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I hear you. I mean, there has been an entire field of study devoted to defining what truth is for basically as long as the written word has existed. My basic p

I hear you. I mean, there has been an entire field of study devoted to defining what truth is for basically as long as the written word has existed. My basic premise is that: 1. Truth is subjective. 2. Truth is dynamic. I believe that truth is defined by what the majority of people says is true. And that that truth can change if the majority of people change their mind. Basically that empirical truth > ideal truth. So, for example, "The sun revolves around the earth." If you lived in 250 BC, that was a true statement. Obviously, today it is not true, but if you were around when Galileo was persecuted, you might be on the fence given the evidence and data that came out after Copernicus' discoveries and possible concern over what the ruling class may have done to you if you openly expressed your thoughts. Basically, that period signaled a shift in what was deemed true. This means that something we believe to be true today can potentially be false tomorrow, and I built this app to be able to track how "truth" changes over time, because now truth doesn't change over centuries, but month/weeks/days/minutes. A lot of the thinking behind marqt came from the stock market (obviously, based on what I named it). There are buyers and sellers that buy something if they think it is cheap and sell something if they think it is expensive. Where they meet is the "true" price – at that moment, you can't sell it higher than what people are willing to pay for it or buy it cheaper than what people are willing to buy it. The other aspect of the stock market is that "markets move." Just because a stock trades for a certain price right now, it changes literally by microseconds due to a myriad of factors, whether they are earnings, changes in balance sheets, correlations, interest rates, macro events, or speculation. I think now, especially with the decentralization of media channels and how effectively the internet has increased the speed of discourse, people have a hard time trusting what they hear and read. But people trust numbers. If I told you about a movie you haven't heard of and you wanted to know if it was worth watching, you would probably look up the rating on Rotten Tomatoes. People also generally trust polls (or at the very least don't dismiss them), on the condition that the sample size properly reflects the population it is polling. And the more people you sample evenly, the more accurate the number will reflect the population. So the idea was to build something like a voting system for truth. But instead of being stuck with your choice, you can change your mind if the circumstances change. I am a child of the 80s and 90s, and for the entirety of my childhood, we were told that saturated fats and cholesterol were the worst things you could eat. That was true. We were shown a food pyramid that was a model of what we should eat, from most to least, with carbohydrates at the base and fat at the top. Decades later, we are now in the middle of an epidemic of diabetes and obesity after companies peddled low fat, high sugar products to the masses, making them believe they were eating healthy because "these cookies have 0g fat" and "I can't believe it's not butter." Now, certain cholesterols and fats are actually good for you, and avocado toast and butter blended into your coffee have made their way into the culture of "wellness," while health experts now tell us to avoid carbohydrates. It was true that Iraq was acquiring massive quantities of yellowcake to build weapons of mass destruction before we went in there and found no nuclear weapons. Bernie Madoff was a brilliant hedge fund manager before he was a fraud. I would have loved to see how truth and facts changed from January 2020 through 2022. "Masks are effective in stopping the spread of COVID-19." "The Biontech Pfizer vaccine is 95% effective in stopping transmission of COVID." You saw it in prediction markets the evening of the 2020 election, as Florida and some other states were being reported, as the markets fluctuated with high volatility. I built Marqt.org to be able to capture those moments in history.

codingdave 3y ago
OK, so you have a completely different definition of truth than most people. Truth is not subjective. At all. If it is subjective, it is an opinion. You are setting yourself up for opinions masquerading (marqterading?) as truth. You can wrap all the philosophy you want around that, but that isn't going to change your results into truth. The examples you are calling out are errors or mistakes, not changing truth. People learn over time. What we thought was true in the 80s doesn't mean that truth changed, it meant that we were wrong. If people lie and other people believe it, that doesn't make the lie true, it just makes it a lie.
- operatingthetan 3y ago
  >OK, so you have a completely different definition of truth than most people. That's a pretty gross way to dismiss philosophy and steamroll all nuance in that discussion. Appeal to popularity at best. You're taking a huge philosophical discussion and stating your opinion on it as fact, which is the opposite of curiosity.
- arthurhur 3y ago
  Yes, the fact that we can both disagree on the definition of truth gets to the heart of the subjectivity of truth. I just believe that it can be quantified the same way we elect politicians and value companies. Consider a presidential election. If you think about it, your vote is claiming "Candidate X should be president," and whether that is your opinion or what you believe to be true, it is capturing a moment in time and your vote reflects that. Leaving aside the nuances of the Electoral College, etc., that is good enough to choose the leader of the free world. Consider a movie. If it has a 93% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, chances are it's a good movie. Now, those numbers can change. You may not like the job the president is doing, so you might no longer agree that "Candidate X should be president." Or, perhaps culture shifts and a movie that was initially panned but was oddly prescient or has enjoyed a cult following might be revisited in a different light later on. That is what I want to track. If you want to buy a stock for a company at a certain price, the price is what it is. You can't say, "Look at their balance sheet, they lose money every year! It should be zero!" The price is what it is, and that is what I consider to be true, whether you agree or disagree. And if you look at a chart of those prices over history, you will see the record of what was true when, and you will see spikes in the graph that are records of the change in narrative around that company. That is what I am trying to do with the history tab, which gives you a graph of sentiment over time. > The examples you are calling out are errors or mistakes, not changing truth. The errors or mistakes of yesterday are only errors today. They were true yesterday, and it means that what we accept as true today can be a mistake or error tomorrow. No one knows what will happen in the future, so the best thing we can do is capture this moment and say, this is the best we've got today, maybe it changes tomorrow. > If people lie and other people believe it, that doesn't make the lie true, it just makes it a lie. Of course, I see your point. Look at Iraq. Cheney lied, but everyone believed him. But they (the media, the politicians, the public) believed him enough for it to be "true enough" to invade a country. When we went in, what we then believed to be true no longer held true. These are the moments that are most compelling to me, because eventually when people get called out for lying, they will deny it. Or they will not admit they were wrong. And the media will simply scrub archives of patently wrong stuff if they get called out on things. However, if someone tells a "lie" but they believe it to be true, are they really lying? I hope I am making my point clear enough, but I welcome your criticism and it's the reason why I built the app. I hope you try it out.

codingdave 3y ago

OK, so you have a completely different definition of truth than most people. Truth is not subjective. At all. If it is subjective, it is an opinion. You are setting yourself up for opinions masquerading (marqterading?) as truth. You can wrap all the philosophy you want around that, but that isn't going to change your results into truth. The examples you are calling out are errors or mistakes, not changing truth. People learn over time. What we thought was true in the 80s doesn't mean that truth changed, it meant that we were wrong. If people lie and other people believe it, that doesn't make the lie true, it just makes it a lie.

operatingthetan 3y ago
>OK, so you have a completely different definition of truth than most people. That's a pretty gross way to dismiss philosophy and steamroll all nuance in that discussion. Appeal to popularity at best. You're taking a huge philosophical discussion and stating your opinion on it as fact, which is the opposite of curiosity.
arthurhur 3y ago
Yes, the fact that we can both disagree on the definition of truth gets to the heart of the subjectivity of truth. I just believe that it can be quantified the same way we elect politicians and value companies. Consider a presidential election. If you think about it, your vote is claiming "Candidate X should be president," and whether that is your opinion or what you believe to be true, it is capturing a moment in time and your vote reflects that. Leaving aside the nuances of the Electoral College, etc., that is good enough to choose the leader of the free world. Consider a movie. If it has a 93% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, chances are it's a good movie. Now, those numbers can change. You may not like the job the president is doing, so you might no longer agree that "Candidate X should be president." Or, perhaps culture shifts and a movie that was initially panned but was oddly prescient or has enjoyed a cult following might be revisited in a different light later on. That is what I want to track. If you want to buy a stock for a company at a certain price, the price is what it is. You can't say, "Look at their balance sheet, they lose money every year! It should be zero!" The price is what it is, and that is what I consider to be true, whether you agree or disagree. And if you look at a chart of those prices over history, you will see the record of what was true when, and you will see spikes in the graph that are records of the change in narrative around that company. That is what I am trying to do with the history tab, which gives you a graph of sentiment over time. > The examples you are calling out are errors or mistakes, not changing truth. The errors or mistakes of yesterday are only errors today. They were true yesterday, and it means that what we accept as true today can be a mistake or error tomorrow. No one knows what will happen in the future, so the best thing we can do is capture this moment and say, this is the best we've got today, maybe it changes tomorrow. > If people lie and other people believe it, that doesn't make the lie true, it just makes it a lie. Of course, I see your point. Look at Iraq. Cheney lied, but everyone believed him. But they (the media, the politicians, the public) believed him enough for it to be "true enough" to invade a country. When we went in, what we then believed to be true no longer held true. These are the moments that are most compelling to me, because eventually when people get called out for lying, they will deny it. Or they will not admit they were wrong. And the media will simply scrub archives of patently wrong stuff if they get called out on things. However, if someone tells a "lie" but they believe it to be true, are they really lying? I hope I am making my point clear enough, but I welcome your criticism and it's the reason why I built the app. I hope you try it out.