[briholt]

This is a naive viewpoint I see pop up a lot. People pushing "fiction" think it's a "fact" and there's no full-proof way to convince them otherwise or even perfectly distinguish the two. People will tell you that it's a fact that vaccines cause autism or Iraq has WMDs or America is a white supremacist country. In reality, "facts" are linguistic simplifications of reality that inherently omit information and the distinction of "fact" from "fiction" is itself a simplistic way to attempt to describe the accuracy of a statement. On a personal note, the people most convinced that they are pushing facts are the ones I'm most skeptical of.

[HlessClaudesman]

To insist that all points of view are valid, and that truth is somehow unknowable is a viewpoint very common in academia.

Using the scientific method, meta-studies and suchlike our species has built an enormous corpus of knowledge, I'm happy to let that evolving concensus be the basis of our decisions.

For example the fact that vaccines do a more good than harm by an order of magnitude is no longer up for debate. There is a lunatic fringe who disagree, their unfounded fiction should not be shown to curious first time parents on google.

To insist that everyone can pick and choose reality and that we should all be wary of "facts" is to cause real harm.

[briholt]

You're bringing up the other extreme (postmodernism), which I wouldn't agree with either. I'm arguing against certainty. We are stumbling along trying to communicate information as accurately as we can in order to produce predicted outcomes we deem desirable. Hopefully the evidence on an issue becomes so overwhelming that we can broadly reach a reasonable consensus. However, that consensus is subjective and dynamic. There is no objective process that will perfectly delineate "fact" from "fiction" as our Google News overlords would have you believe.