We haven't believed our presidents for at least a generation. We haven't believed the news media and other organs of information since the advent of the web. At some point during the COVID-19 pandemic, we stopped believing our institutions of science.
The catastrophic failure of the mediators means that we now debate the frameworks and their meanings among ourselves. In this rolling chaos, interpretations have turned tendentious and partial. Reality has splintered into a million pieces.
Of course, many types of information will always have the function of mapping to reality: of representing accurately some state of affairs. Sports information is always of this kind. If I ask, 'How did the Nationals do last night?' I expect a single correct answer: 'They lost.'
A battery of official statistics, maintained by the various sports organizations, have the function of determining the productivity of individual players - which in turn determines how hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in the pursuit of top talent. Any hint that these statistics have been subverted by bias would destroy a sport. Change is suspect because it invalidates historical comparisons: Sports fans are the most conservative.
#post-truth-society #interpretations-of-facts #trust-erosion #mapping-to-reality #information-accuracy
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