>Something that can be objectively stated, without judgement.
You can't always find the objective truth. Was Trump _really_ joking when he suggested people drink bleach? You can conclude with reasonable certainty that he was or wasn't based on his previous patterns of action or whatever, but the only way to truly know what he meant is to be him. And your interpretation of his previous actions will necessarily be incomplete: there's always going to be something that you don't know about that could potentially change your interpretation, and each event in his history that you base your interpretation on will have to be analyzed with the same amount of rigor. It's possibly for a person to perform this analysis, that's a biographer's entire job, but to do it for every person in current events, for every situation, for every conflict and incident is impossible.
So yes, there is an objective truth, but you can't always be certain that you know it. If you're not dedicating your entire career to analyzing one thing then you'll have to rely on heuristics, and those heuristics will be built on top of your knowledge and analysis of past things which are also based on heuristics, which are based on more heuristics, etc. Those heuristics, the way you analyze and interpret events, are only as important as the information available to you for you to build upon. If your primary source of information is Fox News then your heuristics will be that of course the President was joking, but if your heuristics are based on information from HuffPo then you'll come to the opposite conclusion. If you want to reject your heuristics and find the truth based on first principles, or at least come as close to the truth as possible, you'll need to do quite a bit of research into the issue, and by the time you've finished there'll be another five things the President has said for you to find the truth of.
It's simply impossible to determine the truth of current events without using heuristics and avoid falling behind, but those heuristics are based on known truth only indirectly. Does there exist an objective truth? Yes, but it can't be found in a reasonable amount of time. It's much more important to focus on the heuristics people use to determine truth for themselves.
Postscript: algorithmic newsfeeds that optimize for engagement are optimizing for inevitable unconcious biases, confirmation bias in particular, and are great for biasing your heuristics unfairly. I'm not saying the truth is always somewhere in the middle, but I am saying that if your heuristics are always skewed to one side you won't be able to recognize when your heuristics are leading you astray and when the truth is in fact in the middle or even the other side. If you get anything out of this, at least try to figure out what echo chambers you're in and look outside of them.
You can't always find the objective truth. Was Trump _really_ joking when he suggested people drink bleach? You can conclude with reasonable certainty that he was or wasn't based on his previous patterns of action or whatever, but the only way to truly know what he meant is to be him. And your interpretation of his previous actions will necessarily be incomplete: there's always going to be something that you don't know about that could potentially change your interpretation, and each event in his history that you base your interpretation on will have to be analyzed with the same amount of rigor. It's possibly for a person to perform this analysis, that's a biographer's entire job, but to do it for every person in current events, for every situation, for every conflict and incident is impossible.
So yes, there is an objective truth, but you can't always be certain that you know it. If you're not dedicating your entire career to analyzing one thing then you'll have to rely on heuristics, and those heuristics will be built on top of your knowledge and analysis of past things which are also based on heuristics, which are based on more heuristics, etc. Those heuristics, the way you analyze and interpret events, are only as important as the information available to you for you to build upon. If your primary source of information is Fox News then your heuristics will be that of course the President was joking, but if your heuristics are based on information from HuffPo then you'll come to the opposite conclusion. If you want to reject your heuristics and find the truth based on first principles, or at least come as close to the truth as possible, you'll need to do quite a bit of research into the issue, and by the time you've finished there'll be another five things the President has said for you to find the truth of.
It's simply impossible to determine the truth of current events without using heuristics and avoid falling behind, but those heuristics are based on known truth only indirectly. Does there exist an objective truth? Yes, but it can't be found in a reasonable amount of time. It's much more important to focus on the heuristics people use to determine truth for themselves.
Postscript: algorithmic newsfeeds that optimize for engagement are optimizing for inevitable unconcious biases, confirmation bias in particular, and are great for biasing your heuristics unfairly. I'm not saying the truth is always somewhere in the middle, but I am saying that if your heuristics are always skewed to one side you won't be able to recognize when your heuristics are leading you astray and when the truth is in fact in the middle or even the other side. If you get anything out of this, at least try to figure out what echo chambers you're in and look outside of them.