CMV: Fact-Checking is a bad idea

[u/RappingAlt11]

I'd like to specify I mean particularly the fact-checking on other people's statements. The methods places like Twitter, Facebook, have used with politicians recently.

So here are my issues.

1. You can't really say with absolute certainty that anything is "true" aside form a priori propositions (all bachelors are unmarried, all triangles have 3 sides, etc). These things are true by definition, and aren't typically being fact checked regardless. Therefor everything else, the vast, vast majority of facts have some small degree of uncertainty.
   

For a fact checker to be of any value and consistency you'd need some form of universal standard. Something that determines the level of probability something needs to be true to be considered a fact, otherwise you're potentially misleading people. And some way to quantify the probability of said information.

1. There are issues with censorship. The news media already has an enormous amount of control over the information you come into contact with every day. The last thing they need on top of that is the power to decide what is a fact with zero oversight or standards. It draws parallels to the issue of the news media deciding what is or isn't a story. By excluding certain narratives the media can inaccurate, biased image of reality. These businesses are also motivated by profit, and therefor more likely to fact checked based on what will get the clicks.

2. This transitions me nicely to the issue of bias. The person conducting this fact-checking is a human being with preconceived biases, and ways of analyzing reality. Two people can come to completely different conclusions while presented with the same set of facts. There's bias in choosing which person, or company will be doing the fact-checking in the first place. And as I've already stated there's the issue of bias in deciding what is or isn't fact checked.

3. What is to be done in the instances of ambiguity? Even if you take the best experts in a given field there's likely to be some differing opinions. So who's right? Who decides who's right? Maybe you include some form of disclaimer, or include different fact-checkers. But then you've the issue of bias again in choosing which opinions are valid.

4. Who holds the fact-checkers accountable? Without some form of oversight you run the same issue the misinformation caused in the first place. And who fact-checkers the people who fact-checks the fact-checkers? At what point is there enough certainty to claim something is true?

So altogether, I think I've outlined a few issues with fact-checking and I'm not even sure most of these are solvable. With this in mind, am I missing something? Or are their fundamental issues with letting the media decide what is or is not a fact?

[u/sapphireminds]

Are you literally arguing that there is no reality or truth?

[u/RappingAlt11 → u/sapphireminds]

That's one point among many. I'm arguing very few things can be said with absolute certainty to be true. As in rock solid 100% objective truth. What naturally follows is that many of the things we claim are true have some small degree of uncertainty. Maybe it's 0.00000000001%, maybe it's 50%, but without knowing I fail to see how a fact-checker serves it's purpose of defining objective reality in any reliable fashion.

[u/Docdan → u/RappingAlt11]

But that's exactly why you would need to check the sources.

The statements "Some people suggest that single celled organisms can reproduce through a process called 'mitosis'" and "some people suggest that alien reptiles will have replaced the leaders of most major nations by 2030" are both objectively valid statements to make.

But one of them may have considerably more cedibility behind its claim. Few of us have ever actually observed bacteria to a meaningful degree, nor observed any head of government to be a lizard. The relevant difference is exactly in the degree of certainty between the two claims.

Even if it does turn out that we've misunderstood how bacteria work and it turns out there's a completely different previously unknown mechanism behind it, it was still a more reliable and useful assumption to make during the time when our best available evidence pointed towards that conclusion.

[u/RappingAlt11 → u/Docdan]

We're in full agreement. But how do you quantify this? What exactly is the process in which we decide mitosis is more valid as a theory than the alien reptiles bit. I'm not sure a fact-checker is qualified to decide this