Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

This statement concerns me, greatly. Its implication is that facts are merely point of view statements. That is just, well, it's just wrong.

Facts are facts. The truth is the truth. They don't care what your beliefs are. If it is empirically true, then it is true.

Why and when did it become okay to hand-wave and dismiss anything you didn't believe in, personally, just because you don't believe in it? What is this world?

We're talking about facts established by research, indicating they have occurred in the past. I don't know what you're talking about.

If Trump's statement about fraud is not predictive, then it is fiction and meaningless instead of wrong.

It is amazingly easy to lie with statistical "facts", through careful sampling, use of technical language, and overly broad or narrow definitions: https://medium.com/@hollymathnerd/how-to-defend-yourself-fro...

I could write a "factual" article claiming hundreds of mass shootings in 2020 (obviously false). I just need to define a "mass shooting" as an incident where four or more people are injured (no deaths required).

Or an equally "factual" article claiming that zero mass shootings in 2020 (also obviously false). I just need to define a "mass shooting" as an incident where twenty or more people are killed.

Exact same dataset, two different and mutually exclusive "facts".

In this case, it just seems like Twitter disagrees with him. They aren't really arguing facts.

What counts as "injured" or "killed"? If shots are fired and the resulting human stampede kills 4 people, does that count as 4 mass shooting deaths? Obviously the shooter is at fault, but these details affect the interpretation of events.

My undergrad was in statistics. In our capstone course, my professor had us read journal articles and discuss the statistical analyses within. I remember one study we read (peer reviewed, a couple dozen citations), and my professor's take away was, "I can't say it's wrong, but based on the data they gave, I can't for the life of me figure out how they reached their statistical conclusions." So yeah, it's a "fact" that the researchers reached a certain conclusion, but the conclusion itself is not fact.

I don't believe in post-truth, but "Facts are facts; truth is truth" is a philosophical statement, not a practical one. And even then, we have an entire field of philosophy to iron out those details, which we call epistemology.

People can lie with statistics and people can lie without statistics. The latter is much easier, but the former is possible, as you lay out.

That's why we need to check whether an alleged fact is true, or at least can be confirmed from multiple sources of evidence so it can be accepted as true for the time being. We can also check statistics for anomalies and errors. Statisticians do that all the time.

All of that is fact checking.

No, its implication is that claiming that something is a "fact" does not mean it actually is a fact. Which is perfectly true.

For example, if you let an apple fall down to the ground and you say "The apple fell to the ground", then you can't really know whether it's a fact or not, because you don't have access to the official logs of the Universe where it would be recorded that "An apple fell to the ground". So you have to trust your senses (and for example the fact that you're not under hallucination or visualizing an illusion) to put some confidence into this belief. If you know you're not under drug usage and if there are other witnesses of the event, then you'll have a very high degree of confidence into the idea that the apple indeed fell on the ground, so much confidence that you would consider it a fact.

When it comes to complex questions about society and everything that we can read on the news, such degree of confidence is very rare. In the end, the threshold at which you consider something to be "a fact" is subjective and for this reason I think all this "facts aren't opinions" thing is dangerous, because it gives the illusion that what we call "facts" are absolute and binary, whereas it's often things we just have a high confidence about, and so it opens the door to slide our standard of what a fact is.

What matters is that our view of the world shouldn't be shaped by what we hope or believe the world _should_ be, but by what it really _seems_ to be. And that is sufficient enough without having to get on one's high horse with "facts".

I don't question the casual usefulness of the word "fact" in appropriate contexts, but when the discussion at hand precisely handles the very nature of what is a fact and what isn't, we need to dig down the true implications of the word.

As soon as you start talking about what happened with those other witnesses, the group begins influencing the way each other remember what happened, and the narrative becomes more "real" than the actual memory. The more time that passes, and the more times the story of the apple falling from the tree is told, the more reinforced the narrative becomes, regardless of how the apple got to the ground.

My immediate reaction to such sentiments is that the ones who hold them would have imprisoned Galileo and poisoned Socrates. We can comfortably say that the truth exists. We cannot so comfortably say that we know what it is.

Absolutely!

> I don't believe in post-truth, but "Facts are facts; truth is truth" is a philosophical statement, not a practical one.

Bingo. :)

Having said that, the comparative fairness argument supports a status quo that rewards bombastic discourse, at the expense of truthfulness. We now know it is socially pernicious.