Saved by SpaceXponential
Wittgenstein’s Revenge
We need a new “epistemic currency,” common to everyone. Fortunately, one already exists, and it’s more fundamental than facts: Trust.
Mike Elias • Epistemic Reserve Notes
Part of the problem stems from the fact that facts, even a lot of facts, do not constitute reality. Reality is what forms after we filter, arrange, and prioritize those facts and marinate them in our values and traditions. Reality is personal.
Brooke Gladstone • The Trouble With Reality
When facts are few, persuading the ignorant is relatively easy. But information abundance, already characteristic of early modern societies, engenders a degree of skepticism: The more there is to know, the more likely we feel that truth is elusive. Information super-abundance, or the condition of “digital plenitude,” as media scholar Jay David Bolt... See more
L. M. Sacasas • The Analog City and the Digital City
All facts are relative, as modern quantum mechanics beautifully demonstrates, and this puts the entire conceptual framework of language and intellect on the chopping block.
Richard Rudd • The Gene Keys: Embracing Your Higher Purpose
Truth, the provider of meaning and orientation, is also a narrative. We are very well informed, yet somehow we cannot orient ourselves. The informatization of reality leads to its atomization — separated spheres of what is thought to be true.
But truth, unlike information, has a centripetal force that holds society together. Information, on the oth... See more
But truth, unlike information, has a centripetal force that holds society together. Information, on the oth... See more
Noema • All That Is Solid Melts Into Information
However, this is the problem: for a vast, complex political universe, there will be a vast space of possible but distinct interpretations sensitive to genuine facts and regularities. In most cases, it won’t be a simple matter of thinking all but one system of concepts and explanatory frameworks are wrong. There’s a deep sense in which they’re all w... See more
Dan Williams • The deep and unavoidable roots of political bias
For the first time there are facts and (in Kellyanne Conway’s notorious phrase) ‘alternative facts’. As facts become fluid they become contestable; the truth becomes (once again) something you assert, not something you prove. It used to be a peculiar characteristic of totalitarian regimes that they made the facts fit their purposes; now it seems th... See more