> The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution and is allowed to survive until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.
I'm curious to know whether he'd still agree with that in the age of "fake news".
The thing is, we don't have a long enough time frame. People are generally sane, on average, but only when looked at on longer time frames. They really want progress.
However, when you're in the middle of a revolution you don't really want to be there.
Basically, probably the next generation will be able to tell how bad things really were and if by their time things are truly better.
There’s been many examples recently. A very public one was that Covid was likely from a lab leak. There were many institutions and government figures that worked to oppress that, but now most experts agree this is a likely hypothesis.
"On average, respondents assigned a 77% probability to a zoonosis, 21% to the lab-leak scenario"
While most scientists generally favor the natural origin theory, an alternative theory with a 21% chance is not something that should be dismissed or suppressed.
Sure, but that's a very different take to "most experts agree it's a likely hypothesis". My impression is that scientists have consistently said it's possible, but quite unlikely, and unsupported by the evidence.
==most experts agree this is a likely hypothesis==
Oddly, I find the lab leak discussion proves the exact opposite point. No truth has been found in the matter, hence even your use of words like "most experts", "likely", and "hypothesis." If anything, the insistence that it is a lab leak is proof that evidence isn't needed for some people to make a grand conclusion.
Just look at the performative (not informative) website [0] the current administration created to spread this theory. It focuses on things like lockdowns, social distancing, and mask mandates, which obviously have nothing to do with the lab leak theory.
When you view this website, which side does do you think is trying to create a narrative? It even seems to oppress information that doesn't support their view. Seems like pure propaganda to me.
If you think USA is too politically charged, even under the Biden administration and intelligence communities, then you can look to other countries, scientists, and others that have also come to the same conclusion independently.
The amount of circumstantial evidence is overwhelming and there’s clearly motive for cover up in the governments and organizations since they were involved in funding the research in Wuhan which sent three lab workers to the hospital before the outbreak was acknowledged.
A concerted effort to cover it up in China, maybe. But in the west it's not covered up, it's just acknowledged by what it is - a hypothesis. We don't actually know, and might not ever know, if Covid originated in a lab. Insisted it definitely did is, in fact, propaganda.
The US has no motive to cover it up, especially since the likes of Trump have been calling it the "China Virus" since day 1. We just don't know, and we especially didn't know at the start of Covid. Then, it was truly a conspiracy theory, so we shouldn't be surprised it was treated as such.
What trips people up about Covid is that we were, and still are, discovering things about it. It was a novel disease. People take changes in guidelines and popular opinion to mean the elites are lying to us or that there's some grand conspiracy. But no - they're changing their minds because they were wrong before, because their understanding of the virus and how to handle it were constantly evolving. We were throwing shit at the wall and finding out in real time if it worked. That's not how we treat Polio or Measles because we already know how those work.
The is now public evidence that Fauci acknowledge it was likely early on in private emails and then set out to campaign against it. In front of Congress he is criticized of perjury for lying that his agency funded gain of function researching. Fauci tried to argue it was not quite gain of function but similar even though everyone knows it was. He public also show that he moved all related conversations to private emails, in violation of the records act, to avoid scrutiny. He convinced trump to reverse an Obama era rule on funding gain of function research.
In the end, Obama pardoned fauci but he did not let ecohealth alliance nor its leader off the hook. They can no longer receive funding. Its leader was also the one who wrote in the lancet that it was a natural event.
There’s lots more evidence in public record now. But clearly it was an embarrassment for all involved including the USA.
> Covid was likely from a lab leak...government...worked to oppress [sic] that
Controversial opinion scoped solely to this one topic: who gives a shit?
In general I agree that governments shouldn't be in the business of cover-ups or suppressing the truth (and in this case I don't think we'll ever know the "real" truth). But what's the difference here? Covid happened, however it happened, and we all had to deal with it.
Bringing it up now feels politicians trying to distract from more pressing problems that they don't have any answers for.
We're not studying traffic accidents with knowable failure rates and capped losses. This is a once-in-a-generation event. Do literally everything possible to prevent it because the stakes are so high.
We could for sure prevent a re-occurrence by cracking down on biology experiments and markets, going into permanent lockdown, stopping all international trade and transit, and so on. But very few people want that, so we compromise and prioritise.
Truth will still act. It will act in terms of competitive advantage, technology and the like. The manipulation of nature in any way is a source of power. It's just that such a source can sometimes be very small (e.g. there's a lot of math I won't use but I know about it). I suppose truth will act when relevant.
Currently it's acting in a way where you can read this message. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be true in order for you to read what I write (e.g. computers working, internet working, electricity flowing, etc.).
In my view, Mills (and Holmes) did not imagine someone winning in the market place of the ideas, because they found an infinite money glitch.
Your information goods you produce, are losing in the market place of ideas, not because of their quality, but because
1) You are blocked from selling them into a market of customers on the right.
2) they are too expensive compared to the alternatives available.
Take the intelligent design movement and how it was platformed by Fox News, as “schools should teach the controversy about evolution”. Implying that evolution isn’t “solid science”, and that ID was a potential answer for this issue.
Or take how fox platformed cranks and bad science on environmental issues, allowing R senators and congress people to point to it, and stop pro-environment actions and bills.
The posture of science at the time was to not engage with cranks, because “dont feed the trolls”.
Shocked by the outcomes, scientists went on Fox, hoping to engage with the audience and explain their points - only to be peppered with gotchas, rhetorical tricks and arguments that made for good TV.
Crucially, the underlying sentiment was to ridicule experts and destroy faith in the “liberal” institutions that were crushing conservative views and cultural ability.
——
These are examples to illustrate that the people who are playing the market place of ideas have financialized it. They are not in it for democracy, they are not in it, to engage in actual commerce of ideas
They are in it to break it. The job of members on the side of accuracy and science and evidence, is to understand it, realize the errors in their assumption, and to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity that inefficient behavior must create.
The cost of production of your facts and ideas, makes you more expensive and less useful, than the content being produced and subsidized on the right.
Be cheaper, be more useful, break the embargo, be financially viable, and/or institute regulation that prevents the creation of idea monopolists.
Either Participants that do not have to compete on the merits of their ideas, but on their ability to subsidize their media efforts, must be made uncompetitive in the market place of ideas.
OR, we must accept that there is an unavoidable fail state at the intersection of human neurology and Laissez faire information economies, and deal with that.
I think with the linguistic turn the idea of a "correct opinion" feels a bit archaic. Sure, if you can truly glean the semantics and connotations of the language, you can feel confident their view is coherent, that they cohere with your views, etc, perhaps you can call their opinion correct in that agreement tends to be seen as correctness in a posteriori terms. But in practice, establishing that degree of confidence requires a shared linguistic background and skepticism. Especially when you're dealing with floating signifiers, as Locke tended to do (and as many respectable philosophers have done).
Plus, Locke seems to have generally existed outside the concept of being paid for eyeballs. I am not sure much of his philosophy survived the rise of capitalism, which is perhaps why he still remains such a strong voice—we are simply aware on some level of what liberal idealism has lost, and we want it back.
Personally, I think "truth" is actually a pretty weak concept and I have none of the attachments that enlightenment thinkers had to it. Even in good faith confidence about how other folks view concepts that are very real to us can be hard to come by. Am I sure that there the continent of Africa is not a conspiracy theory? Yes, I'm pretty sure. Well, what about the characterization of XYZ conflict? Or about the social value of idk role models with raising children? That's where newsrooms lose me—the terms are just too vague, the connotations too difficult to hold editors accountable for, for "truth" to be a real concern.
> The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution and is allowed to survive until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.
I'm curious to know whether he'd still agree with that in the age of "fake news".