[sunseb]

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” Marcus Aurelius

We need to stop trying to enforce "the truth" to other people. Just let people talk and have different opinions. That includes letting people having conservative values, because lately this thought police is getting out of control.

[ceejayoz]

As The Daily Show once put it, "you are entitled to your opinion; you are not entitled to your own set of facts".

[emerged]

This is generally a sleight of hand where one person's opinions are being referred to as 'facts' while the other's opinions are not. The rabbit hole here goes deeper than most people wish to believe because we're nested so deep into a particular dominant narrative.

[afarrell]

Epistemology is harder than that.

If a government body declares that there is no risk of human->human transmission of COVID-19, am I not entitled to evaluate other evidence and conclude that this statement of fact is incorrect?

> Based on the preliminary information from the Chinese investigation team, no evidence of significant human-to-human transmission and no health care worker infections have been reported.

https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of-unk...

[ceejayoz]

No, see, that's a great example of incorrectly mixing the two up on your part. Nothing in that statement can fairly be read as "there is no risk of human->human transmission of COVID-19".

Fact: On Jan 5, 2020, the WHO had "no evidence of significant human-to-human transmission".

You can hold the opinion that they should've been more aggressive about the potential of that changing. You can hold the opinion that the WHO should figure out a way to rely less on member nations accurately reporting information to them. As the statement notes, much was unknown to the WHO at that point:

> There is limited information to determine the overall risk of this reported cluster...

[afarrell]

> Nothing in that statement can fairly be read as "there is no risk of human->human transmission of COVID-19".

So you'd like to be 'entitled to your own set of facts' about how to summarise that WHO post because I am a fallible human, correct?

Would you say that Facebook are composed of infallible humans who never misinterpret the results of dense scientific papers? Or can the human judgement they exercise on complex topics be mistaken?

[ceejayoz]

> So you'd like to be 'entitled to your own set of facts' about how to summarise that WHO post because I am a fallible human, correct?

It is simply not factual that that statement states "there is no risk of human->human transmission of COVID-19". It explicitly states otherwise, in fact.

> There is limited information to determine the overall risk of this reported cluster...

[afarrell]

And your choice to believe the webpage over me is an (entirely reasonable and wise) exercise in human judgement based on other evidence you have access to.

[afarrell]

> the WHO should figure out a way to rely less on member nations accurately reporting information to them.

So you would say that the WHO should be 'entitled to their own set of facts', separate from that of the PRC, correct?

That would imply that "How do we determine the credibility of organizations?" is a sometimes-difficult exercise in human judgement, correct?

[ceejayoz]

> So you would say that the WHO should be 'entitled to their own set of facts', separate from that of the PRC, correct?

No, not really. "The WHO doesn't have reports of X" and "No one has reports of X" are separate (if related) facts.

> That would imply that "How do we determine the credibility of organizations?" is a sometimes-difficult exercise in human judgement, correct?

"Is this organization credible?" is an opinion, that you might back up with various facts.

[afarrell]

"Is this organization credible?" is an opinion, that you might back up with various facts.

Right. 100% Agreed.

And that implies that a fact like "On 5 January 2020, the WHO said 'Based on the preliminary information from the Chinese investigation team, no evidence of significant human-to-human transmission and no health care worker infections have been reported.' " is based on an opinion like "The WHO's web administration team is credible and would not have misleadingly changed the content of a web page"

Unless you start comparing that fact with other facts as reported the internet archive or a checksum in your database...which also has credibility questions.

---------

I'm just saying "Sadly, there is no way to escape using human judgement somewhere." I suspect we agree on most relevant object-level questions about vaccines and COVID-19.

I realise I sound pedantic. In normal times, I just round 0.9999999999999999999 up to 1 and go on with my life.

[bhupy]

Yes, and Facebook as a platform is not a place solely reserved for "facts", one can also post "opinions".

This isn't even a new thing: Op-Eds (i.e. "opinion" and not necessarily "fact") are a common information propagation tool, one that isn't unique to Facebook.