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| ▲ | armchairhacker a day ago | parent | next [-] | | To clarify, there are formal truths: widely-accepted hard science, e.g. “2 + 2 = 4”. Technically, there’s a point where we can’t fundamentally prove anything (“if a tree falls and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?”), and rarely we get things wrong (e.g. classical physics)….but in practice, these are true, end of discussion. Then there are informal truths: e.g. “the Earth is round”, “the sky is blue”, “Gala apples are red”. You can nitpick them (the Earth isn’t a perfect sphere, the sky is only blue during the day in areas without high pollution, Gala apples may be pinkish or have yellow blotches, or exceptional discoloration), endlessly or until they become formal (possibly by becoming self-referential). But in practice, these are also true (like formal truths; although it’s important to know the difference because…) The problem is, there’s no line between an informal truth and uncertainty/opinion that isn’t true. Like you know ##FF0000 is red and ##00FF00 is not, but there’s no exact color that separates “red” and “not red” (it depends on person, mood, surroundings…) Consequently, unlike formal truths, informal truths have false implications (“fuzzy logic”). An informal truth can be phrased in a “misleading way”, priming the reader for a false implication (a formal truth can be phrased in a convoluted or unintuitive way, but interpreted formally, never leads to a false implication). The vast majority of discussion is not formal. Even the smartest people constantly fall for false implications. And this isn’t completely solvable, because we fundamentally can’t formally define everything (too much detail): we tried with GOFAI, it failed and its successor, neural networks, informally defines things like us (by forming a lossy model of the world, then generalizing it). | | |
| ▲ | ahepp a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > rarely we get things wrong (e.g. classical physics) Curious, do you think quantum physics is the end of the line? I wouldn't claim to have a good understanding of anything beyond classical physics, but I've just assumed it's turtles all the way down and at some point we'll find serious issues with the quantum model | | | |
| ▲ | ksec a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >widely-accepted hard science, e.g. “2 + 2 = 4”. Except we live in a world where people do argue 2+2 could also be 22 ( Because they use Javascript /s ) Which is basically people believe what they want to believe in. Rationale rarely works. | |
| ▲ | d4ng a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | 2+2=4 is only a formal truth up to the axioms of arithmetic and how we denote numbers. The statement is not statement with regards to objective reality. | | |
| ▲ | tremon 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The statement is a formal truth exactly because it only exists inside the symbolic universe constructed by humans, not despite. | | | |
| ▲ | fooqux a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | You're being pendantic. Choose whatever symbol you want for "2" and "4". The point is that if you have symbol apples and someone gives you symbol more, than you have an agreed-upon number in total. | | |
| ▲ | AlotOfReading 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's not being pedantic. With different assumptions you can make a system where 2 + 2 = 0 and it turns out to be extremely useful. You can also build a system where 2 + 2 = 22 like the other commenter lampoons and the free monoid that corresponds to is again useful. If we had a radically different perspective (like Borges' Funes the memorious), you can imagine how adding wholly distinct objects might seem ridiculous and derive some other wacky system of arithmetic instead. Of course, you could alternatively derive it from set theory, but you might also end up with something fundamentally different than what the grandparent intended like presburger or skolem arithmetic. | | |
| ▲ | armchairhacker 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | But “2+2=4”, in the specific formal system that is common arithmetic, is true. Furthermore, you can translate “2+2=4” to any other formal system (your examples, “2+2=10 (base 4)”, “2+2=1 (mod 3)”, etc.), and it’s still true. “2+2=4” is a universal truth, just expressible in different ways. |
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| ▲ | d4ng 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Agreed-upon, as in subjective. | | |
| ▲ | armchairhacker 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | The objectivity is in the relations. If you define a system where “2 + 2 = 5”, but also “a square has 5 corners”, “carbon has 5 covalent bonding positions”, etc. your system is coherent, but you actually are stating the abstract property “2 + 2 = 4” in common math, just using the symbol “5” to represent what’s commonly represented as “4”. A bit confusing, a less confusing example is common math, substituting “2” with “B” and “4” with “D”, so “B + B = D, a square has D corners, …” If you define a system where “2 + 2 = 5, a line segment has 2 ends, a square has 4 corners, 4 < 5”, you’re objectively wrong (unless you’re taking common math and substituting more than digits)…if you extend this system you’ll find contradictions (what happens if you combine 2 parallel line segments of the same length at that length distance?), especially if you try to apply it to the real world. | | |
| ▲ | d4ng 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | You are not objectively wrong. You have simply defined an incoherent abstract system in language. The claim you have made simply does not compute in the system in question. Regardless, that claim is not a claim about the objective world, however that may be defined. |
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| ▲ | pmarreck a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think the biggest problem is not that there may be many truths, but that people don't even bother seeking out the best evidence or reasoning against their truths. Especially in tech, for which there are basically only tradeoffs. I use Zig in most things lately, and I use AI. I have a high quality standard (that AI honestly sometimes makes difficult to meet), but my github has never been more active: https://github.com/pmarreck/ I have a really good code-review skill (which I'm actually in the middle of updating, but it's here): https://github.com/pmarreck/llm_skills/blob/yolo/deep-code-r... I also have a pretty neat (although arguably janky) way for LLM agents in different tmux terminals to talk to each other: https://github.com/pmarreck/llmsend | |
| ▲ | jasonjayr a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The problem arises when there are contradictory truths, and defenders of one or both sides refuse to dig deeper to both self-reflect on what they believe to be true, and perhaps come to a deeper more correct understanding. | |
| ▲ | hallole a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | There is only a single source of truth and that is objective reality. Maybe you agree with that, but your wording is messy. It's true that different perspectives can yield their own particular bits of truth, if that's what you're saying. | | |
| ▲ | coldtea a day ago | parent | next [-] | | "Objective reality" is only the source for the least interesting truth. The truths that really get people fighting over concern best courses of action, moral matters, aesthetic issues, and things like that, where there isn't some singular objective truth (and even if there was, nobody has access to it). | | |
| ▲ | Retric a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > thinks like that These aren’t truths. It’s cases like “is the earth flat?” that have an answer in objective reality and people still argue about it where some people are simply wrong. | | |
| ▲ | coldtea a day ago | parent [-] | | What's addressed as truth is not some holy artifact handed out for us by God, or what some theory of Logic defines as such. It's what people consider and call a truth. Language terms are defined by use. And people absolutely argue, fight, unite, or even go to war, for the version of those that they'll consider and call the truth of such matters. | | |
| ▲ | Retric a day ago | parent [-] | | The English language has multiple independent definitions of the same word. You’re misusing that ambiguity here. “sincerity in action, character, and utterance” is different than “the body of real things, events, and facts” This distinction very much exists in how people talk about such things. You don’t need to “have faith” that something like gravity exists such that when you trip you can fall down. “We hold these truths to be self evident” isn’t how you talk about the distance between NYC and Boston. | | |
| ▲ | coldtea a day ago | parent [-] | | >“sincerity in action, character, and utterance” is different than “the body of real things, events, and facts” So? I didn't refer to truth in the former sense. I said there are several kinds of meanings of the term "truth", and that the one that's about mere facts about things that can be measured objectively (the stricter version of your second definition) is the least interesting one. The truths of the "We hold these truths to be self evident” variety, the truths of "this proposal is really bad", "this behavior is wrong", "this person is guilty", and many others even more nuanced varieties, are the ones that matter, and for those objective reality is nowhere near the "single source of truth", if it even applies at all. | | |
| ▲ | Retric a day ago | parent [-] | | > So By acknowledging that nobody considers these objective truths, there’s nothing interesting to say on the topic. You were playing around with the linguistic ambiguity for whatever reason using a different definition than was used by “There is only a single source of truth and that is objective reality.” and I called you out on it. Thus the subject dies. | | |
| ▲ | coldtea 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | >By acknowledging that nobody considers these objective truths, there’s nothing interesting to say on the topic On the contrary, that's where most interesting things to say happen in the real social world. From relationships all the way to wars. >You were playing around with the linguistic ambiguity for whatever reason using a different definition than was used by “There is only a single source of truth and that is objective reality.” and I called you out on it. Nope, you were limited by the one definition you had in mind, unable to understand that real world, real people, don't constraint themselves to it, and argue regarding the truth or falsehood in all kinds of things that are not bound to "objective reality". In other words, you pedantically erased most of human life and discource on the truth (not to mention the incovenient other philosophical and dictionary definitions of it) with "well, ahchtually". | | |
| ▲ | Retric 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | > you were limited by the one definition you had in mind Intentionally misunderstanding what someone said is at best wordplay, and wordplay is fucking boring. Stop being boring. |
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| ▲ | hallole a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | You say that, but some people really do give you a hard time if you try to assert that there is one, definite, objective reality. |
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| ▲ | rrgok a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Uh, what is objective reality? | | |
| ▲ | Peacefulz a day ago | parent | next [-] | | What is objectivity? “There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be.”
— Nietzsche:On the Genealogy of Morals III It's a target. Objectivity does not appear in nature in a stable form. Nothing is fixed and certain. Some things just appear that way from our point of view. | |
| ▲ | PaulDavisThe1st a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." My own addendum: the atoms are stories, too. | |
| ▲ | bit-anarchist a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Aspects of reality that are shared by all possible subjects. | |
| ▲ | hallole a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | What is. |
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