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by willcipriano 717 days ago
How "truth" works today:

"I see homeless people every day on the way to work, I'm having trouble making ends meet, the economy sucks."

"Fact Check: False, The economy is fine, take a look at NVIDA shares!"

3 comments

Two anecdotes followed by an opinion, responded to with another opinion and anecdote. There is not any meaningful argument about 'truth' going on there.
And you trust the people making these decisions to agree about what’s an opinion and what’s an assertion of fact? When they can put their political opponents in jail by blurring that distinction?
The "reader added context" below that post seems on point. It is an opinion, not a fact. I assume the graph is accurately representing truth. It is a decent demonstration of the old saw about lies, damn lies, and statistics, but it is real numbers, real dates, and the metric is described specifically. Excellent for misleading, but still truth.

The assertions that "we won" or it is "over" or it was "at very little cost" are all one man's opinions, however.

"Numbers don't lie" is a truism, but is practically undone by "People use numbers to lie."
"Winning the war on inflation" isn't a statement of fact, it's a jingoistic military metaphor.
Is it humane to have homeless people in a society that is financially booming?

Lying is apparently a trait that differentiates us from other animals. Humanity is another.

Homelessness is a choice. Just compare Germany where there is a right to housing to the US. All homeless people in Germany are homeless by choice, usually because they are severely mentally ill.

Btw. guess who has more homeless people Germany or the US.

There are no traits that distinguish us from other animals. We're just a little bit smarter than apes, elephants, and dolphins, which has pushed us past a tipping point into civilization.

Our societies are still ecosystems, and cannot escape from the rules thereof. Competition, hierarchy, and economic inequality are emergent properties of ecosystems. There's nothing inhumane or immoral about an ecosystem.

A little bit? Like, computers designed by dolphins are only 16-bit? I'd say it was more than a little bit.
A bit as in: on the spectrum of civilization-capable organisms, between bacteria and human beings, we're only a bit ahead of dolphins, which is where the tipping point happens to be. Aside from dolphins et al, this space was also occupied by our hominid ancestors.

It took us ~50,000 years to get to computers. We're not biologically different from humans then. Civilization itself is a new mechanism of transmitting information that dolphins do not possess (because they've not passed the tipping point) which allows transmission and accumulation across generations exponentially faster than DNA and culture (which dolphins do possess). We're also anatomically rather more suited to building things than dolphins.

How many homeless people you see on the way to work is a worse measurement of the economy than the stock market.