
Why Does Truth Matter, Anyway?

When the truth gets hazy, tyrants get to define what’s true. The irony here is sharp. Artificial intelligence, perhaps humanity’s greatest monument to logical thinking, may trigger a revolution in perception that overthrows the shared values of reason and rationality we inherited from the Enlightenment.
Nicholas Carr • Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart
Libby Marrs • I Would Very Much Like To Be Excluded From This Lore
Different cultures have different ways of understanding truth, each with its own biases. The Athenians had a great respect for first principles and the structure of rhetoric as a way of organizing evidence to arrive at truth. Our own culture tends to focus on extensively on numbers and data rather than feeling, experience, or rhetoric. (following N
... See moreTherefore the crucial distinction for me is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot.
Stephanie Stokes Oliver • Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing
The uses may vary, but the principle is always the same: You want the truth so you can use it to produce a consequence you want. Truth is information that leads to predictable results.
Harry Browne • How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World
History is a narrative enterprise, and the telling of stories that are true, that affirm and explain our existence, is the fundamental task of the historian. But truth is delicate, and it has many enemies. Perhaps that is why, although we academics are supposedly in the business of pursuing the truth, the word “truth” is rarely uttered without hedg
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