Is objective truth dead
I had a conversation with my gf about increased police presense around NYC over the past few months. She says it's "disgusting" and I respond that it makes sense consider the mass looting towards the end of the summer. She says no it's an attempt to arrest more black and brown folks. Another time, I'm with some folks and a massive brawl erupts in the street. I'm talking ~50 people fighting. About 5 cop cars roll up and everyone says how disgusting it is to have cops using excess force to break up a fight. I respond, "It makes sense to hgave 10 cops there instead of 2 who think they might get surrounded and would be more likely to reach for a gun." I get called a cop lover.
With the election, I'm talking to family and get told it's amazing how the election was stolen from DJT. They start talking about how 100's of thousands of votes just pop up out of nowhere in PA and DJT was leading then it flipped. I say the same thing happened in FL and TX on election night - it's all about when the existing votes are counted. I get called a shill of the mainstream media and told that real news is found on youtube.
Overall, wtf is happening to this country? The left seems set on pushing a hyper progressive agenda around police reforms based on largely anecdotal data. The right seems to have their own issues with believing DJT's stream of lies as truth.
Anyone else agree with this and have a feeling that objective truth is dead?
If people want to live in their own alternate reality bubble, more power to them, but that doesn't change what truth is.
Denying reality is just kind of sad. So is believing baseless conspiracy theories.
That's not really what the first part of your post is, though, which reads a lot more like a legitimate disagreement on the role of police in society, which is a legitimate issue to disagree on.
The problem is that people these days could live in two different realities, or "truths". It's easy to accuse the other side of "misinformation".
I believe you are confusing bias/interpretation with flat-out falsehoods.
There is plenty of bias today in how events are interpreted - me included. Take the current election, for instance. Was it a mandate? Was it close? Did Joe Biden overperform? Did Donald Trump overperform? Was it was huge day for Democrats? Was it a better than expected day for Republicans? A person's bias will inform their interpretation of the results.
What isn't up to interpretation, however, is the result. Joe Biden won. Anything to the contrary of that reality isn't "an alternative truth" or "misinformation" - it is a blatant falsehood.
You can argue about the proper height of grass. Maybe one group of people prefers grass 1.5" high while another group prefers it 3" high. The two groups can argue about the proper or preferred height of grass, and cite evidence to support their opinions, but if someone comes along and points at 3" grass and calls it 5" when it isn't, or flat out says that the grass is not, in fact, grass, they do not have a different "truth." They are simply wrong.
I don't agree about it being an objective conversation. There's a difference between saying the "police are intentially trying to arrest people of color" and saying police actions end up arresting more POC's. OR arguing why police don't use teargas for white protestors complaining about lockdowns, but do use them for BLM protests (hint: only one of those groups actively burned down stores). I'm a black man, so recognize some of the underlying concerns, but don't think that folks are taking nuanced/thoughtful stances on what they're seeing.
I didn't say his girlfriend made a very good argument, at least as it was presented above. (And everyone here knows my views - I would tend to side more with her interpretation of the events)
I said that OP and his girlfriend have a legitimate disagreement on an interpretation of a situation. The facts are the same - increased police presence exists - but the rationale and legitimacy changes. OP's argument with his girlfriend doesn't have to be a particularly well balanced or well argued argument for it to be a legitimate disagreement. The point is that in that cited example, no one is living in an alternate universe.
Yup totally agree. This is why normal people shouldn't have anything to do with politics tbh. Social media was a mistake.
It seems like it’s dying. As another commenter pointed out, it seems like social media is at least partially responsible.
Reality check: objective truth has always been dead, and all sides and all people, including you and me, are guilty of gas lighting, denying, inventing, etc. Everyone filters reality through their own biases.
“History is written by the victor”. There’s a million quotes going back thousands of years on this very topic.
Good point. Still feels shocking that we have access to more information then ever before and I think we're collectively less informed on the truth vs. 30-40 years ago.
"Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones. The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself. And what Phaedrus saw in the isolation of his own laboratory work years ago is now seen everywhere in the technological world today. Scientifically produced antiscience - chaos.”
-Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Facts x 100.
It's also funny that for most of human existence, having access to the objective truth was almost always reserved for the privileged few.
Aka the ones controlling the message (well most of the times)
Yes, it's a result of most of the population being too dumb to think critically. Just try not to engage and ignore them/don't waste your time with them. Bad use of your energy.
Social media has given a voice to complete idiots that didn't have one prior, both sides. The left is just 'better' at social media.
They were until DJT aka the President of Tweet Landia
Did you see all of the social media posts during the summer protests? Leftist Accounts were popping up saying "Myth they teach you in school: Police are here to protect you". "Real life Fact: Police were only invented to patrol slaves." Like Christ, are we going to ignore the fact that police have existed since the beginning of human society? Even on a more basic level, you're annoyed that school teaches you a "biased" version of history, then you go about spewing a similarly biased version of history. Same thing with the absurdity of the 1619 project.
You can’t pick your family but you can pick whoever else you surround yourself with so maybe you should source better company? There are plenty of objective people around, especially in NYC
by the way, I’ve been called a “bootlicking pig lover” or a privileged elitist many times for expressing my opinion on the police and try my best to steer clear of that noise. I suggest you do the same
It's called brainwashing by tv, internet, family, etc and lack of critical thinking
Interesting. Objectivity and truth are very different things. Not sure what objective truth is. There is fact (2+2=4) and there are informed opinions or just opinions. I'm not really sure what truth is as our versions will differ. Look at the Palestinian situation. Do they live in a ghetto because they are oppressed by Israel or does Israel confine them because they lob bombs at them and swear to wipe them off the face of the globe (just an example - please no sidebar on the topic) .It's like situational ethics. That always makes me laugh because the whole point of ethics is to be true to them regardless of situation.
There are very few very objective people out there. Most have an agenda and will form a case using evidence to support their claim.
It takes 5 seconds to dismantle the BLM narrative. 95% of deaths by police are males. So it's either: the police is biased against males or the narrative is bullshit.
Clearly it's the second. Anyone who isn't convinced after this, doesn't deserve to be talked to. Dump your gf, she's emotionally unable to handle facts that she doesn't like. Long term gain.
Going all-in on the incel approach
Obliterated. Thank you for playing, always a pleasure to humiliate you.
Nothing predicts Biden-voting like incelmania. People who are in a satisfactory marriage vote conservative. No surprise your side has been working to destroy marriage for decades. Make people unhappy and lonely-> tell them it's the fault of ''the system'' -> promise them handouts. Utterly despicable agenda.
Not everyone wants to deal with a gf who thinks in that manner. Clearly the OP so far has, and I respect his decision, but know that not everyone is the OP.
I think that colleges also need to start having students take statistics, math, philosophy, maybe even finance classes even if they are gender studies majors. I think it is difficult to gain critical thinking skills without being trained, I think it is a learned way of thinking.
We are raising generations of kids who are leaving school with no objective training in any field other than highly subjective fields that are sometimes even taught by the person (professor) who is the leading "expert" on the topic. A lot of these professors are highly opinionated and I don't think that these kids get the chance to see what a stats class is like where there is a right and a wrong answer.
Are finance classes really that objective? When building a DCF for a company, is there an absolute way to look at things?
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The problem is that they teach them in a politicized, extremely dishonest way. I lost count of the times I had to point out that you can't use an outlier to represent the norm, as they are conceptually the opposite, just like in non-normal distributions you need to consider scaling, otherwise you are missing the point.
I'd even argue we may need to focus on developing critical thinking skills earlier, like high school or even middle school. Educational standards, at least in the public system, are in my opinion too minimal and not enough to equip young people to be prepared for college. There's too much award for very basic things like showing up to class, turning in homework; not enough actual push to make curriculums somewhat challenging.
Following high school, transitioning to college can be a very overwhelming experience. It's the first time at 18 that many are figuring out how to be responsible for and taking care of one's self. This is a big change and pairing it with the more challenging grading environment of college reveals the unpreparedness of many. I do think people have strengths in different areas and this doesn't mean they're unprepared, but i think there are enough areas for someone to be strong enough in to succeed rather than pick the "easy way out" through a major or program that doesn't offer much critical thinking, or potential for the matter.
Only thing that doesn't lie is the number in your bank account.
idk if objective truth is dead, or just that the intellectually lazy have a platform via social media and that nuance isn't easily hashed out in 280 characters. I think what you're really asking is what's the antidote? and to that, I'd say listen. tease out concerns, arguments, etc., so instead of responding with "no, increased police presence makes sense" ask a question like "what makes you say that?" or ask them for their ideas on how to solve something you see as an issue like rioting. if they don't think it's an issue at all, well then you know you're arguing with an idiot. often times, I find when I actually listen to those with whom I disagree, I discover they they come to their conclusions from a different point of view, not maltintent. I may not agree with their point of view, but it does help to lessen the ferocity of arguments.
I do, however agree with @m_1 when he said just don't engage. that's what I do normally, because I don't have time to go through how to logically construct an argument, save for a few select friends & family members
This isn't a new thing although it might feel like it.
For as long as human history has been recorded and even before that, there have been competing narratives, and therefore competing visions of what is absolute truth.
In the West that debate was 'settled' when the Romans adopted Christianity as an official state religion. That world view was robust enough that even the Roman Empire's conquerors adopted it. That was the view and definition of absolute truth espoused in the Western world for well over a millennia. When challenged, that view was defended with force.
The "success" of that worldview eventually led to its own demise as rising prosperity and competing visions of human flourishing started to gain ground. And while by and large the definition of progress seemed to be broadly shared (though not without reactionaries at every turn), the two world wars shattered peoples' belief that progress was inevitable.
Narrative building has always been part of the process. Whether it be the Crusades, colonization, slavery, pretty much every war that has ever been, things have always made sense to a lot of people that at some later time others would say wtf about.
With the amount of information we now have, that has been driven into hyperdrive. The Iraq War was built on a huge lie and there was zero remorse for it, just a whelp, guess that's how it is. The great financial crisis occurred on the watch of criminally negligent central bankers, politicians, fraudulent mortgage lenders and credit rating agencies and the only people to get punished? The poor schmucks who took out those loans.
The Trump presidency pushed that to the next level. You had the Democrats pathologically incapable of accepting the results, defaulting to running their ridiculous Russia psy-op for the intelligence and defense communities. You had Trump lying about things as small and stupid as the size of his inauguration crowd.
Covid has been the "final boss" (surely to be topped soon of course). The way the small business loan thing was run, the whole "trust the science" meme when there is clearly not much the science is able to agree on, the protests and the fact the response on a policy front was absolutely zero (who in their right mind would support qualified immunity?), the Hunter Biden debacle... it just goes on and on and on.
I live uptown in NYC and I have seen zero things that were particularly worrisome this year in terms of crime (ok the fireworks were annoying). The data regarding police violence is not anecdotal however and the fact the US is several standard deviations from its other "developed" counterparts should raise some questions.
Modern life feels like an exercise in weighing different views, in trying to make sure you don't focus too closely on one set of people to follow on Twitter. It's exhausting, it's almost like having to build conviction trades on everything, all the time. Strong opinions lightly held as they say.
Personally, my religious beliefs are the only thing I consign to absolute truth. Seen them pan out in amazing ways throughout my life and it's a lens to view the world that I believe always works. I may want to convince others of the strength of that lens, but never impose it on them lest it damage their view of it, and am always open to letting someone challenge it.
Police violence is largely a result of unrestricted gun access in the US. No other developed country’s police force has to deal with the largely unfettered access to firearms. Black Americans also tend to commit crimes at a disproportionate rate - largely due to poverty. Feels like this argument around the police ignores the fact that the US has aggressive pockets of poverty/violence that need government intervention to get broken out of. Black folks in the south side of chicago aren’t dying cause of the cops.
Firearms are certainly part of the problem and unique to the US context (gun proponents cite Switzerland, but poverty there is very relative).
I'm not saying the police should be abolished, and neither is the vast majority of people. But the US' police is unique in its imperviousness to prosecution (qualified immunity), its militarization, and the strength of its unions (the only union that is acceptable apparently). The amount New York taxpayers spend on NYPD misconduct claims and the fact an officer is virtually impossible to convict unless there is an exact precedent for the charge (and even then) is clearly a policy failure.
Months of protest did zero to change that, save in NY for a ban on chokeholds (despite the fact those were banned in NYC in 1993). Colorado is the only state to pass a law curtailing qualified immunity in police brutality cases.
Resentment against the police while understanding the need for them seems like a tenable position.
And of course this is all a symptom, but finding solutions on the poverty front is even further from what most US politicians would like to be doing - ie posing in kente cloth and offering platitudes.
It's confirmation bias. I ran a number of studies on this in 2009/2010 during undergrad and there have obviously been countless other published studies done on the subject but people tend to surround themselves with information that reinforces what they already believe to be true, especially when it comes to politics. Unfortunately, social media has significantly amplified polarization in the world by making it much easier for individuals to tailor the news that reaches them. Often times when it comes to politics and hot button social issues you can provide someone guilty of this phenomenon with irrefutable evidence that disproves something they believe to be true and they will completely disregard the evidence as false or a or conspiracy theory because it goes against their own narrative. Relating to police violence and racism, there was a study conducted and published by a Harvard Economist called An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences and Police Use of Force which showed that black suspects were actually 25% less likely to be shot than white suspects. If you were to try and tell someone who is part of the BLM movement that white people are actually more likely to be shot by police than blacks (which I have and provided this information) they will completely dismiss it because in their mind police are racist and this can't be true (not to generalize and say all BLM activists act in this manner). I will say that there are still a great deal of level headed people in the world capable of having an open discussion around divisive issues and the polarization is probably less prevalent than the media would like us to believe but the Right likes to highlight the crazies on the Left and the Left like to highlight the crazies on the Right making it seem more polarized than it might actually be.
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