[jawns]

I have arguments about exactly that with friends who are otherwise very smart, and though they don't come out and say directly that the truth doesn't matter, they say equivalent things, like, "Well that's your truth, but who's to say it's my truth? We can't know for certain what the truth is, so why should we be able to force our version of the truth on someone else?"

[bryananderson]

Some truths are objective, others are subjective.

“The atomic number of helium is 2” is an objective truth. “The best flavor of ice cream is chocolate” is a subjective truth. It might be my truth, but not yours. Maybe your truth is that strawberry is best.

For a more relevant example (not saying you are disagreeing, just that it’s a topic of the article), the fact that someone experiences gender dysphoria may be, in this sense, their truth. It is a question of the individual’s subjective experience.

Everyone acknowledges that people have different subjective experiences, but for some reason, when it comes to this specific issue, acknowledging subjective experience is treated as tantamount to declaring that everybody gets to pick their own atomic number for helium.

[gls2ro]

We may need a better definition of this "truth" we are discussing.

> The best flavor of ice cream is chocolate

This is not a subjective truth. It is an opinion. And an opinion is not testable because it is subjective. Thus it cannot be judged on its truthfulness => ergo it is not a truth. Putting subjective in front of truth is making the truth part invalid.

A subjective truth is an opinion.

Now you want to make that a bit more testable, you need to add something that can be tested:

> The best ice cream for people with Alzheimer is chocolate ice cream

This is the trick that actually makes us debate. It wants to sound like the truth, but it is still a type of opinion: until this gets tested, this has a name - it is a hypothesis. That is kinda like a testable opinion. Still, opinion until tested.

But observe that the phrase has changed: from "best flavor," which is subjective, to "best for <group X>" which now can be tested.

I think we let ourselves too easy to talk about opinions as facts or having a truthy-like value.

[bryananderson]

Well, we’re kind of getting into word-games that I’m not sure are that meaningful, but I was thinking of the statement “the best flavor of ice cream is chocolate” where “best” means something like “the one that brings the most joy/utility/hedonic units/whatever.” I say it’s a truth rather than an opinion because it might well be testable in some way, such as by monitoring pleasure centers in my brain—but I say it’s subjective because that truth only has me-scope, not global scope. We’ve all met that person who stubbornly insists that the best flavor of ice cream (or whatever) for them must be the best for everyone, and somehow doesn’t grasp that others’ subjective experiences are different. That’s what I mean by subjective vs. objective truth.

[whendoyoushrink]

I wish we'd move away from "truth" and uses "facts" and "conclusions" instead.

Most really bad ideas take incorrect facts, and use them to draw tenuous conclusions. The examples in the blog are precisely that, the puberty blockers and the Maori traditional knowledge.

The elegance of stating "truths" is that the definition of "truth" has always been wishy-washy, to the point it is the vast majority of most philosophy 101 classes.

You can have whatever "truth" you like, but you can't choose your facts, and if your conclusions are predicated on bad or simply false facts, your conclusion can be ignored.

[pixl97]

I think that is confusing many different things and specifying them as 'truth'. This gets complicated in social situations where opinions firm feedback loops and due to complexity of the causality tree people don't understand if what they are talking about is an opinion or a truth.

This gets more complex when you start talking about local maxima versus global maxima, and even comparing local maxima from different locations.

Truth is not simplicity and this leads to a lot of social problems between different groups.