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.
But how do we distinguish facts from non facts?
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.