CDC data are disappearing

Data is the ultimate Fact Check. This is a President that's adamantly opposed to fact checking [1] and has even coerced Facebook to drop fact checking. Of course they don't want data on government sites that disprove their "alternate facts".

[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4920827-60-minutes-tru...

Well, fact-checking works if it's done impartially. So, if you want to fairly fact-check a political debate, each side should have their own team of researchers/fact-checkers being equally able to object to an argument made by the opposing party. Due process, sort of, kind of.

But I don't think I've ever seen that done actually. Usually, fact checkers are akin to Reddit moderators. Technically independent, but with one important twist. These are people that have a lot of free time and are willing to spend it doing unpaid (or underpaid) work. And that's a huge bias. Big enough to question impartiality, if you ask me.

Having two parties with opposing biases and incentives doesn’t magically cancel out and become impartial. That’s the opposite of impartiality.

Although true, it isn't a very useful observation. "How do I find someone impartial to this matter?" is one of the great unsolved questions that the lawyers have to deal with. Up there with "what is true?".

If anything that is one of the big promises of AI systems. Maybe we can have adjudication that is both extremely intelligent and provably biased towards consistency, facts and evidence. SHA256sum-ed and torrented around for inspection. It'd be a game changer for fact checking instead of the highly falliable groups that we have right now.

> Although true, it isn't a very useful observation. "How do I find someone impartial to this matter?" is one of the great unsolved questions that the lawyers have to deal with. Up there with "what is true?".

Although true, this isn't a particularly useful observation either. It turns out we can define "true" very well for a lot of really useful stuff. We know the sky is blue. We know the sun rises. We know that two plus two equals four. And we know that anthropogenic climate change is a real thing that exists and is likely to have a large impact on our world.

There are some things that we're less confident about, such as different projections for exactly how large an impact we're likely to experience, what the most efficient way to limit that impact is, who bears the responsibility for implementing those changes, and so on. Reasonable people can quibble over some of those details, and there are multiple valid ways of interpreting those facts. But we can very definitely - and completely objectively - fact check statements like "anthropogenic climate change does not exist" and "fossil fuels do not have an impact on our climate and environment".

A lot of those are technically not true - the sky is frequently not blue, the sun doesn't actually rise and there are number systems where 2+2 does not equal 4 (eg, 2+2 = 1 in a mod 3 arithmetic).

That sounds pedantic until people start disagreeing or implementing legal requirements that result in people needing to use the definitions. Eg, if there is a legal requirement to recognise that 2+2=4, is it ok to teach modular arithmetic? Especially if someone has a grudge against the teacher. Lawyers are more than happy to punish someone over a technicality.

We are fucking doomed.

We cannot even agree on the basics any more.