The unfiltered results ARE the truth. 4chan is the truth. In the sense that "Someone posted this thing on 4chan." And that's the only truth there is in internet-land: Someone posted something.
Is it real? Is it true, what they posted? Or is it "fake news?" You will never know, and you probably shouldn't try to take it that far. Or if you do, at least be able to handle the cognitive dissonance of believing it and not-believing it at the same time. The only thing you can truly know is what you witness in person. Or perhaps what you hear from trusted parties, but even there, your trust may be misplaced, or they may report something false in good faith that was the result of their having been deceived or mistaken. And you can misperceive and twist reality even all by yourself in the presence of supposedly non-subjective and "real" stimuli.
Regardless, from the vantage point of "looking at a computer," all you know about anything you see there, is that someone put it there. And even the "someone" part isn't necessarily true... it could be AI-generated like some sports and financial news is now.
The good news is, that which you can't witness with your own eyes, rarely has any real effect on your life. I'm experimenting with that. The sun still comes up, and it's still time to get some shit done. Sure sure, of course there are myriad ways someone or something far away can have an influence on me. What I'm saying is, what if you ignore that? What if you construct a mental model of the world where it's actually not one big joyous tapestry of unity and interconnectedness, but just a fragmented patchwork and you have your own little square and that's it. Neither view is right per se, but they're both equally valid, which is to say, bullshit, yet incontrovertible to those who believe it. I'll say one thing though, take the fragmented view and suddenly you don't especially find yourself immersed in news of shootings and Google can't "fail you" because you don't rely on it as a window to the world - you only use it for what it's actually good at: looking for shit on the internet.
> Is it true, what they posted? Or is it "fake news?" You will never know
What nonsense. There are degrees of trust you can put in claims, based on a variety of factors. And you don't really believe it, either, as further on in your comment you say "The only thing you can truly know is what you witness in person". If you could know something is true from personally witnessing it you could know that a claim contradicting it is false.
> The only thing you can truly know is what you witness in person.
That's not true, either. Just because you "see" something doesn't mean what perceive is an accurate picture of what is actually there. Your brain is doing a huge amount of inference, based on expectations, to build the details you perceive. This goes up from basic things like the shapes and colours there, to what objects you individuate, to recognition of things like the expression someone is making or their body language, or perceiving what activity someone is undertaking. On top of that, when you talk about what you've witnessed, usually this is what you remember that you witnessed, and memory is notoriously unreliable.
I'd put far more trust in an experiemental "fact" that has been tested many times over in the lab, or in a body of knowledge that has been tested many times over in engineering (whose accuracy is "proved" by the fact that the machinery, such as a plane, actually works), than what someone thinks they saw for themselves a week ago.
> Not only anti-rationalist and anti-Enlightenment, but you're even disagreeing with object permanence!
And not even "not only" that, it also veers into the dirty movement of muddying the waters of responsible reporting, into a discussion of "what is truth really?". When "nothing is true", every venue from 4chan to infowars is equal in its non-truth to AP/Reuters/WaPo/NYT/Atlantic/etc.
When all media is fake, listening to Alex Jones talk about water supplies making children gay is somehow legitimized.
Yeah no it doesn't. Just one more thing to ignore. Unless I personally saw someone turn gay from drinking water, but even if I thought I saw that, I wouldn't totally believe that either.
And I did mention trusted parties, which could be a reporter. You guys are just not in the mood for philosophising tonight I guess. You want to be certain of things. Disappointing response. Should've avoided the term "fake news." It's Pavlovian.
> The only thing you can truly know is what you witness in person.
Why do you trust your eyes? Eyewitness accounts are notoriously inaccurate.
Why trust your brain? How do you even know that the world you think exists is real? Maybe you are just dreaming right now.
You went part-way down the rabbit hole, then stopped. Better to go all the way, then decide on a rational basis for belief (which is probably more complicated than only trusting things you see firsthand), and build from there.
They are the first result thrown up out of a search engine. Just as much as "someone posted this thing on 4 chan".
This is not truth, any more than
"pull the trigger and kill Godot when he enters the room" are words in a sentence.
Truth is intriniscally lined to meaning.
You are implying that people are entering search terms into a search engine expecting the results to be a form of interprative art.
That is not what people are searching for - in this day and age.
Maybe during the days of alta vista or geopages, when most people knew the results were junk - and you were an advanced tech users, that would hold more on a probabilistic basis.
Is it real? Is it true, what they posted? Or is it "fake news?" You will never know, and you probably shouldn't try to take it that far. Or if you do, at least be able to handle the cognitive dissonance of believing it and not-believing it at the same time. The only thing you can truly know is what you witness in person. Or perhaps what you hear from trusted parties, but even there, your trust may be misplaced, or they may report something false in good faith that was the result of their having been deceived or mistaken. And you can misperceive and twist reality even all by yourself in the presence of supposedly non-subjective and "real" stimuli.
Regardless, from the vantage point of "looking at a computer," all you know about anything you see there, is that someone put it there. And even the "someone" part isn't necessarily true... it could be AI-generated like some sports and financial news is now.
The good news is, that which you can't witness with your own eyes, rarely has any real effect on your life. I'm experimenting with that. The sun still comes up, and it's still time to get some shit done. Sure sure, of course there are myriad ways someone or something far away can have an influence on me. What I'm saying is, what if you ignore that? What if you construct a mental model of the world where it's actually not one big joyous tapestry of unity and interconnectedness, but just a fragmented patchwork and you have your own little square and that's it. Neither view is right per se, but they're both equally valid, which is to say, bullshit, yet incontrovertible to those who believe it. I'll say one thing though, take the fragmented view and suddenly you don't especially find yourself immersed in news of shootings and Google can't "fail you" because you don't rely on it as a window to the world - you only use it for what it's actually good at: looking for shit on the internet.