It's impossible to answer this without getting political. Instead, let's just say every previous generation has been critically wrong about some things. Statistically, we're unlikely to be the outlier.
Some of the ugliest episodes in human history were caused by people who believed their political positions were not political positions, but unarguable statements of the True and Good.
Eeehhh? Im not sure truth* exists, but there are things that we accept as true and things that are so fundamental that it doesn't occur to us to question them - these things are inherently political. Just to be clear - not using that word to refer to the specific species of polarized discourse that we got in the states, talking about the nature of power and the human condition.
Curious what you consider to be true though? I'm coming at it from the perspective that even in physics where we can isolate so nicely we still aren't divining any truths, just making models with increasing explanatory powers.
Personally, I've been reaching more towards 'shared values' than 'truth', this is likely the pedant in me but truth doesn't feel tractable whereas shared values feels like it has less baggage?
Does shared values here just mean definitions? Such as the number of carbon atoms in a mole, 5+9 in base 10, the average number of protons in a carbon atom is a specific value, and leptons exist?
No, shared values is referring to the moral/emotional stuff, I find it more useful when trying to bridge the gap in a pretty politically charged environment to reconnect on simple things like wanting other people to be happy and healthy.
Are those true things? Good candidates, I like 'leptons exist'. Do you mind if we just gently ignore the math one? Feels like inviting the whole 'is math invented or discovered' thing.
1) carbon atoms in a mol - a mol is a counting number so it seems tautological to declare this one a truth
2) pass :)
3) this seems like a good candidate but it also seems to reduce truth to just the things we measure and only to the extent that we can be accurate (I'm also assuming you meant neutrons, protons are static by specie). Purely hypothetically there could be a whole heap of unusually heavy or light carbon out there that would disprove one or another of our theories. To put it another way; is the average number of apples that a trees grows in a year 'true'? It'll change year after year after all. I'm fine with a definition of truth that implies error bars and best efforts but I feel it falls short of the colloquial definition.
4) I think the pure observation that a thing somewhere exists is probably the closest to true, the rebuttals against that would all be self consuming anyway. The specific claim that leptons exist seems a little more fraught though - we could conceivably come to another conclusion if that better fit the facts.
So, can we call these things true if our concept is potentially incomplete or incorrect?
I’m a little confused on the statement “truth isn’t political”. This kind of goes against what I understand politics to be, which is the negotiation of a broader societal trend, which doesn’t itself have to do with whether or not the societal trend has a factual basis. The truth may be that cigarettes cause cancer, but the politics are obviously that acknowledging this would encourage society to implement top down policies to limit cigarette use. In this way, “cigarettes is a carcinogen” is a truth with significant political weight, which is what I understand a political truth to mean. Is my understanding different from yours?
If I'm understanding the parent comment correctly: a fact may have political implications but it doesn't depend on politics. In other words reality is independent of our interpretation of it (i.e. philosophical realism). The rub of course being that coming to know facts about most things is a highly social process filtered through interpretation and biases. Everything can be political if it needs to be decided upon by a group.
EDIT: I have avoided using "truth" here because it's a more general term than "fact" which has the connotation of being in reference to something concrete.
Generally when people talk like this nowadays they mean trans people, or the LGBT community in general. Sometimes Jews, though those types don't say that part out loud on HN too often.
There were lots of good examples during COVID. Remember that you don't need to wear masks, because washing your hands is enough (and we need to save the masks for doctors, but we're afraid to say that, because it will cause a run on masks). Remember that staying 6 feet apart is a magic distance over which COVID cannot cross (or maybe 1 meter, truth depends on the country you live in). Remember that you can't eat inside a restaurant, but you can eat outside, and it's okay for the restaurant to build partial walls around their outdoor spaces to make them more comfortable. Remember that COVID definitely could not have come from a lab leak, and it's racist to even suggest it might have happened. Never mind that the scientist who started the anti-lab-leak open letter was himself heavily funded for GoF research, and he refused to sign his own letter for political reasons.
I don't claim to know the answers to all of the questions (and I certainly don't know where COVID came from), but clearly there are plenty of cases where dubious statements were strongly enshrined as "True" in a way that required major online players to suppress alternative beliefs as "False".
A big difficulty is the conflation of fact with judgement. 'Vaccines work', 'masks don't work', 'a lab leak is impossible', etc. are judgements, not facts. They are not even hypotheses, in that there is no clear criteria by which they can be falsified. Hence fact-checking presents obvious problems, as in practice it will be judgement-checking.
