I suppose a direct experience might be something like the following: Standing in front of my oak tree in my back yard, as opposed to looking at the same oak tree in a picture (direct and indirect). Hearing God speak as he stands in front of you (e.g., Jesus and the disciples), or reading his words in the Bible. Although it's not always clear the way many religious people use these words. — Sam26

Would you agree that the distinction between a direct experience of X and an experience of X differ only insofar as direct experience of X is not mediated, whereas experience of X in general is mediated?

I think when someone reads the bible and hears God speaking to them through it, the experience they have is not of the character of God announcing their presence through the interpretation of words; a mediated relationship; it's a borderline aesthetic sense of identity, a tacit "this is divine" that comes from immersion in the words, like a calling or a whisper of purpose. The people who have experienced this readily distinguish it from ordinary functioning of their senses, even if the divinity expresses itself in a usual sensory modality (so no necessary divine sense to have it). It's direct in the sense of finding oneself in an intimate connection with the divine while reading, not by inferring something is divine or being caused to believe that something is divine as a result of what is read.

You and I both see the rainbow. The use of the word "rainbow" isn't determined solely by its attachment to a private sensation; it's rather that when someone senses such a presence, it is attributed to the rainbow. — Banno

My friends Anna and Joshua both hear God. The use of the word "god" isn't determined solely by its attachment to a private sensation, it's rather than when someone senses such a presence, it is attributed to God.

You need a finer net.

However, I would point out that IF someone did have a direct experience with God, then the belief would be basic for them. — Sam26

What distinguishes a direct experience from an experience?

Of course what exactly counts as a direct experience? My contention is that what most people count as direct experiences with God are merely psychological. This is not to say that there can't be real experiences with God (if one exists), but only that it would be difficult to discern in most cases.

Nowadays we've got means and arguments to doubt things like possession by spirits, God's existence and so on. But there were less resources in the past; it made more sense to believe in spirits and souls, so they fit into the transparent networks of association, action and thought that prevailed at the time. (Or some of the time). So it looks like what can be doubted isn't solely a function of conceptual necessity, it's a function of historical and social circumstances.

In other words, if whether it makes no sense to doubt a statement is the sole criterion for whether that statement may be held as a basic belief, and whether it makes sense to doubt a statement depends upon social and historical circumstances, then whether a statement can serve as a basic belief depends upon the social and historical circumstances it finds itself in.

If basic beliefs, by their nature, are necessarily true, then what is true comes to depend upon historical and social circumstances. If basic beliefs, by their nature, need not be true, they are not guaranteed to form a basis for a foundationalist epistemology.

I find the discussion in Platinga's article to bring us to consider the ambiguities involved with the very idea of basic beliefs and discovering what they are through analysing language use.

Ah, god as the beetle in the box! — Banno

This is a greedy reduction. The use of the word God isn't determined solely by its attachment to a private sensation; it's rather that when someone senses such a presence, it is attributed to God. Just like the word "tree"'s use isn't determined by "I see this tree" when functioning as a basic belief.

and "here is a hand" is one of those. — Banno

Person on salvia with no left hand, "I can see my hand". Why should a minor thing like solipsism condition basic beliefs for the majority of people that don't even know what solipsism is?

I don't really buy it. If you're going to make any condition of use sufficient for basicality, if you change the use you change the criteria of basicality. It requires some work to distinguish this from arbitrariness.

while the tree is before you. But hearing the voice of god while reading the bible is something that could be doubted. — Banno

Why? What lets you distinguish one from the other?

Guess a grid on an object in a more general topology would be a collection of disjoint closed (or open?) sets that cover the object.

Compactness? — jgill

This was my thought too. If covers need not have a finite subcover, then something like a pixellation couldn't exist for sets that fail to have finite subcovers.

My other intuition was that: open covers having finite open subcovers in some topology (of a suitable object) would probably let you "push" any open set in that topology into an open set in the plane through a continuous injective function, then you could cover the open set in the plane with a grid of polygons; composing the continuous injection with the point->polygon grid assignment would give an association between the points of any open set in the first object with a pixel, then you 'pull' the point back through the composition. I didn't check if this preserves the grid like properties on the first space (maybe small open sets in the first space can be guaranteed to hit multiple pixels).

Are your "polygons" abstract entities? — jgill

I was imagining closed plane figures with straight line edges.

Topological spaces or what? — jgill

Yes!

Compactness in TS if you adjoin limit points, I suppose. — jgill

What is TS?

Can you explain that by describing a type of object or information that can not be visually represented on a computer monitor? — Zelebg

Yes.

A pixellation consists of a finite number of finite pixels arranged in some sort of grid that cover an object.

So I took an object which has infinitely many things in it, all the points contained in a square whose side lengths are 1 and gave it a finite pixellation, four squares defined by its non-diagonal lines of symmetry.

Such a square has infinitely many points, but it nevertheless has a finite pixellation. So an object having a finite pixellation doesn't prove that the object is finite.

What information is lost? Imagine that you're trying to specify your position on the monitor's image - you can represent this as the position of a pixel (its centre). If you move right one pixel, you move a distance according to the length of the pixel. You can't specify any within pixel coordinate just using pixels.

If instead you want to be able to move right by any distance at all, you're already dealing with an infinite object (at least something like the rational numbers, the fractions, which have a coordinate between every pair of coordinates, no matter how close they are).

I use the term "cultural Marxism" as a blanket reference to the vague collection of ideologies that emerges from atheism and that rejects the requirements of traditional religious law. I don't know of a better term to capture the idea. — alcontali

Secularist. You rail against secularism.

Of course. The entire process is faulty. The assumption that every aspect of the universe can be so pixeled assumes his conclusion. — jgill

Do you know what kind of properties a space would need to have so that every subset of it could be covered by a finite set of polygons?

You are not addressing the problem. What part of the universe you could not potentialy see on your monitor? You can either name what kind of object or information it is that your monitor can not visually convey, or you have to admit your monitor can convey any and every possible information. — Zelebg

A pixellation of something is a map of it to a finite set of polygons that cover it . Let's say they're squares. It doesn't matter what you apply the pixellation to, it ends up finite. You can throw squares on the unit square $[0,1]\times [0,1]$ by dividing it into 4 squares along its non-diagonal lines of symmetry, but the unit square is uncountably infinite. That is, an object having a finite pixellation is not sufficient for it being a finite object (specifically, of finite cardinality).

I think you're confusing the necessary finiteness of the pixellation with the finiteness of the pixellated object.

I should say that I agree that the argument isn't really about God's existence, it's breaking down a bunch of implications.

Basic belief -> groundless belief? Nope.
Reject popular at the time (apparently) foundationalist criterion for basicality -> arbitrary beliefs are basic? Nope.

Then highlighting a pretty hard criterion problem for beliefs being basic.

The only argument for the existence of God in it is that if there's some belief which is properly basic that concerns God, it's reasonable for the person to conclude that God exists on that basis.

(2) is rooted in basic belief only if there is a God who speaks to humans and we actually have the faculty to hear it. — Relativist

(1) is rooted in basic belief only if there was a tree who is seeable by humans and we actually have the faculty to hear it.

I believe the same logic applies to the tree as to God. You can substitute tree for God in the expression, and hearing for sight.

You are doubting that people have a special God faculty, whereas the example only requires hearing.

Indeed, it does; but does it succeed? — Banno

I find the argument plausible.

(1) I see a tree.
(2) I heard God speaking to me when I read the Bible.

People exist that have sound mind and normal perceptual faculties that do (1) and (2). I can no more doubt that I saw the tree than that I heard God. Therefore, the tree exists and God exists.

Assuming that you believe in basic beliefs, on what criterion would you distinguish instances of (1) from instances of (2) as basic beliefs?

I like the term "culturally Marxist" because that is exactly what it is. — alcontali

It really isn't. "Left liberal", "social democrat", "progressive liberal" are much better.

Your run of the mill proponent of gender equality, racial equality, disability rights, secularism, progressive taxation, fiscal transparency and welfare advocacy doesn't take their ideological cues from Marxism or socialism, which are anticapitalist politics relying on a structural analysis of class and place class in a central role in their political opinions, they're normal pro-capitalist pro-democracy pro-human rights people in a vague and usually unarticulated sense. Less Rosa Luxemburg, more Walter Bregman.

Even if this vague sense filled the leftist politics vacuum after socialism and worker's politics died down in the west.

The kind of vocabulary that paints Bernie Sanders as akin to the freakin' Naxalites is intentionally misleading.

So we've got the ability to talk about natural numbers and addition, and identify expressions containing them with each other (like 1+2 = 3 = 2+1). The natural numbers are 0,1,2,3,... and so on, and it would be nice to have a formal theory of subtraction to go along with it.

There's a pretty obvious problem with defining subtraction in the system to work in precisely the same way we're taught in school, like 1-2 = ... what? -1, says school. But -1 isn't a natural number at all. What this means is that for any sense of subtraction which works exactly like the one we have in school, the natural numbers don't let you do it in the general case.

You can define subtraction between two natural numbers a,b whenever b is greater than or equal to a and have it work exactly as expected in that case, but being able to subtract any number from any other and obtain something that we've already defined is extremely desirable. In other words, whatever structure we define subtraction in, it has to be closed under subtraction to work as expected in every case.

An observation that's extremely useful in setting up subtraction in the above way is the following list:

1-1 = 0
2-2=0
3-3=0
4-4=0
...
1+0=1
2+0=2
3+0=3
4+0=4
...

Which demonstrates the, probably obvious, property of subtraction that a number minus itself is always zero. And that any number plus zero is itself.

Imagine, now, that you're not looking at familiar numbers, and instead you're looking at symbols. There is some operation such that for any x (say 2), there exists some y (say 2) that when you combine them together with the operation, you get 0. What would be nice would be to be able to take the original operation we defined, addition, and define additional elements into the structure of natural numbers so that for any number x we can guarantee the existence of some y so that we can have:

x+y=0=y+x

We want to ape the ability of subtraction to take any x and ensure that we can subtract x from it and get 0, but make it a property of addition instead. This property is called the existence of an additive inverse for every element of the structure, or more generally the existence of an inverse for every element under an operation.

Predictably, the additive inverse of 2 is (-2), the additive inverse of 1 is (-1)... the additive inverse of x is (-x).

So the first list can be rewritten as:

1+(-1) = 0
2+(-2)=0
3+(-3)=0
4+(-4)=0

There seems to me a contradiction involved in setting out basic beliefs as dependent on anything. — Banno

The articles goes to pains to argue that it's not a justificatory relationship between a basic belief and something else which grounds it, it's something more like a practical one. If one sees a tree, in normal circumstances one may hold that one sees a tree, and infer that the tree exists. The inference there is not an act of cognition or deduction, it is a practical presupposition, like that it can be said that I believe that "I am holding a fork" is true when I am holding a fork purely in virtue of holding the fork. The argument construes belief in "God exists" in precisely the same manner as belief that forks exists while holding them.

While I disagree with the conclusions, I enjoy the conceptual machinery here. Basic beliefs spring from a context of activity, if one acts in a context involving God, belief in God is basic. The interesting question in my book is the status of being basic; is it a property of a statement, is it a binary relationship between a statement and a context, or is it a ternary relationship between a statement and a context and an event or activity?

Context narrows that down so that it becomes truth-apt. — frank

Why does this matter if we're already going to stipulate that a sentence is truth apt? Like "There were dinosaurs 66 million years ago".

I'm not sure how a proposition is different from a state of affairs. Neither is made of physical objects. — frank

I think the relationship of a state of affairs to composition of necessarily physical objects (for some account of physical) is an intuition you're bringing to the table, rather than one which is an intended necessary feature of the accounts.

If you contextualize a sentence, how is that different from using a proposition (except for not mentioning the word?) — frank

I think you and @Nagase have very different ideas of what contextualising means. A statement having contextual truth conditions requires spelling out how the truth conditions depend on the context - usually in some function like way. So "I am eating dinner now" is false, but it was true earlier. The truth conditions depend on the "now" like a timestamp or an alarm, the truth conditions are satisfied when the "now" alarm goes off and it is true at the present moment. The truth conditions for the dependence on "I" are similar.

I believe you're imagining that if the truth conditions of a statement depend upon the context of the statement, and the context is something which is ultimately mind dependent, then the truth conditions depend upon something which is mind dependent, and so the truth conditions are mind dependent.

Some would say Platonic. So? — frank

It was a gesture toward Frege. I also gave you gestures towards deflationism and correspondence in general, which in general are not (intended to anyway) work with propositions considered as eternal mental content. The relationship is between some statement and its truth conditions, an eternal abstract idea need not play a mediating role in every account - well, maybe it really does need to, but realist accounts don't make use of it constantly.

More generally, consider that when someone focusses on truth conditions of statements, the truth conditions are not easily construable as necessarily mental content at all, they can be events, states of affairs, etc - world stuff, worldly happenings not necessarily mind stuff.

They can be the same thing. Depends. — frank

Yes. I use them ("proposition", "statement") interchangeably most of the time, specifically when I think the distinction doesn't matter.

It isn't equivalent. The quotes indicate an utterance. — frank

I meant that they had the same truth conditions. not that they were equal as strings or utterances. The "would" maybe behaves differently for past events.

The proposition does not contain the moon, the earth, or orbiting. It's not any particular sentence, and its not an utterance — frank

I think in this case it's more illuminating to focus on truth conditions of statements; which are broadly construable as states of affairs; rather than distilling the proposition as an abstract object that is somehow equivalent to the truth condition but also expresses it.

Could you comment on whether realism requires propositions? Am I wrong about that? — frank

I know this wasn't direct at me, but realism about stuff generally concerns the notion of mind independence of that stuff. Minimally it requires something like "Dinosaurs existed on Earth 66 million years ago", considered as a statement or a proposition (and these don't mean the same thing) is about dinosaurs and the Earth 66 million years ago, and that how this statement is true is not a matter of convention as the statement somehow satisfies the world. This "how" maybe a correspondence relation, or an "is true" iff (truth condition) in a deflationary account. There're lots of variables.

The "abstract idea" notion of a proposition (as some statement content) is very Fregean, and you certainly don't need to have an apparatus of associating eternal mental content with statements to assert the mind independence of whether statements are true or not.

A proposition has no location in time or space, and yet it somehow exists. — frank

This isn't a particularly remarkable property.

A friendship has no location in time or space. "Where is my friendship?" "Over there by the rug".

A law doesn't (it instead has a domain of applicability). Corporations and institutions don't ("Where's the university? You just showed me a building.), colours don't ("You just showed me a rose, I wanted to see red!"), moral values don't ("I found a picture of justice in this manifesto" "You mean metaphorically?" "No, justice was literally contained in the pages"), golf doesn't (Watch Tiger Woods play, and you'll never see golf as such), artworks don't (where is "The Scream" when you can print two copies of it?)...

Where must the word "egg" live?

This issue has driven some philosophers to reject propositions and deflate truth to a property of sentences or utterances. If you do this, you'll be back with your question about how an 'unstated statement' could be true. You'll have to allow that the only truths are those which have at some point been uttered. — frank

Please spell the reasoning out for me from: " "There are dinosaurs now" would be true 66 million years ago" to "unstated statement", to me it looks equivalent to "There were dinosaurs 66 million years ago". Incidentally there were no humans then. When we stipulate such scenarios in which there are no humans, we obviously use our current language abilities to do so, but that does not suggest that the sense of the counterfactual scenario or possibility itself is dependent upon the existence of humans; the truth conditions of "There were dinosaurs 66 million years ago" has nothing to do with the existence of humans or our language abilities, we just have a nice ability to attach language to actualities and possibilities and discuss such matters. The truth conditions are just reality shifting underneath the words.

For Muslims, Islamic law is not subject to negotiation. — alcontali

Shame about all those kids sexy dancing to this in schools in Iran. Remember to swipe right on Tindr if you think she looks good in hijab.

You're also shitting on Turkey's national political hero, Atatürk, the reformer, who apparently is not a Muslim by your standards.

The trick to seeing the situation is to become emotionally neutral. Emotion is the thing that binds me to my precious view and blinds me to its flaws. — frank

Am I to read this as a suggestion that I'm blinded to the flaws of realist intuitions because I'm emotionally attached to them?

The proposition is the abstract object — frank

Why is it necessary to believe that a truth condition of a statement, considered as a state of affairs, is an eternal abstract object when all that it concerns are contingently formed material particulars or events or generalisations thereof? "There were dinosaurs before there were humans" is true, because dinosaurs existed before there were humans is a fact.

Counterfactuals are more difficult, "The Earth would still orbit around the sun even if there were no humans" is true because what drives Earth's orbit around the sun is not existentially or causally dependent upon the existence of humans; because it works in a way indifferent to our existence it would work the same way without us.

The simplest solution to fix the problem is conclude that the ongoing experiment of co-education has failed, to abolish it, and to go back to boys-only and girls-only schools. — alcontali

How do you even come up with this stuff.

You just end up with these eternal abstract objects, some if which are false. — frank

Why? "The Earth would orbit the sun even if there were no humans" is about the real Earth, the real sun and real humans. It's a stipulation, but it's not about the stipulated content (the content isn't merely possible, it's actual, and we stipulate about it). If there were no humans, the Earth would orbit the sun - are the Earth and the sun eternal abstract objects there?

We could say that what would appear to us as dinosaurs (if we had been there) were there prior to human life. — Janus

That's quite different from being able to say "There were dinosaurs before there were humans", which is true. Why do we need (if this is the point you're making) to change from "There was X before there were humans" to "There was what would appear to humans as X before there were humans" to get a meaningful statement when "There were X before there were humans" means something and doesn't mean the same thing as "There was what would appear to humans as X before there were humans". The first statement is about X, the second statement is about a human in relation to X.

Though, I think that so long as we agree that there really were dinosaurs before humans (not just counterfactual "things which would appear as dinosaurs"), we're in agreement.

Even if a sentence that expresses P was never uttered at any time, P would still be truth-apt. — frank

I don't see the problem? We can interpret "What would there be without humans?" and "What was there before humans?" questions unproblematically; the Earth would orbit the sun even if there were no humans.

I wasn't suggesting there were no dinosaurs prior to the advent of humanity. There being dinosaurs would be an actuality, not a truth (in a context where truth is considered to be a property of propositions or statements). — Janus

Do you believe in a modified version of * where

[y is actual => there exists a human x that can express y]

?

And it is really weird to have the POTUS just tossing out obviously false information. It's bizzare and hard to accept in the first place. There's emotion that's opposed to the truth in this case. Cut the ties to the facts, and emotion can do what it wants to do — frank

I think that's about how it works. Though there are other features of it.

If you successfully control what discourse is about, you can leave relevant bits out of it. An example with Trump, the kids in cages on the border and ICE are thrown at his feet, but Obama's presidency started it. This gets taken out of the context of "Trump and Obama actually treated migrants in similar way" and put into the context of defending Trump through tu quoque.

Zizek has a good example about climate change and recycling, people can go apeshit at you if you've not put rubbish in the right bins - doing your bit to save the climate - but they don't go apeshit at industrial agriculture, petrochemical and oil CEOs. It's like "do your recycling!" suffices, because everyone has to do their part. Framing the whole thing in terms of individual actions instead of systemic interventions (Video from climate scientist on sensible systemic interventions).

There's also a time lapse involved in uptaking belief from misinformation and framing; it's not like a skeptical person immediately goes "I believe this!" to propaganda or misinformation, the effect occurs when heuristically searching for available information to interpret (in a broad sense including gut emotional response and snap judgements) a claim or situation, or in making a decision. If you ask pretty much anyone for their immediate mental image of "terrorist", they (and I) imagine some young Muslim bloke; that's the image in my head. It doesn't matter that much that the image is false, and acts of domestic terrorism are disproportionately committed by young white far right men, the framing effects take their toll.

How does it affect passers by? — frank

Maybe a good "natural experiment" on this is to look at attitudes towards climate change. It's

A

(1a) settled that anthropogenic climate change is real
(2a) settled that the differences arising in the climate from our actions are relatively large
(3a) settled that we're already feeling these effects in social problems and extreme weather rates

But in discussions about it you see:

B

(1b) Attempts to discredit the sheer mountain of evidence of the reality of anthropogenic climate change by focussing on single (usually misattributed) study flaws or counter-variation (like the El Nino cycle) or erroneous claims.
(2b and 3b) Attempts to discredit claims that the difference caused by humans on the climate is large by focussing on "so it's an apocalypse now eh? What about the Mayans and the Millenium Bug!" like claims; false equivocations and hyperbole, then denying it's hyperbole. Looking at information in a highly decontextualised manner ("This part of the Greenland ice sheet has been growing this year!") to refute a well established general claim. "Who cares if this island people have lost most of their land from sea level rises? It's an isolated case!" (ignoring literature on climate refugees)

If you imagine an observer coming into a social media discussion, they'll see supporters of settled science A speaking on a level playing field with supporters of lobbying derived bullshit B. Usually what's happened appears to be a clickbait article about climate change has a bunch of falsehoods in it, skeptical individuals will realise that the article is clickbait and remain unconvinced, but precisely the same thing holds for reporting on well researched science.

Part of the effect is to create, as you put it, a fog where people can't tell true from false because they are equally skeptical of all claims. In a situation where someone's belief is not driven by contact with well reasoned argument and evidence, emotional and discursive factors play a bigger part in informing and maintaining belief; what's true becomes little more than what is presumed in what media you expose yourself to.

Another part of the effect relates to derailing - or controlling the conversation - making claims that lure people into responding and thus increasing the "broadcast strength"of the original message if the responses explicitly correct it and react to it rather than providing their own narrative. Even if everyone who responds to it disagrees with it. The "lure" works by exposing skeptical or hitherto unexposed people to a claim, or a framing context for a claim, in a situation of heated debate; so when you just "skim over it", you see good points from both sides, but one person (like @NOS4A2) is controlling the flow of conversation - what topics get brought up in what way, and what easy refutations there are for them. It's to the benefit of a position's exposure to be obviously wrong or implausible given an informed perspective and divisive between people who are uninformed (read: skeptical in the usual "the news is so biased now" sense) on a matter; that's good misinformation, it makes waves, it goes viral, it frames discourse, it creates bottlenecks of inquiry through saturation (want to know about X? well guess what, it's similar to Y on the internet - now you know about Y).

The major distinguishing feature, I think, between intentional misinformation and just being misinformed is that intentional misinformation about X is designed to intervene on how the discourse surrounding X works, not to work within it to assess and challenge claims. Being dispassionately reasonable about an issue when engaging someone who is intentionally misinforming can still help them saturate the medium with their message, or the presumptions underlying it.

The role that presumptions play is easier to see in talking about trans issues, a recent popular issue was "should trans women be allowed to compete in women's sports?"; which is a neatly packaged clusterfuck overlapping the question of the distinction of natal sex and gender, the possible effects of bodily differences between trans women and cis women, and sports fairness intuitions. Misinformation is designed to make waves and push the exposed into a desired position; through divisive or occlusive framing, through taking a lot longer to correct than to state, and to appeal to the ultimately aesthetic and heuristic components of belief formation than the logical or analytic ones.

If truth is a property of statements, and there were no statements prior to the advent of humanity, how could there have been truths prior to the advent of humanity? — Janus

Let * be [ (y is true => there exists a human x that can express y)]
* is equivalent to "if there is no human x that can express y, y is false" - the antecedent is true whenever there are no humans, so if * holds an arbitrary y is false (when there are no humans). Implications of trivialism aside, the interesting thing is:

The counterintuitive thing about "There were dinosaurs before the advent of humanity" isn't that there were no human languages capable of expressing a truth about dinosaurs at the time; which is obviously true when there are no humans capable of language; it's about the falsehood of there being dinosaurs before the advent of humanity. There really were no dinosaurs before humans existed if * holds. It's less about human language, and more about the dinosaurs winking into existence in the past if * holds. The truth conditions of claims regarding dinosaurs existing come to depend on the existence of humans, not just whether the articulability or expressibility of the truth of those claims requires humans.

We know the dinosaurs didn't wink into existence in the past when humans became capable of expressing "Dinosaurs existed in the past", so * does not hold.

I think it’s a bad idea to have any sort of centralized curation of information, let alone some committee of experts or commissars picking and choosing what info we are allowed to see. — NOS4A2

The algorithms already do that by themselves. There's just so much content available that it makes sense, in terms of generating revenue and keeping users on site, to curate exposure. Some smart casual commissar already decides how we get shown what we get shown, and we need laws to protect the "free marketplace of ideas" from its worst impulses, habits and cooptions.

After 70 years of television culture and unwarranted trust in the caste of professional liars, generalized skepticism and a deeply ingrained, knee-jerk reaction of seeking to corroborate and verify were long overdue. — alcontali

Generalised skepticism is useful for misinformation. If you're extremely skeptical of everything, you come to believe what you believe through what you're exposed to and saturated with, and that exposure is manipulable - like the unholy union between targeted advertising and political campaigning. You won't realise how your beliefs are shifting until you're a dogmatic Muslim living somewhere off grid subsisting solely off of Bitcoin, or shouting "There's a fine line between eugenics and racism!" at an Turkish looking bloke in a bar, or believing that women are inherently whores and that you are unworthy of sexual intimacy because of the shape of your skull. All the while saying: it's those bloody normies that are so duped, take the red pill, duh.

I think the only effective means of combatting this crap from influencing you (as much as possible anyway) is doing what you can to curate your exposure to it. Expose yourself to news media that reacts more slowly, cites sources that have a good reputation and have independent journalism/research collation as a component (remember that stuff you get taught in school about primary, secondary and tertiary sources? Yeah, don't forget that). Getting news from established news sources rather than social media is a start, doing a mental exercise of noticing what website you're reading from (Do you recognise it? What sources does it cite for its information?).

Worse, this canard is being used to justify seizing control of social media. — NOS4A2

Which is great, really, the kind of measures that Facebook and Twitter took against ISIS were extremely effective at neutering their penetration in their platforms. The companies which own social media are in an extremely privileged place of control regarding information exposure, which affords them a great opportunity to cut the influence of organised disinformation and propaganda.

I was looking for info on how to spot intentional misinformation. But yes, fact checking helps. — frank

Don't have any resources for specifically Russian trolls, but the Daily Stormer published a guide on how to draw people into Naziism through social and news media savvy, the Huffington Post reported on it.

There was also an (alleged) FBI document circulating around leftist internet circles around 2009 which was a style guide for internet trolling to disrupt political online spaces. I've spent an hour or so trying to find it but can't.

If I remember right, it has a similar emphasis on simultaneously derailing discussions and innocuously deciding the rails which follow. @NOS4A2's posts are quite a lot like this; I like to imagine that they're actually a highly sophisticated troll that presents all of their misapprehensions as lures. If you start correcting their crap, they've already decided the terms of the discussion. If this plays out on social media, the overall discussion topic is what gets remembered (the lie, the misapprehension), and the impetus to correct it just carries the message further.

With that in mind, a pattern of shortly written posts which are clearly factional in a dispute, aim to be divisive, repeat known misinformation and attempt to discredit everything which doesn't fit in with the assumed frame (or rely lazily upon such a frame), and have an uncanny ability to derail discussions are good indicators that a person is trolling intentionally for some purpose. The aim is to saturate the space with their views rather than argue for them.

Of course, being the internet, it's extremely difficult to tell a troll from a quick to react advocate of a position.

I guess the closest thing to finding a home in words is Google's empty search bar.

I want to highlight the references in the linked post as being excellent. They give you a real sense for what concepts people were wrestling with at the dawn of set theory.

There'd be no one to say anything of "there are dinosaurs", so I don't think it would be false. It just wouldn't be labelled either way. — Isaac

I am pretty sure it would be false if the logic has excluded middle.

(There is someone that believes that P) necessitates (P is true)
is equivalent to
(P is true) entails (There is someone that believes that P)
is equivalent to
(not (There is someone that believes that P)) entails (not (P is true))
When there is no one that believes that P, the last implication allows us to derive (not (P is true)).
Then with excluded middle for all P (P or not P) you get:
P is false.
So "there are dinosaurs" would be false. It'd also be false that "There was plantlife prior to the advent of people capable of belief" until people capable of belief came about, despite everything indicating otherwise.

If the existence of a verification procedure or justification for a statement was necessary for a statement's truth, "There are dinosaurs" would be false before the advent of humanity because there would be no verification procedures or justifications.

If a particular verification procedure or justification was sufficient for a statement's truth, then in order to avoid true falsehoods and false truths, this verification procedure or justification must be infallible; as in this model, X being verified or justified forces "X" is true.

So long as justification and verification are fallible, and there are truths prior to the advent of humanity, justification and verification are logically independent (in the sense of not formally entailing anything about) of statement truth value.

If belief in a statement was necessary for a statement's truth, then "There are dinosaurs" would be false before the advent of humanity because there would be no beliefs in statements (since it is not believed, and belief is necessary for truth, then it is false).

If belief in a statement was sufficient for a statement's truth, then in order to avoid true falsehoods or false truths, this belief must be infallible; as in this model, X being believed forces "X" is true.

So long as belief is fallible, and there are no beliefs in statements prior to the advent of humanity, belief in statements and their truth are logically independent.

What we can say is true is not what is true! Though what we say is true is largely what seems true to us or what can be asserted with adequate justification.

Are there still relationships between justifications/verifications procedures, beliefs and truths? Ideally, a justification or verification procedure connects a truth evidentially and conceptually to a belief. An inquiry may cause us to question, reevaluate and re-contextualise held beliefs to better connect our beliefs to the truth and to dispel false statements and connections.

Epistemology (of statements/declarative knowledge) dwells in the rupture between belief and truth, trying to analyse the bridges we build between them.