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Comment by poszlem | Hacker News Reader

We are living in the post-truth, post-modernist era, and I am very happy that more and more people are realising where it is taking us.

I feel genuine relief reading again things like:

<<<We cannot have differing rules based on the speaker’s skin color, gender, or political affiliation. No one has a higher claim to the truth because of their group identity. “Who you are does not count;” Rauch says, “the rules apply to everybody and persons are interchangeable.”>>>

Something that over the last few years has been heavily contested and went from being one of the most obvious values to one that triggers the most vitriol.

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"We are living in the post-truth"

This implies there was a truth era. When was that?

It's just a dumb name to represent an idea.

"an era of increased skepticism towards the idea of objective truth" is the idea.

The "truth era" wasn't the era when everything was true, but when we actually believed that there is such a thing as "the truth". I would argue that up until the time when "Applied Postmodernism" took hold in some of our most important institution we could say that we lived in the "truth" era.

Postmodernism is the reckoning with the problem, not the problem itself. It recognizes epistemological difficulties and how different power interests or ideological preferences are often tied up with claims of "the truth."

The people who dislike it the most tend to be either those who've been effectively manipulated by power interests, or those who find reckoning with the difficulty of finding the truth inconvenient.

> It recognizes epistemological difficulties and how different power interests or ideological preferences are often tied up with claims of "the truth."

Down the nihilistic rabbit hole we go!

That's this layman's understanding of where postmodernism almost invariably ends up.

If you're equating the elaboration of difficulty with the declaration of impossibility, then the nihilism is inside you.

That’s exactly what a nihilistic postmodernist would say.

I mean, I guess your pithy comeback is a sentence someone could say if they were all in on posture and casual in their nihilistic contempt for semantics and substance.

We should start a podcast!

No one will be able to tell if we’re serious, trolling ourselves, trolling each other, or trolling the audience.

The essence of postmodernism is actually plausible deniability.

> The people who dislike it the most tend to be either those who've been effectively manipulated by power interests, or those who find reckoning with the difficulty of finding the truth inconvenient.

Excellent way to avoid engaging with an idea you might find disagreeable, a tip of a straw hat to you

> Postmodernism is the reckoning with the problem, not the problem itself. It recognizes epistemological difficulties and how different power interests or ideological preferences are often tied up with claims of "the truth."

Which is fine for "claims to truth", but it's not fine when people think this entails that there is no such thing as truth, or sometimes that all claims to truth are equally valid.

Maybe I was just young and naive back then, but when I was at uni 20 years ago the truth still seemed to hold some sway. In my subjective experience there’s been a massive change since then, but it’s hard to say how much of that is me changing and how much is actual change in the world.

The age of enlightenment was a time of new emphasis on, among a great many other things, obtaining knowledge through reason and structured logic. Even seeing "science" as a discreet concept (i.e. the scientific process) came to be in this time period.

Modernism was a shakeup and rejection of "realism"; post-modernism took it a step further by rejecting the notion of a universal truth entirely; the replacement idea is that what is true can only be discerned based on an individual's experience as we can only gain knowledge through imperfect means.

Maybe from the Enlightenment to the early 20th century. Back then, science was still understood as the pursuit of truth.

The big idea in 20th century science, philosophy of science, and mathematics was that the truth is fundamentally unreachable. We got quantum mechanics as the foundation of reality. We got the idea that experiments can only rule out explanations but not establish the truth. We got used to probabilistic estimates based on data. We got all those uncomfortable results about the incompleteness and undecidability of formal systems.

Science became a social construct. We got evidence instead of facts; we got explanations, predictions, and interpretations instead of the truth. Science became a system of best practices for building and updating consensus based on empirical evidence.

> The big idea in 20th century science, philosophy of science, and mathematics was that the truth is fundamentally unreachable. We got quantum mechanics as the foundation of reality. We got the idea that experiments can only rule out explanations but not establish the truth. We got used to probabilistic estimates based on data. We got all those uncomfortable results about the incompleteness and undecidability of formal systems.

I am not an experimental scientist or philosopher, but I am a mathematician, and I thoroughly reject the claim that the big idea of 20th-century mathematics is that the truth is fundamentally unreachable. To be sure, we found that one can speak meaningfully, and rigorously, of the limits of decidability; but only an algorithmic view of mathematics will lead one to conclude that this makes the truth unreachable. Perhaps one could advance the claim that certain truths are unreachable (I do not, and find the claim woolly), but that is quite different from saying that truth itself is unreachable.

I'm an experimental scientist. My take would be that truth is reachable, but the Truth with a capital T is a potentially meaningless throwback to a past age of certainty.

What I mean is that some theories have been corroborated to the point that they can be regarded as "truth" for all intents and purposes, and despite known limitations in some cases. Examples might include electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, gravitation, and biological evolution.

Regarding those theories, we can still say that we accept them on a tentative basis, but it would not be irrational to assign a vanishingly low likelihood that any of them will be radically overturned.

Radically overturned is an overstatement I think. The theories you've listed are all tautologically valid in the domains in which we've tested them. What will happen is that either they will continue to hold in new domains where they haven't yet been tested, or we will discover a more general theory that will reduce to these theories in the limit.

Indeed, to illustrate; Einstein and Planck doesn't mean that for most of our lived experience and work, classical mechanics offers a far more useful model of the world.

I was referring to the crisis in the early 20th century, when the paradoxes and inconsistencies in the foundations of mathematics became too troublesome to ignore. The crisis was eventually resolved, but the mathematics that arose from it was more limited in scope than what earlier mathematicians had hoped. That is usually not a major concern if you work in mathematics, but it was a significant change in the understanding of the nature of truth.

>Maybe from the Enlightenment to the early 20th century. Back then, science was still understood as the pursuit of truth.

But, that was a period of material scarcity. Only a relatively small wealthy upper class had access to that kind of education. That was a period of time still rife with superstition... literal witch-hunts.

P.S. - Bravo for volunteering a reply.

> Science became a social construct. We got evidence instead of facts; we got explanations, predictions, and interpretations instead of the truth. Science became a system of best practices for building and updating consensus based on empirical evidence.

What is the utility of empirical evidence to building consensus if it does not reflect some underlying truth?

I disagree with your characterization of science and math of the 20th century. To start, quantum mechanics does not entail lack of realism. The 20th century also saw two deterministic interpretations of QM emerge (many worlds and Bohmian mechanics).

The fact that experiments can only rule out explanations can be used to establish a process that provably converges on truth (Solomonoff Induction).

Incompleteness and undecidability are provably true propositions. Cold, hard truth.

In other words, there are counterparts to all of your points that supposedly undermine the concept of truth.

Truth is an anti-scientific concept. When you say something is the truth, you are saying no evidence can change your mind. Maybe there is some underlying truth, but it seems to be out of our reach. And it's irrelevant anyway. The utility does not come from some metaphysical ponderings but from models that can explain phenomena and make reliable predictions.

> Truth is an anti-scientific concept.

There is no epistemic value to empirical evidence if the empirical evidence were not proxy to some truth.

> When you say something is the truth, you are saying no evidence can change your mind

No, "truth" is the proposition that will agree with all conceivable robust evidence.

> Maybe there is some underlying truth, but it seems to be out of our reach.

I disagree, and I already mentioned Solomonoff Induction that I think disproves this.

> The utility does not come from some metaphysical ponderings but from models that can explain phenomena and make reliable predictions.

I disagree as well. Plenty of empirical evidence is useful without a model. For instance, taxonomy in biology was very useful before we knew of genes or even evolution.

The actual utility here is clearly truth, whether that be individual facts or whole theories.

No, it does not. A post-truth era may be one in which truth & falsity are not absolute & the only choices. Relativity brings about the realization that two people can witness the same event, obtain different measurements (usual example is in "empty" space where both start at the same velocity & distance to the event location, but one is in an accelerating reference frame relative to the other leading to different photon counts & "time" passage) & both be correct.

If you've got an experiment (either relativistic or quantum, or both) where two individuals can obtain different photon counts, I'd like to hear about it.

> If you've got an experiment (either relativistic or quantum, or both) where two individuals can obtain different photon counts, I'd like to hear about it.

The experiment could simply be measuring photon counts at a pre-agreed location after a pre-agreed duration, where the elapsed time is measured by a local clock. (Probably it is reasonable to argue that this is not a "reasonable" experiment, but it's beyond me to make rigorous the sense in which it should be excluded.)

There is stuff like the Unruh effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_effect

Description was trying to avoid the misnomer eponym ("Stigler's law").

This example doesn't mean what you think it means.

I think it would be erroneous to try to apply concepts of micro-level phenomena to macro-level societal events. The levels of abstraction between the two likely turns that low-level ambiguity into background noise.

For example, someone could never logically claim the photons they perceived indicted someone wasn't in front of their gun when they pulled the trigger, while everyone else in the vicinity states they clearly saw the person in front of the gun. There is not enough uncertainty around the behavior of photons for us to consider their explanation as truth.

Roughly prior to the mid-2010s, when people talked about “the truth” instead of “my truth”.

Different people have different lived experience. "My truth" is just a recognition of that.

Experience is a different thing to truth and it doesn’t help to conflate the two.

When truth was the goal, back to the ancient Greeks.

Postmodernists believe that it is more important to have the "right" political impact than to be correct.

If a "truth era" did exist, it was definitely before the current era of "math and acronyms are racist" and "men can get pregnant".

So well said

Post-truth is a result of the truth no longer really being knowable. You can't know if science was bought and paid for, you can't know whether Russia actually did this or that, you can't really know if X or Y is good for you, or you're just being sold something or someone is trying to control you, whether an image or video is a deep fake. That's the real post-truth. A reality where any one "fact" could be true depending on what you believe. In this reality, who you are does matter. If you're someone who actually believes in the virtues of truth and honesty then I'm more inclined to believe you, whether or not you're actually truthful. This is the real origin of post-truth. If one cannot really know the truth without experiencing it first hand, one must delegate their belief to someone who they feel has values aligned to their own.

I think one aspect that is a challenge to understand what people thought about that is that it was a big trigger online. But for my experience less IRL. I think the academic / intellectual-ish (well the folks who think of them as that way) types bought into it. I'm really not sure many other folks did.

I think part of the reason why this is so much more visible online is the fact that the whole online world is the world of words.

For example, the idea that you can "be violent" toward someone by not affirming them is a profoundly online idea, because everybody here is only as real as they can convince us they are. If I told you I am an 80 y/o woman from Iceland there is not much you can do to verify that. Thus we end up in a culture where you HAVE to believe me, otherwise you are "literally erasing" me from existence.

Sounds good, except that the critical theory, and other traditions that ascribe "violence" to written communication, had their first huge flare up with Situationalist International and those protests in france in the 60s. Well before the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_68

They did, and then they went away. For a long time it looked like postmodernism is dead. The reason we talk about it right now is because of the rise of the online culture, where suddenly a philosophy of fluidity and lack of physical boundaries can be finally applied.

Postmodernism wasn't a problem. "Applied Postmodernism" is (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeXfV0tAxtE).

Actually given you probably don’t know Icelandic and it’s a small country that might be really easy to verify.

The truth sucks. The truth is that you're going to die and probably nothing you did mattered at all and there's no god to judge you for any of it and you're not going onto an afterlife. I see why people want no part of that truth and I'll accept my downvotes as the messenger of that sad reality.

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