'Oxford Dictionaries popularly defined it as "relating to and denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief."'
Since when did objective facts drive or shape public opinion? When did humans ever live in a "truth world"? Take the title and the content of the article itself. Does it aim to arrive at an objective truth or to play on our emotions? When's the last time you consumed media and thought it tried to instill some truth rather than it tried to make me feel someway?
We've always lived in a 'post-truth world' because people are moved by emotions rather than truth. Humans weren't mentally ready for the printing press, newspaper, radio, tv, etc saturated post-world either. But here we are. Go read about the history of printing press, newspaper, radio, tv, etc. The same story. Politicians, priests, journalists, academics, etc claimed these new media technologies were a threat to truth. Feelings and emotions rule mankind, not reason and logic. All AI does is make it a more efficient post-truth world.
I don't think political or cultural issues are particularly amenable to objective truth anyway. You can't run randomised control trials for most of the main political or cultural points of contention.
Yeah they are tangental concepts. Truth is only useful politically to inform decision making. Political frameworks and decisions are fundamentally subjective and would still vary wildly even if we could all agree on fundamental truths. It's the main reason I'm skeptical of technocracy.
On that topic, few things bother me more than the phrase "trust the science."
I understand the intention, but we should be encouraging skepticism and engagement with the underlying tools and methodology.
People will scoff at this but you can find a ton of different "Flat Earthers" either accidentally proving the earth is curved using their own experiments (Eg. Bob Knodel), or even dying trying to prove them (Eg. "Mad" Mike Hughes).
Science is not some "pure" pursuit of truth, with no care for politics, economics, social influence, or biases. Technocrats genuinely scare me, as they often combine these two things, by claiming authority via "trust the science" type nonsense, while holding delusions of scientific purity.
It's more of an open question. While we cannot use the scientific method to evaluate truth and even less so prove it in the mathematical sense with pure abstract reasoning without any wolrdly evidence, there could still be truths (in a weak sense of the word), at least for humans. Because as humans our morals are primarily based on our feelings/instincts/neurochemsitry/etc and those are highly similar (and of course there are exceptions and deviations such as psychopaths) across the world. Depending on our terminal goal as a civilization or society if humans really wanted to we could try and build some "axioms" of morals and build up other political and cultural truths from there.
Yes, I think you've touched on something here that goes all the way back to Aristotle's three appeals (logos, ethos, pathos).
His belief was that a good argument relies on a balance, between appeals to logic (logos), appeals to emotion (pathos), and appeals to what is just / ethical (ethos).
People typically claim logic or objectivity as a simple shorthand for "better", they rarely include formal inductive and deductive logic.
And while formal logic can tremendously enhance the structure and impact arguments, it provides a hollow foundation without appeals to what is right/just, and of little motivation to the reader without appeals to their emotion.
The horrifying thing about our species, is that when you get down to it we care little for formal logic. Caring requires emotion, and emotion often requires ideals about how things should be; consequently, ethos and pathos are necessary for logos.
The pursuit of logic comes last, or as you've noted, sometimes not at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth
Since when did objective facts drive or shape public opinion? When did humans ever live in a "truth world"? Take the title and the content of the article itself. Does it aim to arrive at an objective truth or to play on our emotions? When's the last time you consumed media and thought it tried to instill some truth rather than it tried to make me feel someway?
We've always lived in a 'post-truth world' because people are moved by emotions rather than truth. Humans weren't mentally ready for the printing press, newspaper, radio, tv, etc saturated post-world either. But here we are. Go read about the history of printing press, newspaper, radio, tv, etc. The same story. Politicians, priests, journalists, academics, etc claimed these new media technologies were a threat to truth. Feelings and emotions rule mankind, not reason and logic. All AI does is make it a more efficient post-truth world.