It's extremely difficult because the human psyche seems incapable of distinguishing "fact" from "that which supports my view", at least when the emotions are activated, and the only topics where people seek "fact checking" in the first place are the ones where emotions are activated. There may be exceptions—i.e. people whose minds don't work this way—but if they exist, they're so rare as to be no basis for social policy. (And I doubt that there are really exceptions.)
That's why there doesn't seem to be any fact checker whose calls aren't predictable from one of the major ideological partitions.
Another way of putting this is that the question, "what are the facts?" is complex enough to already recreate the entire political and ideological contest. It's understandable that people would like to reduce that contest to a simpler subset of factual questions—but you can't. Just the opposite: that apparently simpler subset reduces to it.
(Edit: it might be worth repeating that there are infinitely many facts, and they don't select themselves—people do that, and when they're people with political preferences, that's usually the high order bit. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
> It's extremely difficult because the human psyche seems incapable of distinguishing "fact" from "that which supports my view", at least when the emotions are activated, and the only topics where people seek "fact checking" in the first place are the ones where emotions are activated. There may be exceptions—i.e. people whose minds don't work this way—but if they exist, they're so rare as to be no basis for social policy. (And I doubt that there are really exceptions.)
I think there are at least people who do seek to fact check their own views or dissents from their own views with genuine curiosity. But that's still a matter of degree, and even the most platonically curious among us still use the same monkey brain blueprints that we all do. They may do their due diligence more often, but never, ever always.
> Another way of putting this is that the question, "what are the facts?" is complex enough to already recreate the entire political and ideological contest. It's understandable that people would like to reduce that contest to a simpler subset of factual questions—but you can't. Just the opposite: that apparently simpler subset reduces to it.
> a version of the English language that excludes all forms of the verb to be, including all conjugations, contractions and archaic forms ... D. David Bourland Jr., who had studied under Alfred Korzybski, devised E-Prime as an addition to Korzybski's general semantics in the late 1940s. Bourland published the concept in a 1965 essay ... Albert Ellis advocated the use of E-Prime when discussing psychological distress to encourage framing these experiences as temporary ... and to encourage a sense of agency by specifying the subject of statements.
Very well said. And the only difference between community moderation and 3rd party "fact-checkers" is if the "fact-checkers" have a different average political profile than that of the users of the site.
That's why there doesn't seem to be any fact checker whose calls aren't predictable from one of the major ideological partitions.
Another way of putting this is that the question, "what are the facts?" is complex enough to already recreate the entire political and ideological contest. It's understandable that people would like to reduce that contest to a simpler subset of factual questions—but you can't. Just the opposite: that apparently simpler subset reduces to it.
(Edit: it might be worth repeating that there are infinitely many facts, and they don't select themselves—people do that, and when they're people with political preferences, that's usually the high order bit. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)