'What is truth?' said jesting Pilate; and stayed not for an answer
A commonplace assertion is that we live in a 'post-truth' world, centuries after the Enlightenment supposedly (under the Whig theory of history) set mankind on an irrevocable path towards, at the very least, valuing and seeking after truth. That's Truth as it would be understood by a philosophical Realist: existing objectively and independently of anyone's knowing it, or even having the capacity to know it.
Even within this worldview everyone has long resigned themselves to co-existing with all manner of deflections from the straight and narrow: the dogmas of religious fundamentalists (to be tolerated in a worldly manner, up until the point where they start to impinge on everyone else); an intelligent degree of relativism (provided Realism is not ultimately ditched); acceptance that politicians of all sorts are doomed to deal often in half-truths and evasions; knowledge that science only proceeds from one approximation to another, better approximation; that the capacity of most people for understanding and/or dealing with all the truths that are out there to be understood is distinctly limited, with various strategies being needed to accommodate this fact.
At the end of the day, there's the smug intellectually comforting Realist consideration that a truth ignored or denied is still out there, and will potentially break your toe if you kick out against it.
All that said, the advent of Blair and Bush Jnr ushered in an era when even western politicians, supposedly 'better' than the Putins of this world, increasingly cared not a fig for truth, but merely and shamelessly called for Alastair Campbell to come up with one of his sophisticated utter-bullshit operations to suit the needs of the hour.
The Common Man has always had an interesting role to play in all this. Firstly, he's not very concerned with the truth or otherwise of the dogmas swirling around (which he knows are well above his pay-grade); he just wants to know what he has to repeat solemnly in public, as and when required, in order for the (current) authorities not to be after him for unintended heresy. If the dogma changes, he just wants to be told what are the new shibboleths. In times of religious oppression this becomes an acute and worrying business, but fainter, less lethal manifestations are always in the air: as Homer Simpson says, the highest wisdom is - never be the only person in the room that's laughing.
Secondly, though, the Common Man does know some 'hard' truths very well indeed - most significantly, those that impinge on his making a living: these are the truths that will break your toe. If he's a blacksmith, he's never going to 'believe' that you can hammer cold metal into a horseshoe, even if some idiot Inquisitioner forces him on pain of death to assert it in the middle of the town square. Of course the average Inquisition, not wanting to be made mockery of, will stick to things that can confidently be asserted in the certainty that no hard-to-ignore practical disproof will ever be at hand (transubstantiation; virgins on offer for martyrs, etc etc). Even so, Stalin's and Mao's dogmatic embrace of some outright lunacies in the scientific sphere forced any number of Soviet / Chinese engineers etc to endorse them publicly but ignore them without comment in their daily activity: these ones require active doublethink. (It has always seemed likely to me that the Stalins of this world don't much care about this phenomenon, just so long as everyone lines up for the 'loyalty test' of repeating faithfully the dogma of the day. In fact, for loyalty-test purposes alone, the dafter it is, the better. And the Common Man is generally OK with doublethink.)
* * * * *
What has caused me to muse on all this in May 2023? The other day I watched Official Secrets, a rather good, fact-based movie (haha!) about the GCHQ whistle-blower who leaked a document in which the Bush operation sought the UK's assistance in blackmailing various UN delegations in order to swing a UN vote that would formally legitimise Gulf War 2 - not that neither Bush nor Blair ultimately much cared about that legitimation. Whistle-blowers, of course, are just that small minority of people that can't bring themselves to do the doublethink. It's a small minority indeed.
But ancient history be blowed: look at what we are faced with right now (- you can pitch in with your own favourites):
- Starmer systematically and merrily reneging on every one of his "10 pledges", with such pious outriders as David Lammy and Polly Toynbee all rushing to assert this doesn't matter a whit
- the complete absence of any reliable accounts on significant matters of the day such as the blowing-up of the Nord Stream pipeline
- the complete works of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Megan Markle etc ad nauseam
NHS treatment algorithms ‘not taking transgender patients into account’: Medics say trans people being put at risk by lack of evidence on how to assess them by gender-based metrics
Or to put the matter more simply: as 99.9% of humanity knows very well, "Trans women are, errr, men" Now that's the kind of truth that really breaks toes when kicked against - ask Nicola Sturgeon.
So: God Save The King! And don't press me (or the Common Man) too closely on that Holy Anointing Oil ...
ND
39 comments:
If a biological Man starts to doubt their masculinity then the proper treatment ought to be to use testosterone rather than to deliberately exacerbate the problem.
Of course, many such Men only wish to compete against Women in order to satisfy the (male) urge to win.
With biological Women, deliberately adding testosterone to a system that has not developed to cope with the increased aggression is a recipe for disaster. Take for example the recent tragedy when a woman jacked-up on testosterone shot up her old school, murdering children (and adults).
Telling the Truth in a Time of Lies is a revolutionary act.
Do we read ,I’ve been wondering lately, news and current affairs coverage for information? Or for entertainment?
What’s caused me to ruminate was the revelation that an (apparently) well-known blogger “Donbas Devushka”, who was supposedly a civilian living in occupied Ukraine was, in fact, you could make this up, a tropical fish seller in Ohio (the story got wide coverage, eg. https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20230422-donbass-devushka-american-mouthpiece-for-russian-propaganda).
Now that’s shocking, in a not really shocking way. There’s an awful lot of propagandists, both pro and anti West.
But this had me thinking, did the people who read and watched “Devushka”’s content really, genuinely, take everything at face value? I’ve not reviewed her material, but the précis of it provided in the articles exposing her deception hardly stand up to close examination. It’s certainly possible those who consumed her output didn’t believe for a single second that it was genuine, or, alternatively, it must have crossed their minds at some point it wasn’t all entirely on the level.
Shorter, isn’t it possible that people not only know they are being misled and fed a diet of misinformation, they vicariously enjoy the process of being misled? And what, really is the harm? People liked, so it seems “Devushka”’s programming, it gave them pleasure to watch it and read it. If a subset of news and factual reporting is seen as entertainment, and, even, some it it is fiction and the audience appreciates it for the creative process and imagination they see put into it, the whole question of “post truth” media becomes altogether more meta.
I cannot tell a lie - well only one, this one.
The meme from Jeremy vine interviewing Boris Johnson.
“Prime Minister, what is your favourite lie”?
“I don’t lie”
“Yes that’s my favourite too”
"the advent of Blair and Bush Jnr": you are too kind to Mr and Mrs Slick Willie.
We have been in a post-truth era for a decade or so. Why? because the truth is unhelpful - innovation has slowed down, we humans are not getting smarter, there is no good solution to our energy needs and there are only limited new employment opportunities.
Nevertheless the politicians have to keep hoi polloi cheerful and full of hope. But anyone can do and make anything anywhere. Capitalism has very wisely spread its money making capability widely - but the source - the mother lode has not become more productive. Which is why America is retrenching and why small middle rank economies are in the manure.
Our ra ra over a few council seats and some old chap getting a fancy chair and hat means nothing. The big problem is how to make money in our new post industrial environment. We can try to sell Green, but other people make the windmills and solar panels and heat exchangers and the laws of physics are not all that favourable. There is no way our old housing stock will ever be triple glazed and cosy-clad - it should be knocked down - even those ancient 'listed' piles.
The old capitalist idea - the market will provide - is still true. But the market will go where the market is profitable. Our big problem is to make ourselves an attractive production place for new. Impossible in an over-mature marketplace riddled with constraints. Our hands off approach to developing the market cannot work, any sane capitalist will look at our planning constraints and go elsewhere. Our government must grasp several nettles and remove constraints and stuff the unpopularity.
All very well if there were any new industries to go into. But the depressing thing is most of them won't work or throw up other problems. We have no real alternative to oil, gas and coal. Humans don't get brighter generation by generation however well fed and educated. Just take a look at the royal family. But AI probably will get brighter and brighter - but the laws of nature will remain just as obdurate. Vote for ChatGPT.
In the face of such a dismal picture a post-truth society that focusses on bosoms, bums, frocks, houses and shiny cars is doing us plebs a kindness.
The public debate about the threat that is AI got me thinking a couple of days ago. On the Today programme (or program if you prefer), one such conversation was followed by another in which Disinformation was held to be a Really Bad Thing (but only when Republicans or any flavour of sceptic does it).
My thought was, AI can help us here. If it's as good as advertised, AI can detect Disinformation and counter the Really Bad Thing in real time. Gone will be the days when a lie can circle the globe before the truth gets its boots on.
What a wonderful world. Who could possibly be against that? Apart from the Liars.
I expect AI to be better at generating disinformation than at countering it.
Don Cox
AI (or more accurately, machine learning) is only as smart as its input data. As usual Garbage In, Garbage Out. The rest is marketing guff.
Labour don’t seem that bothered about voter I.D. anymore.
Wildgoose - it's a great quote (though nobody seems sure who first said it. Orwell? Gramsci? ...)
Clive - what really is the harm? - I think this is the Putin model of: keep everyone so bemused, they neither know nor care any longer what's true or not. Panem et circenses all round!
BQ - is that on youtube or whatever?
dearieme: Clintons? - well, I invited your nominations. To me they seemed like occasional & very bad liars, mostly out of desperation rather than basic modus operandi.
jim - so, back to the bread & circuses then
decnine, Don, Matt - AI, etc: these tech developments are always an arms-race: they bring problems, they bring solutions. Incidentally, here's a great example of AI competence. https://wavellroom.com/2023/01/27/artificial-intelligence/
Pedestrian - but first-year undergraduate competence (at a lesser university).
Fifeland - yeah, funny, that
"To me they seemed like occasional & very bad liars"
People familiar with them said they lied by instinct and lied always. It seemed to come as naturally to them as it did to Blair.
I do remember a time early in the last Labour government when Gordon Brown found it necessary to lie and was laughably bad at it. Simply out of practice I think; I take it that he had previously relied on rather subtler means of misleading people. Mind you, unlike Blair he did have a brain (at least when he was young).
Fairly recently an AI system was stress tested for the ability to design scientific experiments to design drugs and toxins. It worked very well. But was felt to be too dangerous to allow public access - dual use/misuse etc etc. What we plebs see is a watered down version of AI, the juicy bits are blocked and monitored.
Most probably serious development is going on to specialise in legal argument, military strategy, economic planning. Already investment portfolios are being put together by AI, how well is yet to be seen. This is not a simple minded GIGO situation.
Try 'Emergent autonomous scientific research capabilities of large language models'.
Military applications are interesting - that bot-written article referenced above is (of course) OK, but (of course) only as far as it goes ...
Might do another post on this aspect
"Even so, Stalin's and Mao's dogmatic embrace of some outright lunacies in the scientific sphere forced any number of Soviet / Chinese engineers etc to endorse them publicly but ignore them without comment in their daily activity: these ones require active doublethink."
You can be a lot closer to home than that - everyone agrees how awful racists are, yet everyone also knows where 'the bad areas' are (didn't ND spend time round Wembley and Harlesden?) and where walking alone at night is dubious for young ladies?
People - even well-indoctrinated students - also know where the "nice" areas are, and gravitate to them.
The point of doublethink is that it's NOT active, it's instinctive.
PS - I still read DD, and while I was surprised to learn she'd served in the US Navy, I never for a moment thought she was living in the Donbass.
Lord of War is my go-to though.
https://t.me/s/llordofwar
"The point of doublethink is that it's NOT active, it's instinctive"
Hmm
the capacity for doublethink is innate** - indeed, probably an extension of the human genius for imitating those around us to an extraordinary degree, which some see as the defining characteristic of humans (even more so than speech). I notice Everybody's saying it, so I'd better say it, too, given that this principle has served me very well up until now
and of course, once the requisite piece of doublethink has been hoisted on board, staying with it becomes instinctive, just like the self-censorship that politicians and journalists learn in regards to certain too-hot-to-handle issues
but hoisting it on board sometimes takes a bit of an effort. There's a great clip somewhere of Tony Blair encountering Alastair Campbell, who's talking to someone that has raised an objection (factual, political, I don't remember) to something Blair has recently committed to, an objection that Campbell believes has merit. Blair looks mildly flustered for half a second, then says: "OK, well what's the new line?" I say 'flustered', but we may be confident this was actually a well-practised reverse-ferret manoeuvre on his part - he probably had to do it twice a week.
____________
**[except, as noted in the blog, for the very few who just can't do doublethink: they are sometimes viewed as stubbornly daft; or are somewhere on the spectrum: eigensinnig, as they say in Germany. A schoolfriend of mine used to say: I can't be a liar because I can only hold one version of events. If it's important to (say) a religious cause that even these people must toe the line, they are just kicked, or worse, until they learn to mouth the words. "A self-identifying trans woman is a woman, for all purposes ..." And even then, there will be a handful of martyrs]
You might like to try Bruce Schneier's security blog for a bit more on how fast AI is moving. Apparently the Republicans have used AI to make a campaign video. A bit livelier than the stuff our parties use.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/05/large-language-models-and-elections.html
Big Brother IS watching you....
What is truth
It is something you believe to be true
... and that a lot of people agree on.
Money is a truth. You believe that a piece of paper which is printed in a particular format can be exchanged for something else (as long as the counterparty shares that truth)
Money may be a truth but truth is more than Money
Accumulated truth beings trust.
Accumulated untruth brings distrust.
If you do not trust the counterparty then you need to check what you get is what you asked for.
This means transactions cost more for 2 reasons
1.you have to check
2. The universe of possible trading partners wiĺ be smaĺler.
If you cannot be trusted, your trading partners will be those who do not yes distrust you. Eventually that means you stop trading.
Or jn the case of Johnson no one believes you and your future as a politician I'd limited to other untrustworthy people.
This is how a bad apple spoils the barrel
And how high trust societies will outperform low trust societies in the long term.
The self identification thing is potty, and I speak as someone who is very *pro* Trans rights.
Somewhere along the line, the concept of context appears to have been lost, as does the capacity to keep biological sex (immutable), physiognomic sex (mutable) and gender (social) distinctly separate when it comes to legal and social rulings.
It shouldn't be beyond the wit of society to recognise anyone having gone through male puberty shouldn't be involved in physical sports with those who haven't, anyone with a penis shouldn't be in women's prisons, and anyone who feels like their gender is female and dresses accordingly should be free to use the women's loos.
AI... First thing to remember that what gets bandied about as AI is just fiendishly complex ML, and training one is currently expensive - you need a few million dollars at hand for each iteration.
No doubt that'll change over the next few years, but the biggest threat from them is treating them as intelligent or inherently superior decision makers. Someone has already thought it clever to have one in charge of their AWS infrastructure, which I fully expect will lead to tears in the not distant future.
Plugging them into any national infrastructure any time soon should be a cause for bringing back heads on spikes, and I've no doubt China will have a crack at that. If they do it prior to invading Taiwan, the Taiwanese can relax and watch from a distance as an entire nation goes for a trip to a digital Dignitas.
We need to get better understanding the ML's "thought process" in order to ensure we can apply safe boundaries, as well as ensure learning models are untainted - those models will become attack vectors in the future, like SQL injection on steroids. We already had one judicial model in the early days which equated "black" with "guilty."
Until then, we're toddlers handed a grenade - it's all fun and games until we pull the pin out.
Not entirely OT, as it pertains to truth and trust - where now for the Tories?
It was only local elections and all, but when a _paper candidate_ beats you, and you lose by more than your expectations management number, you know the fat ladies off throat clearing in readiness.
The Tories have been in power for a long time. People are bored with them.
Don Cox
CH - "It shouldn't be beyond the wit of society to recognise ..."
It isn't!: society sees it all too well, as does the High Court. It's beyond the wit of: (a) Sturgeon, (b) the wokerati, (c) the Police Forces of this land, who are ideologically captive to Stonewall - and (d) once upon a time, the newly-sainted Penny Mordaunt!
It is of course in that category expressed by George Orwell: some ideas are so stupid, only an intellectual could hold them.
And a wonderful woke shibboleth. Yes, you have to spout this nonsense as though you believe it - it's your initiation test! Or you'll be cancelled! Thus ensuring it remains an elite filter - no ordinary person, certainly not anyone that has avoided university education, can keep up with this ever-changing crap.
I see the "North Atlantic", having expanded to the Med/Baltic/Black Sea, is now in the Sea of Japan.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/03/nato-planning-to-open-japan-office-to-deepen-asia-pacific-ties-report
For a defensive alliance, it's remarkably acquisitive.
When an adult says "I identify as..." what in reality they are saying is "I am pretending to be...."
Now, role playing is a core and essential part of childhold.
In adulthood, on the other hand, it says simply - "I am special, and very disturbed"
Tho' language capture has clearly taken place, at least in the USA, where I have noted people saying "I identify as a Democrat". Not "I AM a Democrat"
WTF?
Elby - it doesn't help that kids are endlessly informed: you can be anything you want
fostering optimism and ambition is really great but it needs to be, and used to be, accompanied with an appropriate conditional clause
these ghastly people (leftist teachers, the TikTok / Instagram offer, etc) give children to understand: "you deserve to be anything you want, just by wanting it; and it's the government's responsibility to make it come true, at no cost to yourself". Since this evidently doesn't work with "I wanna be a cash billionaire tomorrow", they fall back on things that are automatically true (as you say - "I am pretending to be ..."), or that government can deliver with the stroke of Nicola Sturgeon's pen
the right way with children, obviously, is a bit of robust discipline: "eat your greens and shut up, or Bonaparte will come and get you" (+:
Nick: " no ordinary person, certainly not anyone that has avoided university education"
You imply that a university education is a bad thing in itself and should be avoided. I have a degree in zoology, and have never for a moment regretted the three years I spent on that course. Apart from its intrinsic interest, it allows you to see humans in perspective.
It is probably best to study a subject that has a practical component, such as engineering or graphic design or archaeology.
Don Cox
"a university education is a bad thing in itself and should be avoided"
Sometimes true.
https://ukcommentators.blogspot.com/2009/03/laban-goes-to-college.html
Laban
Don, no, sorry to be pedantic, but it doesn't follow at all that's what I'm implying. If (as I assert) anyone that hasn't been university wouldn't be falling for that guff, that doesn't mean that everyone who has been to university will fall for it.
I, too, greatly benefited from my own university experience.
That said, I do believe things have become a lot worse on the woke front since the 1970s, even if there are the first glimmers that the tide is turning - in those establishments that are strong and confident enough to reject arrant nonsense and reassert freedom of speech, thought and research. The weaker, more easily bullied establishments, are really under the woke cosh.
In my day (as they say) there was no shortage of vehemently leftist students, up to all manner of mischief. If the cry "Rhodes Must Fall" had gone up in those days, he'd have fallen that same evening with a loud crash into the High.
But (a) the faculty were having none of it, notwithstanding the occasional 'history man' in the SCR; and (b) the risks one ran as a rightist student were of the good old fisticuffs variety, not the nasty and pernicious way that the wokerati enforce their will these days.
"Caeser Hēméra said...
The self identification thing is potty, and I speak as someone who is very *pro* Trans rights."
Out of interest, what statutory rights do Trans people not have that the rest of us do? All I can see is that "Trans Rights" are no such thing, ("claim rights", as Scruton would have noted - not "natural" rights); rather a weapon to dismantle Women's (natural) rights to single sex spaces, etc.
No?
ps.Have asked the creepy Tatchell who incessantly bangs on about "gay rights" the same question. A number of times. Oddly, no answer. Maybe because the answer is "none"?
@Elby - much of the demands from the more bonkers Trans aspects are pretty much an attack on women's rights, the "importing of male privilege" in woke parlance if you will.
What I'd *like* to see, is more nuance and recognition of gender and physiognomic sex - until relatively recently they were pretty much the same, but have diverged* as we change as an society.
For me, most of the issues are friction from this, and the conflation of the three concepts into one, which I've certainly done in the past.
An example, someone who looks, and is dressed, very feminine rocks up to passport control with a passport with a "Sex: M" is going to cause the officer a moment of pause, only natural, and maybe raise some needlessly personal questions about the difference between the document and physical reality - having additional properties to reduce confusion hardly seems onerous.
Another is recognition (as I mentioned in my comment) that anyone who see's themselves as a female _gender_ are free to use the likes of ladies toilets. I know there are some vocal "think of the chillllldren" types who that horrifies, but we've not banned the BBC, the Church or Asian gangs yet, and we've an awful lot more evidence on them being a danger.
Finally, bullying. The whole deadnaming and misgendering thing is a little awkward - if you're racing in the women's category of something, you can expect to get called she/her, etc. If someone's being a prick at work that's a little different. Society decided taking said little prick round back and having Dr Marten inject a little civility in them is unacceptable, so while that's a thing I'm quite happy it being a police matter.
Now, I'm not especially fond of splitting rights into type outside of theory - realistically they all emanate from state and society, and if one of your theoretical rights is being trodden on in a very practical way, and no one gives a toss, we're in Monty Python sketch territory - "'ere, you can't do that!", "I'm doing it!"
*I suspect quite a lot of chemicals we've chucked into the environment has had an impact on this, the pathways of sexual development are quite complex and the change from proto-female to male/female is open to a lot of corruption from anything crossing the placental barrier. I'd love to know if there's a rough correlation between the availability of the pill and gender dysphoria, as one potential source.
The cornerstone of policy must surely be:
- to ditch self-ID - an abomination in all dimensions, philosophical and practical;
- to go with the Science (on sports, medical treatment & anything else where undistorted evidence is crystal clear);
- to institute, at the very least, a Good Faith test.
My touchstone comes from two specific cases. The first is Jan Morris, for whom I have very high regard: call yourself whatever you like, so far as I am concerned.
The second is an old army comrade of mine (who'd actually started as a fully-fledged Royal Marine). He was a really great bloke, and now lives as a woman, quietly and unobtrusively, making no great show of it, in a small village - & regarded well by all, I strongly imagine.
The interesting thing to me is that, when this latter case became publicly known, the comments on ARRSE (the extremely robust 'Army Rumour Service' website) were of the sort: "pity the yob who tries anything on outside the pub after dark!".
BTW, there is an excellent parallel that can be made which, I think, illuminates the matter very well. Consider foster parents. Nobody suggests they are, merely by fiat, the biological parents. For many very serious practical purposes, the distinction must be maintained rigorously and openly. And we don't allow just anyone to become a foster parent merely because they want to be one - we have exhaustive criteria before the status is awarded, because there's a lot at stake. BUT, all that said, for many day-to-day conventional purposes, we accord foster parents many of the same status-indicators as biological parents; we 'let them pass', if that's what they want to do: and we do this (a) because it's assumed there's loads of good faith in play (maybe we even admire what they're doing); and (b) as a sort of courtesy / kindness to all concerned.
Slightly off piste but I used to listen/watch PROGRAMS on BBC now it is SHOWS. That is if I can decode what is being said by fast talking non standard English voices. Incidentally what is progress on our new pit!!!!
Whoops I am as bad !should be PROGRAMMES
Computer PROGRAMS, radio/TV/Theatre PROGRAMMES.
Don
@ND - nothing disagreeable there.
The courtesy/kindness aspect is one thing that ends up missing many a time.
I can completely understand the knee-jerk responses to some of the more 'out there' attention seekers, but knee-jerk responses are rarely the best ones, nor are the attention seekers representative of the whole and shouldn't be taken as such.
On the flip-side, I also see a lot of "god of the gaps" reasoning when it comes to the question of "what is a woman?" by the "transwomen==women" advocates in an attempt to deflect common sense understandings.
@OGC - when the current crop of TV execs start hitting their late 40s, and start to enjoy the delights of reduced hearing capability and tinnitus, they'll come to appreciate RP.
Much as I'm happy to see more regional accents in TV shows, the likes of the news and anything hoping for a demographic older than the 30s might want to rethink just how thick an accent they want.
Caeser Hēméra
Caeser - I wonder, like many others, whether you think Trans is just about "gender dysphoria". Many do, quite reasonably, but wrongly. As someone posted on Twitter, "Why is it that girls get gender dysphoria at puberty, but men when arrested for sexual offences?"
Quite. The dark side of Trans is that the law has opened up loopholes for autogynephiles to class themselves as trans and hence go into girl's changing rooms and expose themselves, get put in women's prisons and there assault women (Karen White). Autogynephilia is a nasty kinky fetish which should NOT be classified with Trans.
Pervs, we used to call them!
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