity is the curvature of spacetime caused by mass, which can be measured and tested.
Trump being a criminal is based on a shared legal and societal context. As a society, we accept that if you are convicted before a jury of your peers, you are guilty and have been convicted of a crime. Jury's get it wrong and the justice system is flawed and has made mistakes. A black man in the 1920s (or even the 1960s for that matter) being tried for murder with absolutely no evidence and sentenced to death is a clear miscarriage and corruption of justice. The testimony of Trump's employees during the trial, who all said they loved working there (most of them still worked there), but weren't willing to lie on the stand about checks and phone calls they participated in, was pretty clear cut. This wasn't random people off the street of [insert preferred liberal enclave here] testifying against him: it was his own people who still work for him.
Some people prioritize political allegiance over legal judgments when it suits them.
If we dismissed facts entirely, science, medicine, and countless other fields reliant on objective reality would collapse.
This exchange is a great example of the subjective nature of our experiences: as I've gotten older -- 38 now -- I've come to accept more and more that some things are objective reality, whereas in my teens and 20s, I questioned reality and society on the structural level, torn down to the studs. From Plato's cave, to brain in the vat, Kant, the Hindu Brahman and Maya, Buddhism, etc.
Your Trump trial example actually proves the opposite of the point you’re making. CNN’s legal analyst of all people wrote an article explaining why the prosecutors “contorted the law” in pursing Trump’s conviction: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-.... Remember, the prosecutor initially declined to bring the case. And those problems with the underlying legal theory are still subject to review on appeal, which very well may result in the conviction being overturned. There’s actually a lot to debate there! Including whether the “shared context” you mention still holds in the circumstance of a blue-state jury trying Donald Trump. And I’d certainly not trust anyone—especially people without a legal background—to moderate people’s statements about Trump’s trial and conviction.
Heck, even lawyers don’t treat legal judgments as god-given “facts” except in specific legal circumstances. The questions at the back of every chapter in a law school textbook will ask the student whether a particular case was rightly decided or wrongly decided and why.
The better way to think about legal judgments is not in terms of “facts” but rather “process.” Even a final decision by the U.S. Supreme Court does not establish god given facts. It merely is the end of the line in a set of procedures that lead to a particular result in a particular case. But even judgments of the Supreme Court are second-guessed every day by 20-somethings in law schools around the country!
I take the "this seems to be true, based on what I know, subject to more information" approach.
I'm ok with not knowing things.
We can measure all sorts of things, and put them in a human context, which is very reassuring. What's a wave? What's a wavelength? What's a unit of measure? These are not universal truths, these are human inventions. Things we've created in order to communicate a shared understanding with each other of things we've observed. It makes us feel knowledgeable, lets us build cool things, and that's a good thing!
It also interferes with learning, and that's a bad thing. For example, (and I'm not taking a position on this either way, because I don't know) I think it's very unlikely, based on your comment, that it would be easy to convince you that Trump is not a criminal. Or, to pick a less controversial topic, to convince the early Catholic church of the heliocentric model of the solar system. Because they already had the "facts."
It's a comfortable position to know things.
It's uncomfortable to not know. As I've gotten older, I've become more comfortable with being uncomfortable.
It would indeed be hard to convince me Trump has not committed crimes, considering a jury found that he had and the whole, "Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck," thing. Tony Accardo ran the Chicago Outfit for 4-5 decades and never spent a single day in jail. I don't think most people would agree that because he was never convicted (or even charged), he was not committing crimes.
If you read a story about a drug kingpin being convicted at trial, do you assume that he might be innocent?
> If you read a story about a drug kingpin being convicted at trial, do you assume that he might be innocent?
That's a very fair question.
To answer: I try as hard as I can to not draw any conclusion from something like that.
I'll be 50 this year. I've seen so many examples of media manipulation, "spin", crooked prosecutors, etc... that I try very hard not to jump to a conclusion. Especially with outrage stories like "child pornography was found on his laptop". There are countless examples of police and three letter agents getting caught red-handed planting this stuff, so I'm always skeptical of news stories like that.
Then there's the whole argument of "what's a criminal?". It's frequently the ethical choice to violate an unjust law. Was Ghandi a criminal? If someone broke a law, but then the law was changed or removed, are they still a criminal?
What kind of drug kingpin? (I'm purposefully being pedantic here for rhetorical purposes) Were they "dealing" ibogaine? Maybe for injured vets, but the news is just calling him a drug kingpin? It's strange to me that ibogaine is schedule 1, and I probably wouldn't consider them to be a criminal for doing that. Or maybe they were doing some combination of things, some good some bad. Or maybe there's a good reason why it's schedule 1, and I just don't understand and they really are a bad guy.
My point is that there's usually nuance. I don't trust stories like that, I don't "believe" news articles. I read them, take them in, and reserve judgement. Really. My initial, unconscious reaction and inner voice immediately says "are they framing him? What's the other side of the story? If he is a bad guy, does he see himself that way?"
I've just been burned too many times in my life by getting sucked into media stories that I believed were true, and made an idiot out of myself because I didn't think critically about it and jumped on a bandwagon that later turned out to be BS.
> Trump being a criminal is based on a shared legal and societal context.
To think that someone is a criminal, you have to believe they committed a crime. A trial is one way of establishing whether they did with certain standards of evidence and process. But it is very far from the be-all-end-all of the matter.
For example, virtually everyone believes OJ Simpson is a criminal, even though he was found not guilty at trial, and even though plenty of biases worked against him in that trial, theoretically.
For myself, I do believe that Trump was rightfully convicted and is a criminal. But that doesn't mean that "he was convicted" should force anyone else to believe this. It only means that a particular group of jurors believed it given the evidence that a judge found correctly collected and presented to them.
But, respectfully, even you, in your quest to cite facts require pointing out that your "facts" are not facts at all. The person in question, Trump, was not sentenced and therefore not "convicted" of anything. But this false claim is repeated a lot even by supposed "fact-checkers". Even the rest of that same paragraph is not made up of facts but you are trying to support some vague claim with appeals to things like "his own people wouldn't lie for him even though they loved him" or some such; you're bolstering a negative sentiment but not really clearly delineating anything resembling "facts". That's the issue that is being discussed and addressed by Meta at this point. Sure, we can call high schools physics problems as reflecting facts of nature, that's nice, but this is not what all the fuss is about.
"in United States practice, conviction means a finding of guilt (i.e., a jury verdict or finding of fact by the judge) and imposition of sentence. If the defendant fled after the verdict but before sentencing, he or she has not been convicted,"
Not true in New York, where this particular trial took place. From your own link:
S 380.30 Time for pronouncing sentence.
In general. Sentence must be pronounced without unreasonable delay.
Court to fix time. Upon entering a conviction the court must:
(a) Fix a date for pronouncing sentence; or
(b) Fix a date for one of the pre-sentence proceedings specified in article four hundred; or
(c) Pronounce sentence on the date the conviction is entered in accordance with the provisions of subdivision three.
So not only is sentencing distinct from conviction semantically, it's also distinct legally in the state of New York.
This is an instance where semantics are nothing more than, well, semantics.
The people who say that Trump has been ”convicted but not sentenced” actually mean that he’s been ”found guilty but not sentenced”, they just aren’t intimately familiar with legal terms of art.
If they simply say ”Donald Trump was found guilty but not sentenced” instead, they’ve silenced the nitpickers while still conveying the exact same message they intended to in the first place.
Sometimes when people complain ”you’re just arguing semantics!”, the semantics do in fact need to be cleared up, because the words being used are confusing, or wrong in a way that’s preventing participants in the discussion from getting on the same page.
Here, no one is actually confused. Everyone knows and agrees that Trump was found guilty, but that he hasn’t been sentenced. The only sticking point is whether you can use the word ”convicted” to describe someone who is in that situation, and whether or not that’s the case doesn’t have any material effect on people’s understanding of reality. It’s just a matter of arguing over which words should be used, i.e. it’s just semantics.
> 2 : any of the circumstances of a case that exist or are alleged to exist in reality
: a thing whose actual occurrence or existence is to be determined by the evidence presented at trial see also finding of fact at finding, judicial notice question of fact at question, trier of fact compare law, opinion
This is the line in the sand that makes sense in the pre internet era.
Online, EVERYTHING is political speech, because moderation is the only effective action we can take, and moderation is currently conflated with censorship. Even though it’s on a private platform.
I was working towards researching this and building the case out fully - but online speech efficacy is not served by the blunt measures of physical spaces, where the ability to speak is not as mediated.
Online, diversity of voices, capability of users to interact safely, resolution of conflicts, these are better measures of how healthy the market of ideas is.
The point of free speech is to have an effective exchange of ideas, even difficult ones. The idea of free speech is not in service of itself, its in service of a greater good.
The earth is "round" can be made political, but there is a factual consensus.
Therefore, we rely on experts that decipher information to transcend political opinions. It saddens me when scientists become political, only to add confusion to the consensus, in an attempt to weaken it.
The US is going to endure four more years of post-truth governance. It isn't in Zuckerberg's interest to have his organization pointing out that the emperor is unclothed when there is real risk of blowback in round 2.
