So recently I discovered that my blog post from back in 2012 making fun of Doctor Who has been picking up steam in the Whovian crowd.
Amusingly I wrote an earlier post making fun of Harry Potter and nobody seemed to notice.
But one blogger in particular felt the need to yell at me and condemn me for not citing sources or having evidence to back up my claims.
I have a simple response to that:
This is the internet, I don't have to.
More specifically, this is a opinion blog. I'm writing for free, whenever I feel like it. I have no editors to respond to, no deadlines, and no need to cite sources.
The only source I have most of the time is my own opinion.
The reader can choose to believe me, or they can believe that I'm completely full of shit. Both are entirely possible. Hell, I will freely admit that sometimes the things I post are complete bullshit.
In the earlier version of this blog, back when it was just a spare Livejournal account, I posted a bunch of guides to dating back before I had any real experience in the dating world. Well, I had some, but not enough to stand as any sort of authority on the subject. I later revisted one of those posts and took apart my own writing to see what had changed in my perspective.
But here is the real point:
Things you read on the internet are not facts. They are opinions.
It's all a matter of whose opinions you trust.
People often cite wikipedia as the infallible source of all knowledge. And in truth, it is largely accurate. But not 100% of the time.
As a birthday gift one of my former roommates edited wikipedia so that my other roommate's boyfriend was listed as the lead singer of the band White Lion.
We all had a good laugh, but the page stayed that way for over a month before somebody fixed it.
So, not always accurate.
Furthermore, you need to always question when someone lists something as "Fact". That's one major difference between the older generations and the younger ones. The older generations are convinced that they truly know many details about the world. Hell, if you asked them how many planets there are in the solar system they would automatically respond with "Nine".
Depending on how much they keep up with the world around them they might remember and change their answer, but they were trained from birth to believe that there are exactly nine planets in the solar system. This is a fact.
The younger generations are more cautious when using the word "fact". We know that facts aren't always facts. They are beliefs, theories, assumptions, but unless you have personally witnessed it yourself, it is not a fact.
I know that I am wearing black shoes today. That is a fact for me. But for you, it is an assumption. You are assuming that I am telling the truth. I could be lying, my shoes could be brown, I might have decided to go barefoot all day. You don't know because you didn't witness it yourself.
So don't use the word fact unless you witnessed something for yourself. Everything else is just your belief that the source that is providing the information to you is doing so correctly.
History is a great example of this. If you look at the history of many major events, the story is very different depending on which side you are on. The American Civil war is a great example of this. In K-12 school they tell you that it was a war over slavery. In college they explain that it was a war over economics (like most wars.). But if you look at the documentation at the time they were painting two more different pictures. The south claimed to be fighting for the sovereign rights of the individual states, while the north claimed to be fighting to protect the country as a whole. Four different versions of the same event.
Which one was right?
Who knows? We weren't there. All we have are assumptions based on what documentation we can find from the period.
Big lesson:
Don't get butt-hurt over someone's opinion on the internet. It's an opinion, not a fact. Facts directly affect you, opinions directly affect them.
I could say that it's my opinion that the sky is actually purple. That wouldn't change the fact that it looks blue to you.
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You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means. Whether or not something is written on the internet doesn't decide whether or not it is a fact or an opinion. Why would writing a fact online suddenly make it not a fact? Does writing a fact in a book or speaking it out loud make it an opinion, too?
ReplyDeleteYou define facts as things that "directly affect you". That's not how most people use the word. Facts are not relative. Example:
My phone is on my desk. That is a fact. Or, maybe I'm lying and the fact is that my phone is not on my desk. One of those statements is true, and just because I lie or you don't believe me doesn't make the reality of where my phone is subject to opinion.
The, ahem, fact that people are often incorrect in knowing what is or is not fact, or that some things are very complicated and hard to discover all the facts about, does not mean that the concept of a fact does not exist. If that were the case, then I could say that my head is currently being eaten by a giant blue rabbit and if you said that, no, in fact, that's not happening, and I'm either lying or hallucinating and should probably go to a hospital, then that would just be, like, your opinion, man.
Or would that just be on the internet?
I often use broad terms in my posts, but allow me to clarify.
DeleteThis post was discussing the subjective nature of facts. Which is true in real life, on the internet, and even in books.
When someone tells you in person that they ran into your mother at a store yesterday this is not necessarily a fact.
Well, lets just make this easier to understand.
Absolute facts are theoretically impossible. I may assume that because my eyes see the sky as blue that the sky is therefore blue. I cannot prove that the sky is blue beyond my own senses. If my eyes could process infra-red or ultraviolet light then the sky might appear to be an entirely different color. So my view of the sky is not an absolute fact, it is a personal fact.
Assumed facts are what we learn from first hand sources. We did not see the event ourselves, but we trust the source that did. These are a larger degree of assumptions than personal facts because personal facts are only limited by what we are capable of perceiving whereas assumed facts rely on the perceptions of others.
It's often covered in philosophy but all facts really are relative. Empirical data is a misnomer. There is no absolute truth in the universe, merely what we can perceive as an individual. A good example is what if all that we perceive is merely a dream? Each of us is a solitary dreamer and everyone else in the dream is a figment. That would make everything we perceive to be factually invalid.
Of course, none of this is how people often use the word "fact". But common usage does not mean appropriate usage.
I agree that much of what we regard as fact is based on assumption and is colored by our subjective experience. I believe that this often makes it difficult, and maybe in some cases impossible, to come to agreements on what is or is not a fact. That being said, even if we as humans are not able to determine what the facts are, I do not believe that makes them subjective.
DeleteYou bring up the color of the sky again, and that's an interesting example. The way we discuss and label colors, after all, is very subjective. There are not names for all of the colors you and I are familiar with in all languages, for example. There are oddities, like the color pink, that we regard as a separate color, even though it's a shade of red. And then people can register the colors differently with their eyes/brain, in what we refer to as color-blindness (similar to what you mentioned with infra-red). That being said, something is happening that is causing your eyes to accept input from your surroundings and process that input with your brain. We regard that as a fact. Using that fact (and many others that people who have been studying the human eye for centuries have discovered), we have been able to do things like invent glasses, that alter the input before it reaches our eyes so that the brain processes it differently. We are able to determine the differences in how colorblind people see colors and then add colorblind modes to software so they can more easy use it. If we say that all facts are subjective, then so is the fact that our eyes accept input from our surroundings, and we can't rely on glasses or colorblind modes to alter that input because that input may or may not be there, relative to our beliefs.
We might not ever be able to prove a fact 100%, but we can find enough evidence that we can use information as if it were fact, and continue to study things to get closer and closer to the truth. That is, of course, only if we assume that there IS a truth to be searching for. If there is no truth, no facts, to discover, then that pretty much gets rid of the entire foundation of all science.
Of course, I suppose none of that matters if we're living in a dream world, but I honestly find that line of inquiry pointless for that very reason. Even if that's all this is, since this is the only world I'm able to perceive, I might as well discover the best way to get by in it, until I find myself elsewhere (or nowhere, I suppose).
In your original post, you say that, "unless you have personally witnessed it yourself, it is not a fact." Language actually IS defined by common usage. There may be similar words used in different ways depending on context (eg. the scientific use of "theory", as opposed to the colloquial use), but in each case there is a common group of people who agree that the word means a particular thing, otherwise communication would break down. I'm sure that there are many ways the word "fact" is used, both by the general public and in various philosophies, but I am unfamiliar with the usage of "fact" to mean "something you have personally witnessed" or "something that directly affects you". If the world is entirely subjective, though, I'm not sure it would even be necessary to have such a word, belief and opinion seem like they would be enough.
I think the problem we have here is the difference between assumed fact and absolute fact.
DeleteA absolute fact is something that is 100% correct, no room for error, no questions, nothing. Most people assume that there is a large number of absolute facts in the world. They assume that gravity is absolute, relativity, etc. All things we have studied heavily and are pretty damn sure we're right about. But we're not 100% sure. There is always room for error, there is always more information yet to be discovered. But the problem is that most people see the world as a realm of absolute facts. It's certainly much easier to process reality when you are sure about certain details. But all it really amounts to is people lying to themselves to make themselves more comfortable. It's the same reason that people generally don't like to think about the concept of infinity. The idea of time continuing in both directions forever is too big to fully understand. So people cling to the idea that time does have a limit. It has a beginning and an end.
The only thing you could ever state with 100% certainty is the phrase "I am." It is a statement of the existence of the self to the self. You know you exist because here you are existing. What that existence is defined by is up for debate, but you can say to yourself with absolute certainty that you exist.