[DaftDank]

Subjective interpretation is very fundamental to being human and the way our minds work, but the underlying physical reality -- the wavelengths of light reflecting off the shirt -- can be measured objectively. A physicist might say that gravity is the curvature of spacetime caused by mass, which can be measured and tested.

Trump being a criminal is based on a shared legal and societal context. As a society, we accept that if you are convicted before a jury of your peers, you are guilty and have been convicted of a crime. Jury's get it wrong and the justice system is flawed and has made mistakes. A black man in the 1920s (or even the 1960s for that matter) being tried for murder with absolutely no evidence and sentenced to death is a clear miscarriage and corruption of justice. The testimony of Trump's employees during the trial, who all said they loved working there (most of them still worked there), but weren't willing to lie on the stand about checks and phone calls they participated in, was pretty clear cut. This wasn't random people off the street of [insert preferred liberal enclave here] testifying against him: it was his own people who still work for him.

Some people prioritize political allegiance over legal judgments when it suits them.

If we dismissed facts entirely, science, medicine, and countless other fields reliant on objective reality would collapse.

This exchange is a great example of the subjective nature of our experiences: as I've gotten older -- 38 now -- I've come to accept more and more that some things are objective reality, whereas in my teens and 20s, I questioned reality and society on the structural level, torn down to the studs. From Plato's cave, to brain in the vat, Kant, the Hindu Brahman and Maya, Buddhism, etc.

[rayiner]

Your Trump trial example actually proves the opposite of the point you’re making. CNN’s legal analyst of all people wrote an article explaining why the prosecutors “contorted the law” in pursing Trump’s conviction: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-.... Remember, the prosecutor initially declined to bring the case. And those problems with the underlying legal theory are still subject to review on appeal, which very well may result in the conviction being overturned. There’s actually a lot to debate there! Including whether the “shared context” you mention still holds in the circumstance of a blue-state jury trying Donald Trump. And I’d certainly not trust anyone—especially people without a legal background—to moderate people’s statements about Trump’s trial and conviction.

Heck, even lawyers don’t treat legal judgments as god-given “facts” except in specific legal circumstances. The questions at the back of every chapter in a law school textbook will ask the student whether a particular case was rightly decided or wrongly decided and why.

The better way to think about legal judgments is not in terms of “facts” but rather “process.” Even a final decision by the U.S. Supreme Court does not establish god given facts. It merely is the end of the line in a set of procedures that lead to a particular result in a particular case. But even judgments of the Supreme Court are second-guessed every day by 20-somethings in law schools around the country!

[claytongulick]

I take the "this seems to be true, based on what I know, subject to more information" approach.

I'm ok with not knowing things.

We can measure all sorts of things, and put them in a human context, which is very reassuring. What's a wave? What's a wavelength? What's a unit of measure? These are not universal truths, these are human inventions. Things we've created in order to communicate a shared understanding with each other of things we've observed. It makes us feel knowledgeable, lets us build cool things, and that's a good thing!

It also interferes with learning, and that's a bad thing. For example, (and I'm not taking a position on this either way, because I don't know) I think it's very unlikely, based on your comment, that it would be easy to convince you that Trump is not a criminal. Or, to pick a less controversial topic, to convince the early Catholic church of the heliocentric model of the solar system. Because they already had the "facts."

It's a comfortable position to know things.

It's uncomfortable to not know. As I've gotten older, I've become more comfortable with being uncomfortable.

[DaftDank]

It would indeed be hard to convince me Trump has not committed crimes, considering a jury found that he had and the whole, "Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck," thing. Tony Accardo ran the Chicago Outfit for 4-5 decades and never spent a single day in jail. I don't think most people would agree that because he was never convicted (or even charged), he was not committing crimes.

If you read a story about a drug kingpin being convicted at trial, do you assume that he might be innocent?

[tsimionescu]

> Trump being a criminal is based on a shared legal and societal context.

To think that someone is a criminal, you have to believe they committed a crime. A trial is one way of establishing whether they did with certain standards of evidence and process. But it is very far from the be-all-end-all of the matter.

For example, virtually everyone believes OJ Simpson is a criminal, even though he was found not guilty at trial, and even though plenty of biases worked against him in that trial, theoretically.

For myself, I do believe that Trump was rightfully convicted and is a criminal. But that doesn't mean that "he was convicted" should force anyone else to believe this. It only means that a particular group of jurors believed it given the evidence that a judge found correctly collected and presented to them.

[dinkumthinkum]

But, respectfully, even you, in your quest to cite facts require pointing out that your "facts" are not facts at all. The person in question, Trump, was not sentenced and therefore not "convicted" of anything. But this false claim is repeated a lot even by supposed "fact-checkers". Even the rest of that same paragraph is not made up of facts but you are trying to support some vague claim with appeals to things like "his own people wouldn't lie for him even though they loved him" or some such; you're bolstering a negative sentiment but not really clearly delineating anything resembling "facts". That's the issue that is being discussed and addressed by Meta at this point. Sure, we can call high schools physics problems as reflecting facts of nature, that's nice, but this is not what all the fuss is about.

[petersellers]

> The person in question, Trump, was not sentenced and therefore not "convicted" of anything.

Sentencing != conviction. Conviction is the legal finding of guilt, sentencing is the appropriation of punishment.

Given your excessive use of scarequotes around "facts", getting this simple fact wrong is ironic.