The Forum > Article Comments > Do we want 'truth' or 'truthiness'? > Comments
Do we want 'truth' or 'truthiness'? : Comments
By Don Aitkin, published 6/2/2015Truthiness is 'What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.'
- Pages:
-
- Page 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
-
- All
This ignores the fact that long chains of complex reasoning are necessarily involved in construing the evidence. If the process of reasoning contains even only one logical error, it is liable to invalidate the whole chain. And in such complex phenomena there is not just the ordinary human liability to logical error, and not just the extra liability from long and complex processes.
There is also the very great liability from the fact that these complex phenomena concern huge political redistributions of wealth, which create vested interests in *factually and logically false* "truthiness".
For everyone else, the cost will be a certain fraction - usually small - of their total product. But for the vested interests, the benefit will be the whole of their income. So they will, and do, form a class of proselytes devoting all their brains and energy to spreading the word of "truthiness".
What we have seen demonstrated in this forum, over and over and over again, is that belief in both global warming policy and statist economic policy fails for simple illogic, to which the statists have no answer but only to endlessly repeat their problematic appeals to problematic "evidence" consisting of nothing but the pronouncements of their own political vested interests, larded with every logical fallacy in the book.