It is important, but I bet if you did a poll here to ask people if they felt they were less able to dig up facts now than before, you'd get a majority negative response. It seems to me people are always worried about others being "post-truth" while they have it covered. — Baden

But there's two things to this.

First, people actually don't "dig up" so much of the things as that is very time consuming, they rely much more on what is served to them on the basis what they like. Secondly, it still takes things like historical knowledge and being informed about things to spot what is nonsense and what isn't. To spot fake news one simply has to be informed.

I think the most common way how people start even unintentionally to spread post truths is that the truly get attached to some political cause or event, like hatred of one political candidate in elections. Then the most damning attack against this candidate is something that the people like. Elections are the silly season typically, a time when people do get emotionally attached to things they would otherwise not be interested in. And of course, that's a good thing that people get excited about elections. Yet if a person thinks some politician is evil, then this person is quite open to post-truths that prove their case.

Same thing happens for instance with wars or terrorist attacks.

Do you feel like you are stuck in such a filter bubble that you can't manage to find out facts about stuff? Is it such an effort to circumvent? It just seems highly exaggerated to me. Or again, is it just others who are too dumb to figure it out?

Sorry, hit post button before writing the post.

I used to buy adwords from Google. It works, many, many people don't go past the first few results. So, whatever filters may or may not be there can be quite important. The EU is suing Google over search results which the EU thinks support android, a Google product...so anti-trust.

What about 9/11?

I have a strong feeling that people decided that the ruling elite should be left to their own after 9/11 and let lesser people concern with themselves. People seem to have accepted or put up with whatever shenanigans that Dubya would do for their ability to enjoy their lives in whatever manner they seem fit to do.

9/11 was really a much more important day than people consider it to be.

So is the failure to recognise bullshit a result of an increased need for critical thinking? Even here, where one might think critical thought would have its natural home, we have a few spouting a disregard for truth.

The talk of "post-truth" politics is anti-democratic whining from a short-sighted managerial elite who see things slipping away from them and don't know what to do about it. — jamalrob

I agree;

There are two distinct ways in which the word truth is used. — m-theory

Thee are distinct reasons for belief, not distinct uses for "truth".

I post truth all the time! — StreetlightX

O:) So you think.

Hey, I am just pointing out how the term gets used.
Not how it out to be used.

I think the most common way how people start even unintentionally to spread post truths is that the truly get attached to some political cause or event, like hatred of one political candidate in elections. Then the most damning attack against this candidate is something that the people like. Elections are the silly season typically, a time when people do get emotionally attached to things they would otherwise not be interested in. And of course, that's a good thing that people get excited about elections. Yet if a person thinks some politician is evil, then this person is quite open to post-truths that prove their case. — ssu

Absolutely. I think that this is just the usual bias that afflicts judgment made especially obvious. I'm tempted to stress something like a necessary gap between the righteous person and the thinking person. There's a personality type, perhaps rare, that is more concerned with accuracy than with any other allegiance. Of course partisans on either side will resent this detachment if they sniff it out. They will probably prefer the journalist or theorist who sprinkles in the "correct" value judgements judiciously. Perhaps some of the best thinking exists in peer-to-peer conversations between specimens of this type. Since I identify with this type, though, I can be accused of a sort of bias. So it goes.

So here we are, with a fascist president-elect. At what stage will truth reassert itself? If?

I am just being overly analytic.

"FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide."
The story is completely false, but it was shared on Facebook over half a million times.

Good fake news writers (modern sophists) can make $10/30,000 per month according to National Public Radio. Capitalism is all over commodification, especially where there is low entry cost.

Would that Landru were here. His was the closest we came to an argument in support of a post-truth world. I would value his opinions.


And occasionally I would say "told you so".

Just occasionally.

Yeah where is that guy?

My counter to him would be stolen from the critique of Feyerabend. If anything goes, then those in power get the most say; "anything goes" means everything stays.

Capitalism is all over commodification — Cavacava

It's the commodification of one's attention.

Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote For Trump

One supposes that the critical capacity of the educated is the intervening cause.

I guess the losers need to convince themselves they're smarter. Sure guys, your vote for Clinton was fucking brilliant. She was just what we all needed but we'll never know how great America could have been.

Oh, and where did you arrive at a correlation between education and critical reasoning skills? Maybe there's a correlation between formal education and liberal indoctrination. I certainly noticed that screamingly obvious fact while being schooled.

Most people who voted for Trumpo thought Obama was a Muslim. Go figure.

Very droll. X-)

I more or less agree with @jamalrob & @The Great Whatever

"Post-truth" had been seized upon by 'experts' (in the sense jamalrob used the word) at the exact moment their theories and narratives have been shown to be false (the 'surprise' of Brexit & the 2016 US presidential election etc.)

In many cases, then, "post-truth" is literally used to mean 'an atmosphere in which people no longer believe in our narratives and theories after those narratives and theories have been demonstrated to be false"

In other words: It's easier for certain groups (who Jamalrob's named) to believe that truth itself has been dismissed than to comprehend that they might be wrong about how the world works.

(& sure, there's something 'post-truthy' about e.g. global warming denial, but that sort of post-truth has been around forever, as tgw notes)

Here's something less amusing, but more pertinent than Hanover's reply:

Why gut instinct will decide the most irrational referendum yet

Oh, and where did you arrive at a correlation between education and critical reasoning skills? Maybe there's a correlation between formal education and liberal indoctrination. I certainly noticed that screamingly obvious fact while being schooled. — Hanover

Yeah, not to understand that education is a way of tracking political position, not as a matter of the two correlating, but in the sense that they are the very same thing, is incredibly naive. In America, to be educated is to be liberalized.

Points taken but none of that justifies the claim that we live in a "post-truth" era, which to me is just a fancy meme, and ironically self-undermining. And if this is representative of the strategy of progressives, to be martyrs of truth in a post-truth world, we just end up playing the same partisan game we accuse the opposition of. Better we work on the presumption that there is some rationale behind the push for change and try to understand it and engage with it.

Here's something less amusing, but more pertinent than Hanover's reply:

Why gut instinct will decide the most irrational referendum yet — Banno

Oddly enough, although in the New Scientist, that was rather a 'gut instinct' article, strong on experts, short on detailed evidence.

I did vote Brexit and was shocked that so many 'liberals' were shocked by the vote. It made clear to me that there was a consensus among Cameron-Tories, Liberals and Blairite Labourites that they still haven't come to terms with. Instead they keep puzzling over the supposed 'irrationality' of the majority that in this instance was against them.

One likely odd outcome for the UK of course is that we will have more black immigrants and less white ones, since we will no longer favour Europeans. It was a strange myth that the European Union, by keeping out most people from anywhere but Europe, was somehow 'liberal' about immigration. Nevertheless there's an obvious danger that rhetoric can become fact, that the anti-immigrant talk of racists - which has undoubtedly stirred up racism in the short term - will have longer-lasting effects.

Meanwhile across the pond the best the U.S. system could do was pitch a tired-looking machine politician against a maverick neo-Fascist. I don't feel (pace Hanover's comments) as an outsider that I'm a loser in Clinton losing - but the U.S.'s tentacles reach all over the globe and we are stuck with the results. I live rather near a U.S.-run 'early warning' station here in northern England, so we are something of a helpless American outpost if the maverick Kingfish presses any unexpected buttons.

None of this is post-truth though. It's much easier to ascertain 'the truth' of events now than it was in the establishment-controlled 60's of my youth, but that doesn't mean anyone wants to know it. Political discourse is gruesome, overwhelmingly a child of public relations - the interwoven worlds of political parties, ad agencies and banks and large business spin their key fictions. But this is not a shift. Vance Packard's 'The Hidden Persuaders' was published in the 1950's and its findings still seem valid to me. Truth is a casualty of the discovery that people respond better to the right kind of lie.

I more or less agree with @jamalrob & @The Great Whatever

"Post-truth" had been seized upon by 'experts' (in the sense jamalrob used the word) at the exact moment their theories and narratives have been shown to be false (the 'surprise' of Brexit & the 2016 US presidential election etc.)

In many cases, then, "post-truth" is literally used to mean 'an atmosphere in which people no longer believe in our narratives and theories after those narratives and theories have been demonstrated to be false" — csalisbury

No, that's just a transparent attempt at a tu quoque and ad hominem: people who talk about "post-truth" are themselves poopy-heads, and that being the case, anything they say is humbug. And that is, unfortunately, the way most political discussions go.


While I agree that there's nothing new about "post-truth," it does seem to be one of the more prominent features of the contemporary zeitgeist. I am seeing it being aggressively promoted by the Russian propaganda machine. The idea that they are trying to inculcate is:

There is no truth, or if there is, no one can know it, which is just the same. There are always two sides to every story, everything can be doubted, every narrator is most likely corrupt and self-serving. Therefore, the choice of what to believe is not so much rational and empirical as moral. To wit, if you are a patriot, you should assume the attitude of "my country, right or wrong" and believe the self-serving narrative offered by the official news media and patriotic (i.e. loyal) pundits.

And from what I can see, this idea is being effectively internalized. I remember when the accusations of wide-spread, institutionalized, government-supported doping in Russian sports broke out, a radio station conducted informal interviews of people on the street. One response stuck out to me: a woman, in answer to the question whether she thought the accusations were true, said something to the effect that "I am a patriot of my country, so I am going to believe that we are innocent." At the time I thought this to be a remarkably candid expression of the "post-truth" attitude. But since then I have heard similar sentiments reiterated again and again in interviews with the "common people." One, when pressed on the point, went on to say that, yes, the government-controlled media may not be telling the truth. But then no one can ever know the truth. He was still going to believe the official narrative.

A strategic move that often goes along with the "post-truth" idea is to implicitly concede that, yes, we are shit, but so is everyone else. And if you are a patriot, then your own shit doesn't stink. This move is probably felt to be necessary in the environment in which the iron curtain is no longer seen as effective in stemming the flow of information and communication with the world outside the government control. Besides, people's moral reactions cannot be completely extinguished through propaganda. A more effective strategy is to sour them to the entire world, turn them into cynics. Our elections are not fair? Well, neither is anyone else's. Our official media serves up lies and propaganda? So does the supposedly free western media. Our government is corrupt and inefficient? So is every government. There is no such thing as democracy and freedom. Everyone is doing it. We are no worse than anyone else.

Lol, people conflating "truthfulness" with epistemological notions of truth... Is the general public talking about epistemology these days? No. "Post truth" is about false news, not about axioms, verisimilitude and/or the problem of induction. Calling outright lies "post truth" is political spin doctoring.

But bullshit is useful... meaning as use and all.

No, that's just a transparent attempt at a tu quoque and ad hominem: people who talk about "post-truth" are themselves poopy-heads, and that being the case, anything they say is humbug. And that is, unfortunately, the way most political discussions go.

Eh, not really.

if the phenomenon of politically-driven fact-indifference is a perennial one

&

if a new term has been coined, to refer to this same perennial phenomenon as though it's unprecedented

&

if one is interested in what is new about this situation

then: the phenomenon in question is not 'post-truth' but 'a collection of groups claiming that there is an unprecedented event/era/atmosphere called post-truth'

And to understand that, you have to understand where those groups are coming from. So, while I could be wrong about some of my assumptions (your cynicism narrative has some truth to it, for instance), this isn't really a matter of calling other people poopy-heads, or painting others as childish which - tu quoque, bub! - is the kinda ad hominem yr doing rn. But, hey, fallacy-sniping tends to be sublimated poopy-head/I'm rubber you're glue 9 times out of 10 anyway.

During my early youth, the narrative was that 'reality has a liberal bias.' And I recall vividly that as I child, given the household I was raised in, I actually believed this. And I think maybe the people peddling it were serious, which is scarier than a child being duped.

What you have to understand is that political positions warp one's entire mirror-house reality around them. They don't exist as pieces of that reality.

I maintain that the spin doctor and the bullshitter are distinct, so:

Spin doctor - That is the truth, but it means this...
Liar - That is the truth, but I am going to tell you this...
Bullshitter - I am going to tell you this...

The distinction between liar and bullshitter is harder to maintain than that between liar and spin doctor.