Moving Factward
In the legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien, the land of the gods is known as “The Uttermost West.” For the world was originally created flat, and the gods took the westernmost region of this flat world for their dwelling place.
On our globe, of course, there is no westernmost point. And yet it is still the case that, at each position on the equator, some direction is objectively “westward”. The objectivity of “westward” doesn’t assume that there is some ultimate West by which the west-ness of all other positions is measured.
Analogously, there is no such thing as a “bare uninterpreted fact”. “Just the facts” is not a realizable ideal.
And yet we can still recognize when one account of a situation is more “factish” than another. We can see that the second account is more of an interpretation compared to the relatively factish features given in the first account. The more-factish account is never the ultimate and unvarnished truth. Likely no coherent sense could be made of that ideal. Nonetheless, from wherever we stand, we can always “move factward”.[1]
Footnote
[1] ETA: Said Achmiz points out that many features of “westward” don’t apply to “factward”. Analogies typically assert a similarity between only some, not all, aspects of the two analogous situations. But maybe the other aspects of “westward” are so salient that they interfere with the analogy.
In 2019 I was trying to study the relation of truth and power because I was studying prediction markets from a design perspective and I found the 1967 essay “Truth And Power” by Hannah Arendt.
Arendt homes in on a distinction between scientific truths and factual truths. In my memory, as a practical upshot, I have found this essential test useful: if I wanted to lie to future history about something, how much would it cost me to erase the evidence available to their scholars and scientists to verify for themselves?
In case someone tries to erase it, here is a different link to the same essay. Also, it is in this archive. The most canonical archive only has the paywall teaser content, I think?
Based on this test, the lower the price of erasure, the more “factual” the truth is, and the higher the price of erasure, the more “scientific” (or “philosophic”?) it is.
(The essay also explores the difficulty of keeping each particular truth secret, but that test is harder for me to use and remember.)
The verifiable “truth” that gravity constant’s specific value relative to human measurement standards is 6.6743 × 10⁻¹¹ m³ kg⁻¹ s⁻² could be erased by destroying human civilization such that it forgot how long a meter actually is (or a kilogram or a second), but this is a very high price (probably trillions of dollars?) so this is a very very scientific truth!
Then consider the ratio of the mass of a proton to the mass of an electron is ~1836.15 with no units, and there you’d have to do something destructive to like “physics itself” in order to destroy people’s future ability to recover this truth. Since causing damage to physics itself might be impossible, this would be an infinite price, and so this truth, by this test, has essentially zero facticity due to being essentially 100% scientific :-)
The sort of obvious latent background here is the holocaust and the holodomor (and the denial of such events), but in the Arendt’s essay these gets one the briefest of mentions (bold not in original) but also their specific position within the typologies of truth (and specifically how dangerous they were to talk about) gets a direct claim and become central to a line of thinking:
Arendt’s essay is very interested in politics, but for myself, as a data scientist, the test for facts calls my attention sometimes in my daily life when “facts” do, in fact, disappear!
Consider that today I went to Oliver’s Supermarket and bought MRM brand Veggie Protein with Superfoods and paid with a credit card. Oliver’s Supermarket has the data in their computers. Visa also has the data in their computers. Now the fact has been added here to this LW comment.
Supposing that I had not written about it here, eventually the fact might be erased from the computers of the store and the bank due to data retention policies (which are hilariously named, because the point of a data rentention policy is to give political cover to the decision to NOT retain certain data, but instead to erase it).
I’m likely to try this product a couple times and see if I like it.
Eventually the container will be shipped off to a dump, and go into the landfill (though it might retain some of my DNA there which could hypothetically be recovered for many years).
In between these events, when will I drink any of it? What will my reactions be?
These very detailed questions about the microstructure of my life will be very very very hard to reconstruct, either with data forensics, or taking a garbage dump apart atom by atom with archaeological nanotech, or even for modern surveillance capitalists.
Based on the erasure test, here we find “facts” that almost cost negative amounts of money to erase! Like you would have to SPEND money to PRESERVE such facts! You’d have to log the data, and put it in the cloud, or something like that.
Brains often flush such details, and they leave few traces, and what traces they leave are often destroyed in a matter of course during daily life, and daily cleaning, and so on.
Something interesting about the trajectory of history is that many kinds of daily historical truths with negative “cost of erasure” (that are very very very “factual” in this sense) have changed to become positively costly to erase! More and more incidental data is captured, and much of it is retained. Someday the CIA’s metadata archives will be a treasure trove to historians!
The essential line here has long been known, with “historians” seeking after facts in archives (and “history” beginning with writing, essentially) whereas “archaeologists” seek after facts that are NOT in the archives, but in the physical residue.
For example, the current best estimate for “the beginning of the history of war” is arguably April 16, 1457 BC because, so far, The Battle Of Megiddo is the oldest military battle that can be reliably determined to have “been written about”.
Before that, surely there were wars, and surely these wars had battles, but these were so “very merely factual” as events that no one was willing to pay the data retentions costs to let the future remember them, and therefore detailed records of them (fully of lies or honesty or whatever) doesn’t seem to exist.
A possible claim: as measurement and archival technology advance, many specific categories of truth (like truths about battles and deaths and what people had for breakfast) are “moving anti-factward” because they are “moving scienceward” towards being cheaply and abstractly apprehended by the mechanisms and processed of socialized literacy and communal reason.
An interesting question: what are currently the MOST EXPENSIVE facts to RETAIN archival evidence of?
A second interesting question: among such facts, which might be worth such costs, and why?
A third interesting question: why do courts (whose archives tend to be hidden, and censored, and very expensive to search, and not allowed to be recorded by microphones or cameras, and so on) so often embrace facticity very strongly, and make their proceedings so murky to so many?
By this analogy, these things are true:
If we keep moving factward, we will eventually return to where we started.
There exists some point which is both maximally more factish, and also, simultaneously, maximally less factish, than our current position.
Any point which is factward of us, is also, at the same time, antifactward of us. Any two positions are either equally factish (i.e., they are the same position), or they are both factward of each other.
Intended? Or not?
I am not asserting that those aspects of “westward” apply to “factward”.
Analogies typically assert a similarity between only some, not all, aspects of the two analogous situations. But maybe those aspects of “westward” are so salient that they interfere with the analogy.
And moving factforward long enough we will go back to fact that earth is flat and then analogy does not work any more :/
Indeed, this is exactly the problem of the criterion.
I think the analogy to the round earth is unhelpful, for essentially the reasons Said Achmiz’s comment alludes to. More relevant would be an infinite plane (where you can always move west and there is a consistent global notion of west-ness).
It seems plausible that it’s correct to treat a piece of information as approaching very close the fact-ness. If I say that a cup contains an kilogram of water, there’s some sense in which this is not a pure fact, but it seems very close to a pure fact, and although pure-factness about water in this cup may be unattainable, it is not infinitely far away.
You must have larger cups than me.
😛 Dangit, my American intuition wasn’t good enough. I was kinda close, only a factor of 2 maybe.
There are various different culinary measures called a cup, but if filled with water they all give you between 1⁄5 and 1⁄4 of a kilogram. Actual cups-for-drinking-from can give wildly different amounts but a kilogram would correspond to a litre of water, and vessels that large usually have names other than “cup”.
“Fact” is just another four-letter f-word. One person’s fact is another person’s nonsensical belief.
You don’t seem to be engaging with the post well.
That is, nobody’s beliefs are facts. But they can be more or less factlike. I don’t see any sensible point of disagreement (with the article) in your response. “Two people can disagree! That means that nobody has facts.” The OP didn’t claim what you’re implying they claimed.
(What I mean is—this is the sort of response I’d expect from somebody who read the title but not the article.)