Comment on I always believe what the people around me believe. Is that truth or what?
Chais@sh.itjust.works 7 months agoAs I said, it depends on how you define truth. If it’s enough that people agree with you, your distance from the generally accepted truth can vary widely, depending on the donor of people you base it on. The fact that people agree with you didn’t make something true on its own.
Effectively the question is: How reproducible do you want your truth to be?
If you only need your buddy to come to a similar truth you may not need to argue that much. But to convince a perfect stranger you will probably have to make your case properly. How did you arrive at your truth? Which conformable facts do you base it on? Which predictions does your claimed truth make, that might validate it?
dope@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Ok. Here’s a nice definition for truth.
When the model in your head mirrors the observation. That’s truth.
Given that, there’s 2 ways to truth. Control the model or control the observation.
Chais@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
That conclusion is unsupported. Only the facts are truth.
When your mental model matches your observations and makes accurate predictions about expected values for observations that indicates that your model is at least close to the truth.
However if you control the observations, you have to be careful not to introduce a bias. For example you might be tempted not to make certain observations that would falsify your model. Or you might be tempted to not make observations that would require you to expand your model. But in both cases you admit your model doesn’t match reality and what good is it at that point?
dope@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Only the facts are the truth. Got it.
Chais@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Not quite. The truth is what the facts are based on.
Take the speed of light in vacuum, for example. We don’t know its true value. We have measured it repeatedly, to high precision, using various different methods. Those measurements are or facts. Based on those facts we estimate the speed of light in vacuum to be 299,792,458 m/s. We are quite confident that this value is at least very close to the truth, sure to how many measurements we made and how close they’re bunched together.
But if in the future more precise measurements suggest that it’s in fact closer to 299,792,458.135 m/s then we’ll learn that we’ve been less correct before.