Facts Don’t Speak For Themselves - A Deep Dive Into Underdetermination

[DocWatts]

I thought I might share a long-form essay I wrote on underdetermination - which deals with the epistemology of facts, the enshittification of news media, an autopsy of bullshit, and how to navigate today's chaotic information environment.

Whereas most treatments of underdetermination tend to explore the topic from the domain of science, I do so in the context that's more relatable to most people - the media landscape that molds our attitudes and beliefs about the world.

The article itself can be found here:
https://7provtruths.substack.com/p/facts-dont-speak-for-themselves

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Facts Don’t Speak For Themselves

Still from 'Network' (1976), directed by Sidney Lumet, © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. Text added by the author.
 

Quote

“Facts don’t do what I want them to”
— The Talking Heads, “Crosseyed and Painless”, 1980

Facts, it turns out, do care about your feelings - not because truth is a matter of preference, but because what counts as a relevant fact is always a matter of context.

A context is just a background situation for forming interpretations. Think of how a spoken conversation can carry very different meanings depending on tone, body language, and your relationship to the speaker. Facts work the same way. The relevance of any particular fact isn’t fixed - it varies enormously depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, and where you stand in relation to the world. If this sounds like academic pedantry with no real world stakes, think again. Human communication depends entirely on shared conventions about relevance. Just ask any journalist, whose job description is heavily focused on making judgments about which facts matter. The quality of those judgments help determine whether we get functional information ecosystems or dysfunctional ones.

Before we tackle today’s chaotic information environment, and what it reveals about the perspectives we inhabit, let’s start with a best-case scenario - and what we get wrong when looking back at it today. The middle of the 20th century is widely considered a high-watermark of American journalism. These were the decades when reporters took down Joseph McCarthy, cracked the Watergate scandal wide open, and laid bare decades of deception about Vietnam by publishing the Pentagon Papers.

There’s a charming but misguided notion that this golden age was defined by newsrooms sticking to a simple principle: ‘just the facts’. If this sounds blissfully uncomplicated compared to today’s algorithmic echo chambers, that’s exactly the point. It never was this straightforward. We only think it so because the interpretive machinery operated so seamlessly that we mistook it for objectivity. Yet the myth persists, and it’s easy to see why.

Picture an era before cable news, before social media - where families across the political spectrum gathered around a single television set to receive the day’s news. All of it delivered by a trusted anchor, whose voice carried the weight of national consensus. Hard as it is to imagine amid our current algorithm-driven polarization, there was a brief window of time when mass media served as a unifying force. One where we’d argue about what course to take, but could more or less agree upon what happened. That’s not to say that this was some golden age of civility - just look back to the civil rights struggle to see how vicious those disagreements could be. The key difference is that we were having our culture wars within something resembling the same Reality.

In contrast to contemporary infotainment - where fact and opinion are tossed into a blender as a matter of course - it’s easy to grow nostalgic for the journalistic integrity of this bygone era. Of course, quality journalism still exists, if you know where to look for it. But its authoritative role has greatly diminished - collateral damage of changes in how we consume our news. The advent of the 24-hour news cycle was pivotal - when eyeballs equate to revenue, sensationalism wins out over substance. By the 1980s these trends were converging into an early version of our media-driven echo chambers. Today’s social media feeds are in fact just the latest iteration of a decades-long transformation. Cable television and talk radio were the initial catalysts. A ‘greed is good’ ethos provided the rationale. Politically motivated deregulation made it inevitable - specifically: 1) The elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, which necessitated balanced coverage of controversial political topics. 2) Media consolidation, which concentrated ownership in the hands of a handful of major players. 3) The privatization of public airwaves, which drove programming to become advertiser-driven.

What you get from this brew is what the author and digital activist Cory Doctorow calls enshittification, where media platforms are hollowed out into a scheme for extracting money from the very people they were built to serve. What began with cable news and talk radio has been supercharged by the digital attention economy. We need look no further than our social media feeds, which are precision engineered, like slot machines, to keep us scrolling and tapping.

Against this brave new world of competing realities, a desire to return to ‘just the facts’ is understandable. The trouble is, this romanticized version of journalism’s high watermark gets the story backwards. Through our rose-colored glasses, we remember a time when trusted reporters like Walter Cronkite supposedly delivered just the facts, and let events speak for themselves. News was news and commentary was commentary - or so the story goes.

What’s missing from this nostalgic portrait is a recognition that Cronkite and his peers were never delivering just the raw facts. They were instead master curators, whose skill was in deciding which facts were relevant to the public interest - and then arranging those facts into a coherent narrative. The higher journalistic standards of this era weren’t illusory - but they weren’t the result of news reporters serving as neutral arbiters of truth. They instead emerged from skilled professionals who understood themselves to be public servants, tasked with helping citizens make sense of a complex world. It was a role that required rigorous judgment about accuracy, relevance, and fairness, rather than a presumption that these journalistic principles translated into objectivity.

The kernel of truth in this idyllic distortion is that a distressing number of people today lack even basic media literacy skills - which is understandable given today’s chaotic information landscape, and decades of educational neglect. What this amounts to is a form of epistemic inequality - where access to reliable information - and the skills (and inclination) to evaluate it critically - become yet another form of privilege. What does this inequality look like in practice? It’s a media environment where quality journalism demands our time, effort, and resources - while misinformation flows freely through social media feeds engineered to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities.

The natural outcome of this digital divide is that people gravitate to sources of information that accommodate their reality. And if you’re someone struggling to keep a roof over your head while juggling two jobs with family obligations, you probably don’t have the time or motivation to become a part-time epistemologist. Fair enough - what’s needed isn’t sophisticated theory, but basic bullshit detection.

An Autopsy Of Bullshit

Bullshit is a term we love to throw around casually, but it’s a concept that’s taken seriously by respected philosophers, who’ve given it a precise definition. So what is bullshit? It’s not the same as lying. A liar at least respects the truth enough to avoid it, but bullshit is speech that’s manufactured without any regard for truth or falsehood. Its main purpose is to deceive and distract in service of an unforthcoming agenda. Whereas a lie might fabricate facts, bullshit separates facts from the contexts that make them meaningful. Its intent is to get you to bow out of the truth game altogether due to apathy and exhaustion. To that end, the bullshit artist will bludgeon you with anything and everything: flattery, half-truths, irrelevant statistics, thought-terminating clichés. Whatever they can get their grubby little mitts on, they’ll use to get you to stop asking questions.

While bullshit has been around with us from time immemorial, our fractured media landscape provides today’s bullshit artists with the cover they need to thrive. Inclusivity - the notion that we should accommodate different ideas and perspectives - is a worthy ideal whose very nature makes it self-undermining without proper guardrails. All manner of dangerous bullshit will take advantage of this openness to masquerade as legitimate perspectives - including those that seek to undermine the very tolerance they cynically exploit. This is known within philosophy as an example of a ‘free rider problem’ - where individuals benefit from a collective good without bearing their fair share of the costs. It’s a dynamic that enemies of open societies have gotten very good at exploiting, as evidenced by the fact that modern authoritarians are more likely to gain power through the ballot box than through military coups.

There’s a widespread folk-theory of information that makes us especially vulnerable to this kind of exploitation - the so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’ - which holds that truthful viewpoints will ultimately prevail over toxic nonsense. It’s a lovely aspiration that’s unfortunately disconnected from the messy complexity of human psychology, which is wired for survival rather than truth.

What Facts Get Wrong

The vast majority of our viewpoints aren’t arrived at through careful consideration, but as an organic outgrowth of our lived experience. Precisely because we can step back from these lived orientations but not step outside of them entirely, this necessarily means that our assessments of the world are always localized, limited, and incomplete. Given this reality, the idea that we could somehow critically examine all of our assumptions is absurd. While armchair philosophers may exhort us to ‘question everything’, in reality this isn’t a blueprint for wisdom - it’s a recipe for psychosis.

This is what philosophers call the problem of underdetermination - where the available evidence literally under determines which interpretation is correct. It’s not just that we disagree about what facts mean; it’s that we have to go beyond facts themselves to make sense of the world.

Which brings us back to our original dilemma. If the relevance of facts is always a matter of what we’re trying to accomplish and where we stand in relation to the world, then what basis do we have to reject harmful or destructive viewpoints? When we remember that facts never speak for themselves but are always curated and arranged, we can be more attentive to the agendas that facts are in service of. While there’s no shortage of bad actors who are at the ready with a firehose of lies, more sophisticated bullshit artists know how to use facts to deceive and manipulate.

The so-called 13/50 rule that’s a staple of racist discourse is a telling illustration - where it’s asserted that black Americans make up 13% of the population but make up roughly 50% of the crime statistics. Conveniently missing from this ‘factual’ premise is everything that would prevent someone from drawing the racist conclusions it’s designed to promote: centuries of economic exclusion, forced ghettoization, discriminatory policing practices, engrained prosecutorial bias, and methodological problems with crime statistics. Not to mention the unspoken implication that 40 million people are collectively responsible for the actions of individuals, in a way that white people never are.

More prevalent than outright malicious intent are instances where someone is using facts to prop up a flawed premise. Take the argument that systemic racism is overblown or exaggerated, based upon the achievements of a number of high profile black entrepreneurs. Not individuals born with a silver spoon, but those who overcame genuinely harsh circumstances. For someone who lived this reality - working late nights and scraping together every penny to build something meaningful despite real obstacles - these stories vindicate that the system works, and success is simply a matter of talent and effort.

What’s often missing from these accounts is an acknowledgment or awareness of the invisible infrastructure that made their success possible: the community program that provided avenues for constructive engagement in a rough neighborhood. The social programs which helped a parent put food on the table. Or simply the luck of avoiding the kind of crisis that destroys someone’s potential before they’ve gotten off the ground. Blind spots that in no way undermine the talent and hard work of these success stories, but do go to show that individual achievement doesn’t automatically translate into special insight about social policy.

Where We Go From Here

Which brings us back to our earlier question: if facts can be misused by malicious actors and misinterpreted by well-meaning people, how do we separate viewpoints that are worth engaging with from those that we’re better off discarding? A question made all the more complicated by the recognition that no viewpoint captures it all, and we’re always evaluating from within our own vantage point. When we acknowledge that viewpoints exist on a spectrum, we can start to develop some workable heuristics for which perspectives foster constructive engagement in spite of their blind spots, which are seriously hindered by distortive patterns, and which are deliberately manipulative.

In general, higher quality perspectives are characterized by their adaptability, contextual awareness, and a realistic appraisal of their own limitations. Lower quality ones can be identified through reliable patterns of Reality-denial, where relevant complexities are ignored or dismissed. And malicious viewpoints weaponize whatever they can get their hands on - facts, emotions, grievances - to feed a selfish, shitty agenda. The key lies not in escaping the limitations of our viewpoints, but in acknowledging their existence - and learning to work within them skillfully.

Edited August 20 by DocWatts

[Elliott]

Critical thinking is more important than ever in the instant communication age. Leveraging heuristics in the age of constant media has normalized deviation from critical thinking.

[zurew]

Good stuff, great job again!

 

Yeah facts dont speak for themselves and we only recognize a small subset of implications that comes from facts. There is our relevance "bubble" and there is a much larger set that contains all implications that comes from facts. Its not just that we only care  about certain facts, but its also about how we relate to those facts . 

And this is why rhetoric is important, because everything is about the packaging of facts and about spelling out how it relates to you and to the things you care about.

And when it comes to underdetermination and when it comes to choosing one hypothesis over another or when it comes to giving weight (significance) to certain interpretations (just as you said) those are all related to things that are not just about facts.

Reasonableness and rationality  are also qualities that are related to packaging and storytelling and interpretation. Its also very obvious to me that when people usually say "thats logical", they dont invoke validity in a strict prop logic sense (where validity means the conclusion necessarily follows), but they relate it to a particular interpretation (where they choose and focus on a specific implication from all possible implications, one that is aligned with their background beliefs and lived experience the most).

 

 

Just as a side note, this is one reason why AI is interesting and problematic right now, because it can show us and make certain interpretations much more salient, ones that are very unintuitive to us, and one reason why they are unintuitive, is because (I take it that) our intuitiveness is also directly related to the things you wrote extensively about.

This is also one of the main reason why alignment is an issue (not because the AI's interpretation is logically inconsistent with achiveing our goals - the goal of getting a coffee is consistent with running over a 1000 people and getting it that way), but its hard to narrow down the set that contains all possible interpretations that are all compatible with the execution of our goals and appealing to facts and logic (in a strict sense) wont be enough for that.

Edited August 20 by zurew

[DocWatts]

51 minutes ago, zurew said:

Good stuff, great job again!

...

This is also one of the main reason why alignment is an issue (not because the AI's interpretation is logically inconsistent with achiveing our goals - the goal of getting a coffee is consistent with running over a 1000 people and getting it that way), but its hard to narrow down the set that contains all possible interpretations that are all compatible with the execution of our goals and appealing to facts and logic (in a strict sense) wont be enough for that.

Thanks!

And there's a term that's used for this problem - 'relevance realization' - which is shorthand for the automatic way in which we just seem to know what's relevant for everyday tasks and activities, without any thought or effort on our part. 

Our perceptual system puts in a great deal of work to structure the world into gestalts of meaning, long before logic and reasoning ever enters into the picture. 

This is very easy for living organisms, and has proven very, very difficult for AIs. Although LLMs like ChatGPT have made impressive strides in emulating some aspects of this through the error backpropagation method which its models use to output text.

[DocWatts]

[trenton]

@DocWatts On the topic of determining relevant facts, I also learned about apophenia. It is the tendency to find meaningful patterns where none exist. There is a recent forum post about this.

The reason I bring this up is because I had a question. One day, I encountered a man who appeared to have some kind of schizophrenic disorder. He was deeply religious and he had a tendency to point to random objects and then derive profound meaning from them as if it connected to divine intelligence. I was completely puzzled by what he was saying because it sounded disconnected, irrational, and nonsensical. It left me with questions like is this man genuinely crazy, or does he see something that I don't see? How do we determine if such a person actually has a valid perspective or if it really is complete nonsense? There is also a problem with utility because maybe his meaning making is useful for some other purpose that does not serve my agenda.

Are such people really delusional, or are we delusional for dismissing their perspective and failing to understand what they are seeing and experiencing as their reality may not line up with our own conventional sense of reality? How do we determine the answer?

[DocWatts]

13 hours ago, trenton said:

@DocWatts   One day, I encountered a man who appeared to have some kind of schizophrenic disorder. He was deeply religious and he had a tendency to point to random objects and then derive profound meaning from them as if it connected to divine intelligence. I was completely puzzled by what he was saying because it sounded disconnected, irrational, and nonsensical. It left me with questions like is this man genuinely crazy, or does he see something that I don't see? How do we determine if such a person actually has a valid perspective or if it really is complete nonsense? There is also a problem with utility because maybe his meaning making is useful for some other purpose that does not serve my agenda.

Are such people really delusional, or are we delusional for dismissing their perspective and failing to understand what they are seeing and experiencing as their reality may not line up with our own conventional sense of reality? How do we determine the answer?

The Short Answer: 

I'd say that we can validate the lived significance of such experiences while retaining healthy skepticism about any broader metaphysical conclusions we might draw about our shared reality.

A good analogy is that we can take the phenomenological experience of someone seeing their dead grandparent during an ayahuasca trip at face value and be curious about what that person took away from that experience, without concluding that ghosts exist.

Longer Answer:

I actually wrote about this topic in another section of my book, where I outline an ontology of Interactional Realism - where that mind and world are entangled.

Our conceptual distinctions are 'real' - but in a different way from folk-realism, which reifies these mental models into fixed features of a mind-independent Reality.

What I argue is that our conceptual distinctions, like an 'atom' or a 'tree', are real insofar as they ground us with a shared experiential reality.

Hallucinations fail this test because their connection to this shared reality is erratic and tenuous, and they don't allow us to engage with our environment in a constructive and healthy way.

Edited August 21 by DocWatts