[acdha]

> The thing is, I no longer trust any news source. They all exist to serve their agenda, while rarely providing the real picture. So there is no way for me, as a regular citizen, to truly know what happens in the world or a particular regional conflict.

This is what the authoritarians want. It’s not actually hard to understand the major trends are in the world, with accurate information available, but that’s bad for their interests and so they spread the message you’re repeating now to make people more likely to support them. We saw this dramatically in the United States where the ability to answer basic factual questions correctly inversely correlated with supporting the winning candidate, or earlier support for Brexit, but it’s been a staple of living in countries like Russia or Hungary, and a key part of the fossil fuel industry’s effort not to get stuck with the bill for climate change.

There’s plenty of legitimate criticism of organizations like the NYT or BBC, but if you follow them you’ll have a much more accurate understanding of the world than someone who consumes Murdoch media or, worse, whatever’s floating around social media. There is objective truth in the world, and every study shows a significant gradient here.

[skwee357]

I find statement like "there is objective truth" - dangerous.

The objective truth in the 70s was, "smoking is good for you". Since then, the narrative changed. Politics, and even s̶c̶i̶e̶n̶c̶e̶ scientific research (to a degree) -- are subjective, despite what world leaders or politicians want you to believe. You can manipulate the data in a way that suits you or your agenda, you can buy scientific researches, etc. It's happening right now in all major, and minor conflicts.

Statements like "objective truth" tend to remind me of the grumpy old engineer who thinks that his way of doing things "is the only correct way", and rejects any modern approach to software engineering.

Now, I don't say you should ignore all statements, or news source. You should be informed enough to a degree you think is relevant for you, while understanding that there will be no objective truth, and unless you have a motivation (be it power, money, or something else) to continue to believe in your established world view, you need to be willing to revisit your "objective truth" every once in a while.

[acdha]

> The objective truth in the 70s was, "smoking is good for you". Since then, the narrative changed.

Your misunderstanding of the history doesn’t mean it was ever good for you. People didn’t call cigarettes “coffin nails” because they thought it was good for you and e.g. the specific lung cancer link was known at least as far back as the 1920s. The reason why it wasn’t named earlier is the same reason you’re wrong about it today: it was an enormously profitable industry and they were able to produce the ads you’re remembering which got far more attention than those pesky scientists who had been correct for half a century by that time – and many smokers blamed people for not telling them earlier, even though they had downplayed the warnings given at the time. A very similar story unfolded with climate change where people like to say that it was confused or contradictory for a long time when it was settled by the late 1970s because they didn’t want to admit having given equal weight to the fossil fuel lobbyists as they did climate scientists.

That’s the key distinction here: we have processes for verifying and testing theories. Yes, scientific research has had fraud but we know about those because their work has been critically examined. We should expect that everywhere rather than giving up on the concept.

[AnimalMuppet]

I would say it differently. Even using your example, "smoking is good for you" is objectively less true than "smoking is bad for you". We know that now.

The problem is that 1) we don't always have enough data to know what is true, and 2) we have a lot of people working as hard as they can to obscure the truth in order to push their own agenda.

All those post-modernist philosophers that I scoffed at were on to something: If we cannot determine the truth from the data available to us, then in practice, there is no truth. That may not have been the point they were trying to make, but for us who are living in it, it works out the same.

[red-iron-pine]

> The objective truth in the 70s was, "smoking is good for you".

Bollocks. Even as early as the 1950s there was a widely known link between smoking and cancer, and a 1964 Surgeon General's report said, unequivocally, that smoking causes cancer.

Hell, even in the 1600s tobacco was regarded as potentially dangerous. King James the VI of Scotland and I of England wrote, in 1604, the ‘Counterblaste to Tobacco’, where he talked about its negative impacts.

The "objective truth" was that capitalism doesn't care about your health, and ad campaigns were able to squash every attempt at getting people to quit.