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Comment by bheadmaster | Hacker News Reader

Pollution is well-defined and easy to detect.

"Information" and "misinformation" is not. The problem of "truth" is a philosophical one - how do you know that a particular claim is, indeed, true? Very few things in the world are directly provable. Even judges and juries get it wrong a lot, even when human lives - apparently the most valued things in society - are at stake.

Your model has a fatal flaw in its assumption that "the truth" is something obvious that we all agree upon. It's not - it's subjective and complicated.

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> Pollution is well-defined and easy to detect.

No, this is absolutely, deeply, profoundly false.

The entire history of the ecological movement is about conservationists working incredibly hard to create the notion of "pollution" as a concept, persuade people to believe it, build technology to detect it, generate data based on that, prove that it actually causes harm, and get people to care.

Really, please do learn more about the history of ecology and conservation and you will realize that the truth is anything but what you just said.

> The entire history of the ecological movement is about conservationists working incredibly hard to create the notion of "pollution" as a concept, persuade people to believe it, build technology to detect it, generate data based on that, prove that it actually causes harm, and get people to care.

This seems more like a problem of convincing people of truth than problem of the contept of pollution. We have built technology to detect it - we have no such technology to detect truth. So pollution is measurable, truth is not.

> Really, please do learn more about the history of ecology and conservation and you will realize that the truth is anything but what you just said.

No, I don't think me having an epiphany of "Gasp! That person on the internet was RIGHT, I was completely WRONG! Pollution is a harder problem than truth!" is going to happen, no matter how much history of ecology I learn. It's a cute sentiment, though.

Pollution is well defined and easy to detect precisely because we have centuries of experience studying the effects of pollution on the environment. And even then we learn new things and have to revise opinions on what we define as "pollution" and what not. See the history of Asbestos, or of CFCs for examples of things we didn't think of as "polluting" initially or assumed the tradeoffs were worth it, only to later realize that they aren't.

We've been trying to find ways to discover truth for much much longer than we've been looking for pollution. I think consensus is that there are some things that are unprovable - e.g., the existence of a god. We know with a high degree of certainty, thanks to Kurt Godel and others, that there are things that cannot be proven.

> Pollution is well defined and easy to detect precisely because we have centuries of experience studying the effects of pollution on the environment

We also have centuries (even millennia) of experience studying the truth. Yet the problem of truth is still as hard as always. I don't see how could any amount of experience solve such fundamental problems.

I don't think the issue at hand is truths and lies, it's the ability to both communicate with hundreds of millions of people easily while at the same time also being able to create smaller silos of group think with no restriction on geography.

The initial comment's argument is comparing "misinformation" with "pollution", since misinformation can now be massively broadcast to many people through the internet, causing ill effects.

The problem is differentiating between "information" and "misinformation" - which is exactly the issue of truth and lies, isn't it?

Otherwise, if you ignore the truthfulness of information, and judge only by the effects, you're walking a slippery slope towards censoring truth because "it's harmful".

Those examples indicate that even pollution isn't so well-defined.

What about nutrient pollution? It requires a bit of philosophical nuance to conclude that nitrogen runoff, say, is a pollutant.

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